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“I am in a position, thanks to our Mr O’Hagan here, to tell you that an American court has held that part of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ is a direct steal from Handel’s Messiah. It is. In fact, there are those who claim that the entire chorus is pinched from other tunes. Try this: ‘Hallelujah, Bananas/Oh bring back my Bonnie to me/I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls/The kind that you seldom see/ I was seeing Nellie home/ To an old-fashioned garden, but/Hallelujah, Bananas/ Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.’ My, that was fun, wasn’t it? Next!” —Captain Moonlight
I have to thank Patrick for talking about Wilson's _Spin_ -- what a marvellous book!
To quoth
461.26] Yes We Have No Bananas [...] from The Messiah: after the 1923 Silver-Cohen song became a hit, the Westman Company, which published Handel's music, took the song's publishers to court and successfully proved that the melody was indeed a direct steal from a portion of The Messiah. The Westman Company was awarded a share of the song's profits.
Wikipedia says
George Frideric Handel (or Georg Friedrich Händel in German) (February 23, 1685 – April 14, 1759)
Handel died 1759, the company sued in 1923? Even with the latest Life-Plus-70 year copyright terms, I'm a bit stumped as to how this isn't a hoax. I did read a bit of Moonlight's post and can't tell if he's insane or a completely misunderstood genius. To a moron like me, it's hard to tell.
Oh well.
there is a distinct whooshing sound over my head, though. perhaps its sarcasm.
Teresa--thanks for recommending Steven Brust. I'm halfway through the Phoenix Guards. The Chapter headings alone are worth the price of the book!
"Chapter the Eleventh, in which the plot, behaving in much the manner of a soup to which corn starch has been added, begins, at last, to thicken."
Any author who can tease himself in the middle of his own novel is a gem.
:)
New birth contrl pill making the rounds in the UK. It's a v. low dose of RU486. It may also help prevent breast cancer.
Chiming in to agree with Scorpio. Spin just showed up on my doorstep yesterday, and it's proving to be a very welcome and much-needed distraction from worldly woes. When I finish it, what should I read next? (-:
As to bananas, I'm not sure where I originally found this (if here, my apologies), but do you know about the Banana Bunker?
Considering that various Sixties shows that made it to the big screen, how come nothing has been done with Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits?
Hi, I'm looking for some help here with a gift decision of a very peculiar sort. My sister has grown up in Bangladesh, which has a very homophobic culture (although curiously transexuals have a kind of jester status). I want to broaden her viewpoints a little - she's 16 and might be coming over to stay in Canada. Can you recommend a decent YA novel which deals with queer issues in a non-exploitative way? Thanks.
Among my favorite recent teen novels dealing with queer topics are Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan(idealistic, funny, sweet), Geography Club by Brent Hartinger(realistic), Luna by Julie Anne Peters(transgender), Am I Blue? Coming Out of the Silence edited by Bruce Coville (short stories) and My Heartbeat by Garret Freyman-Weyr(realistic).
I'm a young adult librarian and so many good titles published recently, I know I've missed some. If you want more details on any of these books, let me know.
Wasn't there a homosexual pastiche of Nancy Drew called Nancy Clue and the Hardly Boys? I've never read it so I don't really know if that's what you'd be looking for.
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City... On second thought, forget that. Good novel, and absolutely hilarious, but not intended for kids.
I was in the exact perfect age demographic for The Banana Splits when it was running, and even back then it made me want to whack my head against the floor until I passed out.
That show, and the Krofft live-action shows, had a cheesy, jokey show-biz vibe that struck even the little kid me as phony and desperate. I mean, they had laugh tracks.
Wasn't this whole bit lifted from Prof. Sigmund Spaeth, radio's Tune Detective?
Obviously, the fact that The Banana Splits is unavailable on DVD indicates that Homeland Security can at least do something right.
It's sort of running on Boomerang* in an early morning slot; there's a half-hour cutdown that contains an episode of "Danger Island" (Richard Donner's finest moment), one of the cartoon series ("The Arabian Knights" or "The Three Musketeers," which are watchable, and Jonathan Harris is the voice of Athos), with the rest filled out with the creepy animal suits, and the even creepier teenybopper girls in the microskirts and boots. There's probably someone at NBC who narrowly evaded jail time for that.
Sturgeon General Law's Warning: I am not suggesting that you get up at five AM to watch this, or even that you tape it. I am often enough still working at that hour, and sometimes it's what TV programmers call the Least Offensive Program. This is an actual television concept.
*"Where cartoons go to die."
I suppose Pat Califia's Doc and Fluff would be out of the question? (ducks, runs...) Oh, wait - Young Adult Fiction, not Adult Fiction.
Seriously, though, Saija - if you can find it, Lotus of Another Color is a now-dated-but-still-decent anthology of South Asian GLBT perspectives. As with most anthologies, it has its weak spots, but overall is quite good. Another resource for you to check out might be Trikone:
Trikone is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people of South Asian descent. Founded in 1986 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Trikone is the oldest group of its kind in the world. South Asians affiliated with Trikone trace their ethnicities to one of the following places: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet.
While neither of these resources are what you were looking for per se, they might help you frame the issue for her within a (more or less) common cultural perspective.
Oh, and there's a Desi P-FLAG group on Yahoo!, too...
another quote
After the song became a hit, the Westman Company, which published the sheet music for Handel's Messiah took the publishers of "Bananas" to court, claiming that the melody was a direct steal from a portion of the Messiah. They won and were awarded a share of the song's profits. Actually the song seems to be a pastiche of several popular pieces of music. According to "The Treasury of Popular Song", the tune of the chorus goes:
so confused.
I see that I'm not the only one who has painful memories of The Banana Splits, based on what Stefan and Mike posted. The cartoon segments were OK enough, but the rest... Brrr...
ARGH, the earworm, it gnaws and gnaws.....
The Banana Splits was my sister's (6 yr younger) favorite show and we had to watch it Every Time it was On. that and the Other One, HR Pufenstuf.
Scarred for life I am.
It seems that Robert Jordan is terminally ill. Websnark has both a description of the issue and some thoughtful commentary on the situation.
-r.
The Onion ran a gag article about a guy wracked by nightmares of another Krofft horror, "Lidsville."
* * *
You know, there's a whole stratum of old Saturday Morning kid stuff that folks don't remember that deserve recognition.
Hal Linden hosted a nice one about animals. The same outfit did one called (as I recall) "Make a Wish" which featured a guy on a guitar riffing poetic on a theme for a half-hour.
Another I barely recall was a kind of medieval themed storyteller show.
And, OH! imdb has a listing for "Marshall Efron's Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School," which was a hoot. (And Marshall Efron is still alive and doing voice work!)
It could be that these would today come across as soporific low-budget early-70s earnest social engineering tripe, but at the time they sure beat "The Bugaloos" or the latest Hanna-Barbara bolus.
It's bizarre to me that my house (I live on Monroe between 3rd and 4th in Hoboken, NJ (right near NYC)) would be under water with a 6m rise, but dry with a 7m rise. Anyone know why?
Does anybody know where I could find a hi-rez JPG of Star Trek's Scottie inside the Jefferies Tube? I'd like to use that as wallpaper for my desktop here at work.
I've long seen myself in the same situation, although I'm a computer programmer, not a starship engineer, and certainly nowhere near as smart as Scottie. But I often feel like I live in the darn Tube, feverishly patching things up so that the Captain can keep on strutting around the Bridge while Klingons are shooting at us. All this to say that, this morning, and without any warning or explanation, my manager changed the target of my big project, from an already tight deadline of April 21, to one week earlier, with new stuff added that also has to be taken care of by that same date.
"Scottie! I need that power!!!"
Stefan -- I remember "Make a Wish." As I recall, the message of the show was something like, "You can be anything you want to be." I hold that show personally accountable for my deep and abiding sense of disappointment and cynicism.
Speaking of early 70s TV: I missed some of the Saturday morning shows, because I'd begged and pleaded to stay up late Friday night to watch Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I've been watching the complete series on DVD, and it just might be Nature's Most Perfect TV Show.
I am madly in love with the opening theme music (by Gil Mellé), which starts out like stereotypical 70s TV instro-pop (with the whistling and the disco strings), and then as Kolchak starts typing, the massed cellos come in with a discordant ground figure, playing senza vibrato, as the words "victim" and "monster" flash across the typewriter paper.
Darren McGavin, RIP, 2/26/2006
I think it would be a Good Thing to build Jeffries Tubes into new houses.
Not tilted round ones though; a shaft, extending from basement* to attic, where you can access all of the plumbing and electric and such.
* Houses need basements. End of story. The trend to just having a crawl space is part of a plot by . . . uh . . . people who don't us to have cellars to store preserves in and hide from zombies in.
Stefan: Houses need basements.
Tell that to my sister in Boynton Beach, Florida. The house is lovely, and, if it were up north, a full finished basement would be de rigueur. However, when the water table is within basement's depth of the house, it can do without.
Paula: The Banana Splits was my sister's (6 yr younger) favorite show and we had to watch it Every Time it was On. that and the Other One, HR Pufenstuf.
And yet you didn't kill her in her sleep? Amazing restraint.
And yes, I've got the earworm now, too. I hope I left that Husker Du album on the iPod...
Since this is an open thread, I'll ask: does anyone remember the name of a magazine that was about monster movies and SF in general, in the US in the late 1970s? I remember seeing issues around 1976, 1977 but have no idea how much before or after it would have been in print. Format like a newspaper, printed on newspaper-quality paper. I remember articles on Godzilla, and one article in particular called "Captain Kirk - EXORCIST!" comparing the original series episode "The Day of the Dove" with _The Exorcist_.
Both my memory and my Google searches have failed me as to the title of this periodical. I would be grateful if anyone remembers the name of this.
Steve:
Sounds like "The Monster Times."
I have a question about accidental plagarism. How do those of you who are writers avoid it? I am wary of submitting any of my writings for fear I'll have unwittingly plagarized passages from someone else's work. It's driving me nuts because every time I reread my work I feel like I haven't written it - that it's somehow foreign to me. I don't know whether I'm being paranoid or have a valid concern. I don't want to be known as a plagarist nor do I want to steal another's work.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
It seems that Robert Jordan is terminally ill.
NO.
The disease is quite serious, but the treatments are beginning, and have a good chance of success. If fully successful, the amyloidosis will be eliminated, and while the heart damage will still be there, a damaged heart (which lots of us have) is not a "terminal illness." If the first therapy fails (a real possibility), there are others that can be tried.
I do not want to trivialize the seriousness of the situation; this is one of my closest friends under discussion. But I will politely ask people not to toss around phrases like "terminally ill" unless and until that is the judgement finally sustained. Right now, it isn't.
'Trikone' is a GBLT SE Asian organization? Wow.
Maybe that explains the persistent graffiti (sometimes spelled 'Trik1' or spoofed as 'Prikone') all over downtown Calgary and nearby areas.
RE: my sister.
Because she was enough younger, mercy usually stayed my hand. Plus the ass whipping I'd get if I actually got angry enough and smacked her. I learned to leave the vicinity if she actually made me really angry, a useful education that persists.
RE: Basements
Water tables cause lots of trouble for basements. The first home we owned in KC was in a neighborhood with a high water table, we had to have a sump pump and it caused a lot of grief. But we will NOT have a house here without a basement due to weather. In Tulsa and OKC, where they really really need basements too, they can't build them for the reason they can't build them in Florida...
Renee: It might just be coincidence... It could just be a tagger.
But Trikone does seem to be used a fair amount by Desi GLBT groups in North America - I just googled a "Trikone Tejano", for instance.
Thanks for the clarification and hope, Mike.
Do any of the folks at Tor have a current c/o address handy we could send cards and such to? I've been deeply involved in WoT fandom from...well, from day one of my internet experience back in '95. I like to hope I'd have wound up here without that, but I can directly point to that as my path in this lifetime. I figure the least I owe the man for hours of enjoyable time passed and many, many friendships is a "Get Well" card.
glitterflex: First, the word is "plagiarize."
Second: What, exactly, are you talking about? Plagiarism is copying another person's words. It's pretty darn hard to do "accidentally."
Leaving aside the issue of intent (which is in fact important, but you clearly don't have such intent), has there actually been an occasion on which you looked back at your work, and discovered that an extended passage -- a long paragraph or more -- was a word-for-word duplicate of someone else's work? If so, what were the circumstances that brought this about? Was eidetic memory involved?
Some novices do pick up mannerisms from writers they like and read a great deal. Just about everyone has favorite writers, and (particularly in genre) they often use those people as models. That isn't plagiarism; it isn't plagiarism to borrow auctorial tricks and gimmicks (of characterization, say) from other people. It doesn't always work, and it's not a strategy for the long term, but it's not wrong, unless the "borrowings" are the precise transcription of phrases.
It is possible that Writer A might reproduce a long and distinctive passage that Writer B used, from unconscious memory; not very likely, but possible. In that case, a rereading should bring up the recollection, at which point one goes back and rewrites the passage to make it original. It is mechanically possible that Writer A might duplicate such a passage without ever having read Writer B's version, but it is distinctly unlikely.
I can't say much about the sense you have that what you've written seems "foreign to you," because that's an entirely different issue.
Saying the same thing that another story said isn't plagiarizing it. (If there were, there would be only a small handful of stories -- the precise number varies, but it's rarely cited as more than seven.) When two lovers woo, they still say "I love you," on that you can rely. (And that's quoting, not plagiarism.)
Stefan: Yes! Someone else who's seen Marshall Efron's Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School! I only saw a handful of episodes, which must have been reruns in the mid-'80s, but it was great. (If Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse can make it to DVD, surely this can too.)Again in the mid-'80s was the "Doctor Science" TV series, which I'd love to see again.
The Hal Linden animals show was, oddly enough, "Animals, Animals, Animals." The theme song was similarly repetitive. It's also mentioned on IMDB.
Randall Garrett said that when he was writing "Backstage Lensman" he discovered at one point that he'd -- without meaning to -- reproduced a few paragraphs of Doc Smith's writing verbatim.
Plagiarism is copying another person's words. It's pretty darn hard to do "accidentally."
I've done it. I was working over a poem and reading a lot of Robert Graves, and I decided to work over one of his lines into an allusion to him and slip it into my own poem. All fine, except that my result was a rather famous Dylan Thomas line.
My teacher, who knew me, did not mock me in front of the class.
Since Doc Smith often reproduced his own writing verbatim, that's hardly surprising.
I have a few videotaped episodes of "Dr. Science" (Dan Coffey, Ian Shoales). One of those shows I'm really glad to have taped, not because I watch it all the time, because it is nice to have proof that I didn't imagine the whole thing.
Yeah, Marshall Efron's (got his start as an old-timey lefty comedian, as I recall) show deserves DVD hood. A cheery, humane, non-dogmatic and damn funny telling of bible stories.
By the way, my search fu is weak today--does anyone know the original release date for Even Cowgirls Get The Blues?
adamsj - 76, 93 if you're talking the movie.
Protected static: I've always assumed Trikone was just a tagger (or a small group of taggers); that doesn't mean they didn't adopt the word for themselves.
F'instance, the first time I saw the tag was the mid-90's, on a Centre Street light post just north of the bridge--just a block from the downtown area locally known as Chinatown and well within the residential limits of 'Greater Chinatown'. 17th Avenue, so-called 'ground zero' for this tagger, is a party zone--shops, cafes, bars and nightclubs.
It doesn't take higher math to put these two facts together with the comment in the link re: the tagger being a short man to come up with the conclusion of 'Asian GBLT person making a personal political statement'. I could be wrong, of course, but I like the theory.
YMMV.
I loved Marshall Efron on The Great American Dream Machine circa 1971. Never got to see the Sunday School show.
I have made a small hobby out of Efron-spotting. I guess IMDB has taken most of the fun out of that. He's sproadically had parts in TV shows and movies over the decades.
For all I know, he may be blogging now.
has there actually been an occasion on which you looked back at your work, and discovered that an extended passage -- a long paragraph or more -- was a word-for-word duplicate of someone else's work?
There have been passages that worried me. I read so prolifically that I no longer remember much of what I've read. Like for my recent English paper I wrote In fact, he goes so far as to share the confidence that he is a Mason. If Fortunato believed Montresor to hold a grudge against him it is unlikely he would have revealed this fact...Fortunato must have suffered terrible mental agony in the interval of time it took Montresor to wall him up. Rereading this I had a sense of deja vu that I'd seen the words before but I can't remember where or even if I'm just imagining the similarity to anything I've read. In a childrens' book I'm writing the main character feels uneasy about the part of town he's entered -Tog lived in the bad part of town. Roger looked around uneasily at the rundown buildings, the bums sitting at street corners, the barking dogs behind chain link fences. Tog didn't seem bothered by any of it. When a vicious looking dog lunged at him, Tog swiped it with his fingernails. The dog ran away whimpering. Again I'm struck by a sense of deja vu. Do the passages in question ring any bells? Should I rewrite them?
Also I'm no expert on the subject but I have read about unconscious plagiarism. Isaac Asimov said he did it early in his career. In one of his writing books Lawrence Block talks about a friend who accidentally plagiarized the plot from another story.
Yes, you are right, it's plagiarize. I sometimes visually elide words which I don't realize until I've used spellcheck.
Renee: true, nothing says that they're mutually exclusive...
dolloch,
Yes, 1976 for the book--but the full date?
glitterflea, your children's book excerpt rings no bells, but I'm a bit concerned about the idea of swiping a lunging dog with one's fingernails. Seems like the use of a palm, fist, or hefty stick might be more appropriate....
Serge, I was a teenager when I read Tales of the City . . . it was a newspaper serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. But the gay-themed YA novels I've seen are so very very good that they're a better bet. Next I get to the bookstore I'll scope them out and see if I can add to the list.
Count me in as another fan of Marshall Efron. As a teen-ager in the '70s, I watched him on "The Great American Dream Machine", (where I believe he did humorous but pointed consumer reports-type segments) and then on "Marshall Efron's Illustrated Simplified and Painless Sunday School", and its followup, "God's Country". I even had his odd comedy album, "The Neutrino News Network".
Unlike, say, "Lidsville", the Marshall Efron "Sunday School" show was not a fast-moving affair with songs and silly costumes. It aired on CBS-TV's old non-commercial religion/culture block on Sunday morning (long since replaced by the money-making "CBS Sunday Morning"). Efron dramatized Bible stories, with himself as the only cast member, treading a fine line between playing it straight and gagging it up. In some ways, it was the TV equivalent of a Sunday school Flannelgraph presentation.
Watching Efron was a solitary activity for me. I didn't know of anyone who had heard of him, let alone liked him. The only time I watched him with my teen-age peers, the loudest of them laughed derisively and called him a fag. And this was at an Episcopal church youth conference.
Actually, if I saw the show today, I would probably find it dull at best, but I have fond memories of my experience at the time.
Seems like the use of a palm, fist, or hefty stick might be more appropriate....
Oh, in the story Tog, who does the swiping, is supposed to be a goblin disguised as a human boy. His goblin nails are rather sharp and he's much stronger than the average child. Thanks for the suggestion which I might take up in the final draft.
Another Efron fan here. "Is there sex after death?" and "Just Pie" are still favorite bits. I also liked when he compared Bayer to Brand X aspirin. "Great American Dream Machine" was a huge thing in my life, and of course, any time anybody watched it with me, they did a terrible episode. Go figure.
"Hallelujah Bananas" is a favorite paragraph of mine. I just searched in vain for any book of mine that contains it, but they're all hiding under the sink, laughing at me. We have too many sinks for me to search them all, and the books move around. I know I've used it in the past, perhaps as far back as Azapa.
There, I've said "Azapa." That means I have to go brush teeth with my daughter and spend the next couple of hours getting her to go to sleep. And I didn't manage to say anything about Bingo, Droop, Snorky and Fleagle. Night, all...
adamsj - Ah. The exact date's a little out of my ken, but here http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?imagefield.x=54&fe=on&tn=even+cowgirls+get+the+blues&sortby=1&imagefield.y=13 at Abebooks might be a good start.
Stefan:
You are completely right, and I seem to have been a couple of years off, thinking 1975 was 1977. I even found the Kirk Exorcist bit as a cover blurb on this page:
Monster Times cover scans (see issue #43).
Much obliged. It's been bugging me for a week.
John M. Ford: There's also the issue of literary allusion. When I was writing my first (so far only) book, a line of Tennyson's got stuck in my head and in incorporated it with a double twist into the text. One reader, as far as I'm aware, got it.
Richard Anderson:
glitterflea, your children's book excerpt rings no bells, but I'm a bit concerned about the idea of swiping a lunging dog with one's fingernails. Seems like the use of a palm, fist, or hefty stick might be more appropriate....
My first reaction was that the hero was obviously a werewolf, or some such beastie.
Another vote here for a DVD set of the Marshall Efron Bible stories show.
"These are COSMIC fish parts!
John M. Ford, re: Robert Jordan, and poorly chosen words.
My apologies. I phrased that exceptionally poorly.
-r.
Saija: I like Empress of the World by Sara Ryan (and so does my 16-yr.-old bisexual daughter).
Call for ideas: My hometown, which has a truly horrifying 28 percent poverty rate (that's by the U.S. federal definition of poverty: income $10,000/yr or less), is just beginning a major effort to Do Something About It, focusing on education, employment, transportation/housing, dependent care, mental and physical health care, and economic growth.
If any of you live in places that have come up with good ways to tackle any of these problems, would you email me with info or links to same?
(If anyone's interested in my own town's efforts, check out "Partners for a Prosperous Athens" at http://www.fanning.uga.edu .)
Lila, check out www.worldchanging.com. Not 100% apropos, but they touch on some of the issues you raise.
* * *
I remember exactly one skit from "The Great American Dream Machine." Efron was fnoodling with some cans of olives, noting that those with larger olives had fewer olives, and that the can of the extra-super-jumbo variety had just ONE enormous olive.
I'm amazed that the thread has gotten this far without anyone mentioning that the chorus of Bob Marley's song "Buffalo Soldier" has almost exactly the same tune as the Banana Splits theme (slowed down and rastafized).
Speaking of mildly-educational Saturday morning TV shows that hardly anyone remembers (viz. Make a Wish), I spent many years wondering if I'd only dreamed Curiosity Shop, featuring such characters as Baron Balthazar and the Onomatopoeia. But the Net is bigger than it used to be, and there is now a little information out there about it. It was one of my favorites, but I don't believe I've ever met anyone who remembers it.
Another one of my favorites that few Americans remember is Vision On, a BBC show for deaf and hearing children that was delightfully surreal.
Oh!
I have a "V for Vendetta" meta-question.
Who is Stephen Fry? Yeah, I can guess that he's an actor / comedian, and I know he had a voice credit in Mirrormask, but what is he best known for? Is there an American comedian he could be compared to?
Open thread material: Hisses and jeers for, of all places, the Smithsonian Institution. They've signed a semi-exclusive deal with Showtime for access to the Smithsonian's archives. The terms of the deal are secret.
On March 9, Showtime and the Smithsonian announced the creation of Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture to develop television programming. Under the agreement, the joint venture has the right of first refusal to commercial documentaries that rely heavily on Smithsonian collections or staff. Those works would first have to be offered to Smithsonian on Demand, the cable channel that is expected to be the venture's first programming service.
here is his IMDb listng
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000410/
Hope it helps, I didn't do more than look it up.
Who is Stephen Fry?
Well, lots of things. Goes back to Cambridge Footlights, where he met Hugh Laurie, with whom he has written and performed in lots of things, notably the "Jeeves and Wooster" series, in which they had the title roles. (Fry was Jeeves.) Was in all the Blackadders except the first series, as the Duke of Wellington, Charles I, and any character named Melchett or variations thereon. Title role in the film "Wilde," no points for guessing which Wilde. Won a Tony for doing a highly successful rewrite of "Me and My Girl," the 1940 musical that "Doin' the Lambeth Walk" comes from. Narrates the movies about that English kid who does magic tricks, Harry Penn-Jillette or whatever his name is.
Four novels and a number of other books; Paperweight is a fat collection of essays, reviews, and short stories, (and a short play), many done for The Listener magazine, which are extremely funny, when they aren't quite moving -- the one on the death of Freddie Mercury and certain people's response thereto is particularly notable as a bit of absolutely level-voiced fury re certain people's complete lack of compassion or humanity, despite their alleged devotion to a particular prophet and apprentice woodworker. (I lucked into a copy of this book, though it does seem to be available new from Amazon UK.)
Busy man, and he's four months younger than I am. Jeeves, where's the old Webley-Fosbery? No, one cartridge will be quite sufficient, thank you. That's just the stuff I knew (and checked Amazon UK for). There's probably a whole bunch more on them those Internets there.
Thanks. Doesn't sound like Fry has an exact American equivalent.
My father is a Blackadder fan. I'll have to see if any of his VHS collections have episodes with fry.
Re: the wtfwjd? particle, I prefer the ones from the author of the Going Jesus blog at her wtfwjd? cafepress store.
Kip, I was going to e-mail you about the issues Greg London raised.
Did the Westman company really sue to get a piece of "Yes, We Have No Bananas?" Fifty googleable places say yes. How could they have claimed a copyright on Handel's music? If it wasn't copyright, on what basis did they win?
Or is the whole thing made up? Or a severe distortion of something that really happened?
I am also left wondering if Spaeth had something to do with it. After all, he served as expert musicological witness in other plagiarism trials, and he made it into Louis Nizer's My Life in Court. And he loved to promote himself. And he is famous for the Hallelujah/Bananas thing. Could the lawsuit story come from him?
Is C.E. Petit reading this?
Strong agreement with John M. Ford's recommendation of the Stephen Fry collection Paperweight. Good stuff, very re-readable. Also funny and moving is his autobiographical Moab Is My Washpot.
His TV show with Hugh Laurie was called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and four books of the scripts were published by Mandarin in the UK -- much appreciated since I deafly missed a good many on-screen punchlines.
Ooh, Stephen Fry's in V for Vendetta? Now I want to go see that. I just finished watching the whole Jeeves and Wooster series, and have been seeking out other things with him in it.
I can't think of an American actor equivalent. We never seem to get quite as dry OR goofy as the Brits, and he does both wonderfully.
Thank you for recommending Paperweight, John and Dave. I've requested it from the library.
Since elementary school, when I went through all the biographies in the non-fiction room in a month, I've noticed that I tend to go through periods of reading only fiction and then periods of only non-fiction.
Since I've just about finished Robert Bringhurst's amazing Elements of Typographic Style--the link is to an interview with Bringhurst--I was just about ready to go out searching for something else when this recommendation fell into my lap.
Recently appeared in an episode of the BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are, in which some well-known person traces their ancestry.
His maternal grandfather was a Jew from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a decorated officer from the First World War, who came to England with his wife in the 1920s to help set up a sugar beet factory in Bury St. Edmunds. Most of the episode was about tracing that side of the family, finding the places they lived, the names of their children, and the official records of their deportations to what was death.
It was a chilling reminder.
My most recent encounter with Stephen Fry was on the BBC comedy quiz QI which I tried not to miss after stumbling upon it.
Lovely wit and poise and totally at ease with being gay... My favorite kind of queer :-) I don't think there's an US equivalent of him.
John Farrel: The opening sentence of, "To Reign in Hell" is probably the best piece of auctorial self-mockey I know.
It's what got me started reading Steven Brust.
This is for Patrick and Teresa (if you get around to reading it):
For no particular reason, I was wondering today if you were Jazz Butcher fans as well as Richard Thompson fans. It just seemed like you might be, him being another musicians' cult fav.
The other thing about Stephen Fry is that he knows nearly everything. It's become traditional on the christmas celebrity specials of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in the UK for someone to call him when they get stuck. Last year he actually got one wrong, but I think it's the first time ever...
glitterflex:
It is unlikely but can happen. In high school, a friend of mine more or less faithfully recreated the Roald Dahl short story about the woman who bludgeons her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves it, roasted, to the detectives who have come to investigate. The parallelism was quite precise, though in her version it was a frozen turkey. Judging by her surprise when I told her I'd read it before, I think she truly did think it was her own invention. As it had also been made into an Alfred Hitchcock Theater TV episode, my guess was that she had seen that and then forgotten about having seen it.
I think that kind of thing is very very rare, though; you can't be worrying about it with everything you write.
Many people who write find that what they've created feels rather distant and foreign to them when they read it. That's no sign of unconscious plagiarism; it's simply part of the creative process. It is one of the reasons people speak of the muse as being responsible for their work.
I think that kind of thing is very very rare, though; you can't be worrying about it with everything you write.
I've just been really worried that I'll unconsciously plagiarize something and be hauled off to Author's Jail and forever known as the
Plagiarist.
You're probably right, though. Thanks for the advice.
A Stephen Fry (I've always assumed the same one, but don't actually know for sure) is also the author of the SFish novel _Making History_.
Yes, the Stephen Fry who wrote Making History is the same one.
Stefan,
Thanks for the link!
David,
I remember Curiosity Shop, just barely (I'm startled to see that it was the first venue for "Multiplication Rock!"). I wonder if anyone besides me remembers The Hudson Brothers? (British and Australian readers probably remember Rod Hull and his Emu.) Or how about Voyage of the Mimi, the first show I remember with a signing Deaf character?
Protected Static,
I love how something like the Smithsonian, that supposedly already belongs to the American public, can then become the "exclusive" property of someone else.
Maybe we should auction off Air Force One.
Re Stephen Fry - another admirer here. On a completely silly note, it was wonderful during the television coverage of the Terribly Civil Celebration of the Charles/Camilla hookup to see Fry and Atkinson being the two in traditional costume — see photo: www.20minutos.es/galeria/146/0/16. One hopes he can flick the fags before too much damage.
BTW, medical problems aren't as deeply serieaux as feared, but still are not negligible, and I'll probably be offline in hospital for some while, as well as skint.
Stephen Fry also hosts the BAFTAs - the annual UK equivalent of the Oscars. I tape it every year, watch his always brilliantly witty and funny opening monologue, then fast forward through the actual awards just to catch the bits of Fry interspersed between them. The man is a national treasure.
Re: The Smithsonian, I can't say I'm particularly surprised, if disappointed. When I was at NASM, there was lots of displeasure of such things as awarding the catering franchise to McDonalds (thankfully whilst I was there the staff canteen and sandwich deli were retained - much cheaper and better than the other dreck - although I believe these are now too gone.) They also renamed the Langley Theatre the Lockheed Martin (TM) IMAX (TM) theatre, after a generous bribe ^H^H^H^H^H donation from guess who...
Unfortunately, museums are very expensive places to run, and so the money has to come from somewhere. Feeelthy socialist that I am, I reckon a complex like the Smithsonian is worth all the government subsidy it takes.
Did you know Madeline L'Engle wrote a book that had a major gay theme? In _Camilla_ it was an overt issue. In _The Small Rain_ it came up in the usual way of branding someone about whom it was not true.
Quoth John M. Ford (wrt Stephen Fry): Narrates the movies about that English kid who does magic tricks, Harry Penn-Jillette or whatever his name is.
Though horrified to find myself correcting Mr. Ford, I feel compelled to point out that afaik, Fry does not narrate those movies but does read the British audiobooks thereof. The American audiobooks are read by a different Brit, Jim Dale.
The closest US equivalent I can think of for Fry is either Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. (In an interview w/ Colbert that was broadcast on public radio a few weeks ago, there was a comment about him projecting his personality in such an exaggeratedly straitlaced fashion that in some ways he comes across as "ethnically gay", which he apparently isn't.)
I'd considered bringing up the Hudson Brothers earlier. The Emu! and Chuckie Margolis!
I remembered the Curiosity Shop, but was afraid to mention it, because the only specifics I recall are that a) one of the characters was a talking rock, and b) the never-seen shop's proprieter communicated by tape recordings.
That puts it firmly in "I dreamed it up" category.
Oh . . . one more detail. One of the regulars was a fantastically annoying kid actress.
In re Malzberg vs Virgin Atlantic:
. . .rumor has it that the second candidate for the program would be British author J. G. Ballard, whose flight would depart from the Martian-sand-swamped ruins of Cape Canaveral.
Nifty. Thanks, Patrick.
Chris Quinones writes:
I'd considered bringing up the Hudson Brothers earlier. The Emu! and Chuckie Margolis!
For me, this remark was so context-free as to be almost a koan. The more I contemplate what it could possibly mean, the deeper it seems.
I suppose I could google, but that would spoil the perfection.
I haven't been to the Smithsonian in (one.. two... other hand... carry the one... yeesh...) over a decade. While I can't say I'm surprised about the changes, I'm not pleased.
I'm all for museums finding creative revenue streams - but giving near-exclusive deals for access to public archives of materials is Just Plain Wrong (what's next? The Library of Congress or the National Archives doing the same thing?), and selling naming rights is tacky.
(Also, reality has a way of making naming rights somewhat... ironic. Around the time we left St. Louis, we had the TWA Dome and the Saavis Center - TWA had just been consumed by American Airlines, and Saavis had just declared Chapter 11. Whoops.)
Fry does not narrate those movies
Of course you are correct; I had gone back and found a credit for "narrator" on imdb, and as I've only seen the pictures in bits and pieces on cable, brought it over without context. Always Follow the Link.
They would probably be better films if he did narrate them, but then, I might actually be able to sit through the entirety of a version of "Mission: Impossible 2" with voice-overs by Fry and Laurie as two British Intelligence chaps trying to interpret the events for Tony Blair --
Fry: "No, sir, MI5 no longer suggests that our agents chat up the ladyfriends of international villains."
Laurie: "Not after Christine Keeler. Oh, of course you recall, sir. The lady who wanted your autograph at the Party conference. For, ah, certain values of 'autograph.'"
Fry: "The lady the Shadow Minister for Deniable Acts referred to as 'Popsy One,' Prime Minister."
Laurie: "As for this part of the operation, sir, you will recall that our agents are still licenced to kill -- well, yes, they still lie and cheat and steal, that's true, but since Mr Reagan it's no longer required licences for that -- but they now have to fill out much more detailed expense-account forms. It would seem that the Americans have a broader charter in that regard."
At any rate, apologies all round.
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey wrote:
Did the Westman company really sue to get a piece of "Yes, We Have No Bananas?" Fifty googleable places say yes. How could they have claimed a copyright on Handel's music? If it wasn't copyright, on what basis did they win?
I don't really know. The thing I knew about was "Hall-elujah, bananas..." and so forth.
The Great Song Thesaurus says that "Yes, We Have No Bananas" is from 1923, and instead of the singable lineage that I love to quote, it states (in the section "Elegant Plagiarisms") that the song is 'Based on the melodies of "The Vacant Chair," and the earlier "When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home" (Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party).'
I'm not sure what the statute of limitations on plagiarism is, but Freddy Chopin probably didn't get a cent for "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows." Moreover, there were popular songs based -- openly, I think -- on pieces that actually were in copyright, like Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto ("Full Moon and Empty Arms" 1946) and Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess ("The Lamp is Low" 1934). I'm unaware of what copyright issues, if any, were raised by these.
As to Spaeth, I once again don't know. I flipped through Slonimsky's A Thing Or Two About Music in search of illumination -- bloody thing has no index -- and finished as dim as I was before, but with a couple of bits of trivia I'd forgotten. Hey, Debussy wrote a funeral march and never published it? Coo.
Whoa - a richness of Particles & Sidelights.
Re: that botanical stuff, seeing the Albrizia whatsis (a.k.a. Mimosa) in full bloom took me back to hot Brooklyn summer nights when you could smell the Mimosas and Ailantus trees. Pungent, almost stinky, but redolent of iced tea on the front porch and the deafening shriek of cicadias.
And those thistles are lovely.
And the taco trucks make me want to jump on a flight to LA, just for lunch.
I'm also surprised that the Beeb is just discovering that subtitles have other uses. Haven't they been in a bar in the last 10 years?
I'm just surprised no one has yet shaken loose the earworm by singing or typing:
Yes! we have no chihuahuas
We have no chihuahuas today
We've alsatians, dalmatians,
The results of a flirtation
Between a pekingese and a toupée,
but yes! we have no chihuahuas,
We have no chihuahuas toda-aaaa-ay!
Larry, don't have go that far. I live near what I consider the best tacos in Kansas City, a 24-hour drive-through called Pancho's that's about four short blocks from my house. In Kansas City. Their tacos are a wee bit more expensive than the ubiquitous Taco Bell and made with better, more careful ingredients. Plus they get lots of Hispanic business, folks looking for lots of good cheap food. I've been known to tell the counter help, "I'll have what he's having, just no as hot..."
And if I want to go to a sit down excellent Mexican dinner, I've got a multitude of good places (Sol Azteca, California Taquiria, Mannys -- I'd do business lunch at Mannys).
RuTemple: maybe because that's one of the more obscure Bogle works? He's done it on tour, but IIRC it's never been available on record in this country. (I first remember it from an LP I bought in Sydney.)
The saga gets worse; AP (quoted in yesterday's Boston Globe) reported that James Moran (D-Va), sitting on the panel that approves Smithsonian appropriations, suggested that the Smithsonian raise the money it needs for renovation by charging admission; he claimed to believe that one dollar would be sufficient. Let's hear it for the New Democrats!
Here's an Open Thread kind of question that maybe someone here can comment on.
It starts with the fifth-season opener of Buffy. In the course of the episode, Spike claims that Dracula owes him eleven pounds.
More recently, Peter David is writing a comic book miniseries called Spike vs. Dracula. In the first issue, he explains this: Spike buys a copy of Bram Stoker's novel, spending eleven pounds on it; when Dracula subsequently destroys the book, Spike decides that Dracula owes him reimbursement for the money.
This is a clever invention, but it seems to me that in 1898 (in London, if it matters) eleven pounds would have been an insanely high price for a book. But I don't know for sure. Is there anyone out there who knows what book prices in general were like around the turn of the twentieth century, and what Dracula in particular would have sold for?
This is a clever invention, but it seems to me that in 1898 (in London, if it matters) eleven pounds would have been an insanely high price for a book. But I don't know for sure. Is there anyone out there who knows what book prices in general were like around the turn of the twentieth century, and what Dracula in particular would have sold for?You'd think this would be easy information to find, and perhaps it would be if I were thinking more clearly, but I can't find what any early edition of Dracula was originally priced at (the problem is that book collectors and dealers do not generally mention original prices unless they are printed on the book or jacket and are a useful "point," or edition/printing indicator).
In any case, the best information that I've been able to come up with is that the first US edition of The Phantom of the Opera, published in 1911, sold for $1.25. Based on that I think a price of 11 pounds for a book published 14 years earlier is certainly far too high.
"Little Gomez" was on a tape available in the US. I had a copy. I can't tell you the title because I incautiously lent it to someone who did not return it several years ago.
Saw the wonderfully silly thriller Slither today.
The trailer suggests that it is an Alien Slug movie, but it's also a Body Snatchers sort of movie and a Zombie movie too! Triple shlockstravaganza!
Besides a lot of laughs there are a few scenes which are genuine nail-biters. If I'd seen this as a kid it would be a real pajama-soaker.
There's one interesting and creepy element concerning, ummmm, I'll say recieved memories so as not to give away too much. It puts the movie into the realm of SF, if of the silly variety.
Their tacos are a wee bit more expensive than the ubiquitous Taco Bell and made with better, more careful ingredients.
The concept of "less careful" ingredients than Taco Bell would make a swell Guillermo del Toro movie*, but I don't think you'd wanna eat there. Even with really, really cheap longnecks.**
*"Hellboy II: Gehenna Drive-Thru" or "Mimic 4: That's Not Chicken." (And yes, there were two sequels to Mimic, though del Toro didn't do either of them.)
**Spanish for "light beer:" Cerveza de vaca.
After a little bit of hunting: what we'd think of as a mass-produced book was priced around two shillings at the end of the 19th C, though this was generallly discounted by about 25%. So, a shilling and a half for a new edition. It's obvious that two hundred times that isn't a reasonable price for Dracula, which (though the details of the first edition are vague) was a popularly priced book.
There are tantalizing references to a suggestion (some attribute it to Henry Irving) that Stoker make the work available for free "downwire" on the electrical telegraph, both saving on postal costs and increasing demand through word of mouth, but these seem to have come to nothing.
(Is it still before midnight? Good.)
Evil....
I sat in the Burlington Barnes & Noble and read the first 100 pages of Brutal, by Kevin Weeks with a named writing assistant given co-author status and credit. Weeks was an associate of James Bulger, Boston Mob Boss. It's chilling. 100 pages was as much as I was willing to deal with in one session. And in this particular case, I feel reading it at the Barnes & Noble was a moral thing to do, I did come out of the store with a purchased book, not Brutal, though. While half the proceeds are going to families of victims of murders he was accessory to whose bodies he disposed of, half the proceeds go to Weeks. The jail time he served was five years--he got time off for leading law enforcement personnel to where he'd buried bodies.
The book is chilling; Weeks has got to be a sociopath. His moral sense doesn't exist. I've known people who obeyed various laws and rules because they wanted to stay in other people's good graces and saw downsides to not complying and not a whole lot of benefit, or at least, not enough benefit versus the costs, to not comply with rules and laws. Weeks, though....
No, I didn't take a shower after I got home; maybe I should have, to wash the virtual stench off.
So, a shilling and a half for a new edition. It's obvious that two hundred times that isn't a reasonable price for Dracula, which (though the details of the first edition are vague) was a popularly priced book.
Perhaps if Spike had had his copy re-bound. In gold leaf. And kept a ten-pound note in it...
My guess is that it is probably much too high. Based on the price of gold then and now (which is to say, on a Google search - I don't keep the price of gold in my head), eleven pounds then would have nearly 100 times the purchasing power of eleven pounds now. So, about 200 books' worth (which corresponds nicely to Mike's figures). So... what could you buy in London for 1,000 pounds? Half a hansom cab? Dinner for twenty at Claridge's? An Oyster card?
I don't know how much flexibility there is with time in the comic, but presumably there has been a time when a first edition of Dracula was worth eleven pounds. About 1960, perhaps?
There's a curious website called "How Much is That Worth Today" that does English currency conversions from the 13th century forward. It says that two shillings (one-tenth of a pound then) in 1897 comes out as seven pounds 56p in contempoary money. A mulitple of 75 seems about right -- remembering that, even in a money-based (rather than a barter-based) economy, the things one can buy, for any price, have changed a great deal.
Looking at abebooks indicates that first British (Constable, 1897) editions of Drac start at about US$7000, and go up based on the usual variables (the top price was $25k, but it's inscribed by Stoker to Ellen Terry). First US editions (Doubleday, '99) seem to start at about $4k. In 1960 (before devaluation) eleven pounds was US$55, and I doubt very much that you could have gotten a first edition for that; the book was by no means obscure then, and was certainly collectible. (The Antiquarian Bookseller's Association listing for the inscribed one describes it as "rare," but that is a word with a great deal of slack in its couplers.)
Before the war, a servant who lived in the master's digs made a pound a week (cf. Allingham, re Lugg). My guess is that, at that time, long before Antiques Roadshow, it might have been possible to find a First copy for twenty pounds or thereabouts. Unless you looked like a rich American collector who kept an autographed picture of Bela Lugosi in his bedroom, in which case the price would have gone ballistic faster than you could say "Good eeevening."
Even more important than cerveza de vaca?
Cerveza muy fría ;-)
What if Spike was already adjusting for inflation when he gave the eleven pounds figure? One seventy-fifth of 11 quid would be about three bob, which would be in the right ballpark for a mental calculation.
"Spike was including accrued interest."
Er, financial or literary?
Oh, financial. The smarter vampires (and you don't live for a century-plus if you aren't paying some attention) have been taking advantage of compound interest, well, probably as long as it's been around. The fact that, at least in some legal interpretations, a corporation is a person that lives forever, ought to inspire some sort of Creepy Thoughts.
Remember that, once upon a time, the Catholic Church was be really hostile to interest-bearing accounts -- "wealth is sterile" and all that. Who really suggested that they change? There's probably a good short Fark Dantasy story in that, though I'm not sure I want to be remembered for creating EconoGothick. Now, where the heck is my copy of Raymond de Roover?
(And no, there are no plans to build a sequel to Dragon called something like Night on the Rialto.
Alas, there is no chance that Spike was adjusting for inflation or including interest -- the comic has a scene set in the bookseller with the clerk asking for eleven pounds.
So it looks like I'm right: it's rather as if I'd had a run-in with Anansi the Spider, went into a bookshop and asked for a copy of Anansi Boys, and was told that the price would be $2000 -- and I paid it.
John Ford wrote: The fact that, at least in some legal interpretations, a corporation is a person that lives forever, ought to inspire some sort of Creepy Thoughts.
Dracula, Inc.
I imagine Christopher Lee as the creepy CEO.
After our heroes stake him, they find that he never was the vampire;
it was the corporation.
Still free to suck the lifeforce out of its employees and customers,
with its new CEO (meet the new boss, same as the old boss).
No, David, it's more as if you hadn't actually read the comic in question, considering:
A) Spike complains about the insanely high price.
B) The bookseller explains that the book has been signed by the author, so as far as he's concerned, that makes it valuable.
C) Spike would be perfectly content to simply kill the bookseller and take it, but Drusilla asks him in her dreamy way to purchase the book for her and the besotted Spike does so.
D) We establish that Spike habitually takes money (theater tickets, valuables, etc.) off the bodies of his victims, so it's not as if he blew a month's wages on it.
Furthermore, to me, there's nothing intrinsically amusing or entertaining or even appropriate about Spike continually adjusting the amount for inflation. Instead it's his FAILURE to adjust that seems much more in character. Never the sharpest tool in the shed, it's far more to be expected that Spike would overlook not only adjusting for inflation, but the fact that a signed first edition of "Dracula" would be worth a hell of a lot more than eleven quid.
So it's a cute example, and you're right for your circumstance, but it has nothing to do with the comic or the character.
PAD
"The smarter vampires"
I now have an image of Marty Zweig and Jim Rogers rising from coffins, clutching fistsful of bonds and stock certificates, mouthing phrases like "I vill drink your basis points."
EconoGothick might have a future.
I imagine Christopher Lee as the creepy CEO.
In Lee's last time out as Dracula ("The Satanic Rites of Dracula," Though It Has Many Names), Dracula has a "secret identity" as a reclusive millionaire, vaguely inspired by Howard Hughes. He's barely in the picture, and (as it postulates that vampires don't appear on video as well as in mirrors and photographs) there are scenes that he's only in part of the time. This is actually kind of amusing, and while the picture's not very good, it's not as bad as "Dracula AD 1972." But then, few movies are. And there's a pretty fair confrontation between Lee and Peter Cushing (playing a van Helsing descendant, naturally) in what passed for a modern office in 1974, that's nicely low-key, and, well, has two very good actors in it.
The unfortunate part is that Evil CEOs are no longer very interesting, if indeed they ever were. I suppose you could make a farce about Enron or Halliburton being run by vampires ("Look, I want Cheez-Its, Famous Amos, and blood in the breakroom. And red napkins. Who do I have to fire to get red [bleep]ing napkins?") but we're talking about an SNL sketch.
Speaking as a guy who was kept alive for three decades on the body fluids of dead animals, and is now kept alive on the body fluids of human beings (t
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