I'm still looking for the particle or sidelight noting the old fanzines up for sale on eBay. Or did I see that somewhere else?
Someone several comments back mentioned H.G Wells and the tank. That would refer to a 1903 H.G. Wells short story, "The Land Ironclads", about a type of military machine very similar to the tanks that were invented a few years later. I read in a biography that after the tank was invented, Wells actually filed a patent claim, using his short story as evidence. His claim wasn't successful.
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.
This has been a discussion about books presented as non-fiction, that turn out to be untrue.
Are there any cases of books presented as fiction, that turned out be true? I don't mean historical novels, but books recounting actual events, but concealing them in the guise of being made up.
Serge ----
I think the reason that the "Forbidden Planet" novel you mentioned a few entries up is so dopey (if the blurb can be believed) is that it's --- according to its listing on Amazon --- a novelization of the movie, rather than the book the movie is based on. Good authors will do terrible things for money, although at least Jack Willamson had the decency to do it under a pen name.
"When you see a statue of a saint with three children in a tub at his feet, that’s St. Nicholas."
Jim, your mention of the children in the tub at St. Nicholas' feet made me think immediately of a passage in Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol", when Ebeneezer Scrooge notices the two children at the feet of the Ghost of Christmas Present. This Ghost has a very Father Christmas-like feeling to him, and for the first time, I wonder if Dickens was using his readers' knowledge of the image of St. Nicholas' children to make a satirical point, when he wrote this:
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
Pleasant surprise to see someone writing about Tove Jansson's Moomin books. The Japanese anime films is news to me, but I was under the impression the characters had been animated before, perhaps back when the Moomin comic strip was still running. I've long thought of Jansson's later Moomin books as sort of Ingmar Bergman for children, so a film version seems fitting.
You know, there's a Cliff Notes edition for "Lord of the Rings". Why don't these students just go over to the college bookstore and pick one up? It's just as intellectually dishonest as looking up unreliable sources on the Internet, but academically respectable.
For the record, Editor and Publisher reports that the Arizona Republic suspended the columnist, Dary Matera, after publishing the column in question:
"Ken Western, editorial page editor, said that Matera's piece was 'one of the most incoherent columns I have ever read and I just said enough is enough. My suggestion was to give him a three-month break to gather his thoughts.'"
You can read more at
http://209.11.49.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2088986
As a kid in the 1960s, I used to read comic from ACG, which specialized in horror, fantasy and science fiction, and only introduced heroic figures late in the game (anyone remember Nemesis and Magicman?). They made a point of referring to folks like Superman and Spiderman as "costume heroes". I'm not sure if they were respecting a DC/Marvel trademark, or if they just preferred to use a phrase that sounded more mocking than "superhero".
Bill Higgins --- you made my day with the reference to Super-President. I must have watched that show exactly once in my childhood, but the memory lingers. However, I remembered Norcross as being president of some other country. I thought it was some recently de-colonized third world country, populated by people of a different skin color than their chief executive.
But the drawback with big-deal heroes is the same, whether they're sawing the denver boot off of someone's car, vowing to fix California's budget crisis, or using super powers that aren't found in the Constitution. They're all the stuff that dreams are made of. They're what we desperately wish for, not what we need, or what we end up getting.
Angle-Grinder Man reminds me of the character Robert DeNiro played in Terry Gilliam's movie, "Brazil". He was the guy in orange over-alls who swooped down to people's apartments to do home repairs. Technically, he was breaking the law --- the repairs were supposed to be done by the official repair staff. But they were inefficient and arrogant, and working with them meant going through impossible paperwork. The DeNiro character represented one guy's frustration with a corrupt, unworkable system. I think Angle-Grinder Man may see himself along the same lines. Is he REALLY a noble Robin Hood figure? Well, you could ask the same question about Robin Hood himself, assuming he actually existed.
By the way, I couldn't help but notice that the first string of comments to the Angle Grinder Man piece focused on the rather unrelated subject of President Bush. Are we obsessed with him or what?
Concerning to George's statement that Dr. Laura Schlessinger is an atheist:
I did a quick websearch, and the materials I found point to her being a former atheist who found a belief in God about five years ago, through Orthodox Judaism. More recently, she has announced that while she still identifies herself as Jewish, she is no longer an observent Orthodox Jew, and has found herself attracted to Christianity. I found an atheist website where a writer had heard a snippet of this, and speculated that Schlessinger might be giving up her belief in God, but I haven't seen any declarations by her to that effect.
Of course, I don't actually know Dr. Laura, so I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about her personal beliefs, even if she does have a highly visible public personality.
After watching this whole Fox/Franken charade play out, I've started wondering exactly what the legal precedent in cases where common phrases are trademarked. I'm reminded of the Hardee's fast food chain, which, to promote its breakfast biscuits back in the 1970s, trademarked the phrase "made from scratch". This is a phrase many restaurants could use in their advertising truthfully; if they did, would they face a lawsuit from Hardee's? Would they be forced by court order to instead use a more literal phrase, like "made from fresh, basic ingredients, not from a mix"? It's been a quarter century since "made from scratch" became a Hardee's trademark, and one would think there would be some legal rulings set down that would apply to the Fox case, but I haven't heard of them.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 2 |
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2006 | 3 |
| 2005 | 3 |
| 2004 | 2 |
| 2003 | 4 |
Total: 15 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jim Meadows:
Show all comments by Jim Meadows.