Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: October 2003

  • Thought Tally : I’ve Got Bottles Of Grins And Racetrack Wins And Lotions To Ease Your Pains

    * I wonder is Tom Doherty of TOR is a relative of Henry L. Doherty of the City Services Corporation.

    * Did Steve lose a lot of weight since the infamous “Developers! Developers! Developers!” video?

    * Theodore Sturgeons real name was Edward Hamilton Waldo. He heh.

    * Salesman of the Century about Ron Popeil and Curve of Binding Energy are totally going into my Amazon wishlist.

    * The “Shottle Bop” from Sturgeon’s story Is located on 10th Avenue between 20th and 21st street.

    * NESFA Clubhouse must be pretty damn cool:

    “A big chunk of the purchase price came from money raised by the NESFA Lunar Realty Trust #1, a trust organized under Mass. law which collected around $60,000 towards the purchase price. The NLRT#1 sold bonds worth $100 each and paid interest based on the prime rate. Most of the money was raised locally, but S.C.I.F.I, the organization which had just run the huge and financially quite successful LAcon II, purchased $20,000 with of NLRT#1 bonds. (It’s worth noting that they paid for it with 100 checks for $137 — it’s a long story — plus one more check for $6300.) The NLRT#1 bonds were paid off completely over the next two and a half years.
    …
    While dismantling the huge dryer for removal, we discovered about a quart of stuff in the bottom: coins, jewelry, marbles, and other pocket stuff. The coins were the biggest portion and amounted to a decent haul. (Of course, it took three people several hours to fish them all out and clean them up…)

    Another find of considerable value was a power shaft for the washer which was perhaps 6′ long with lovely ball-bearing axles and a 2′ diameter toothed gear on one end. As it was dismantled, people though it was much too lovely to waste — but what to do with it? Inspiration struck: Send it to LASFS! Don Eastlake quickly organized a carpentry crew and built a shipping crate which features heavy-duty construction and special mounting brackets which allowed the shaft to spin freely within the crate. The finished crate was closed, screwed shut, and put on a truck for delivery to LASFS. Since there was some doubt that LASFS would accept delivery of a huge sealed crate from NESFA, arrangements were made to have a secret agent on site to handle that chore for them…”

  • Who Are They?

    From The “Curve of Binding Energy” by John McPhee (1973, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 104-105):

    “Not all the Los Alamos theories could be tested. Long popular within the Theoretical Division was, for example, a theory that the people of Hungary are Martians. The reasoning went like this: The Martians left their own planet several aeons ago and came to Earth; they landed in what is now Hungary; the tribes of Europe were so primitive and barbarian it was necessary for the Martians to conceal their evolutionary difference or be hacked to pieces. Through the years, the concealment had on the whole been successful, but the Martians had three characteristics too strong to hide: their wanderlust, which found its outlet in the Hungarian gypsy; their language (Hungarian is not related to any of the languages spoken in surrounding countries); and their unearthly intelligence. One had only to look around to see the evidence: Teller, Wigner, Szilard, von Neumann — Hungarians all. Wigner had designed the first plutonium-production reactors. Szilard had been among the first to suggest that fission could be used to make a bomb. Von Neumann had developed the digital computer. Teller — moody, tireless, and given to fits of laughter, bursts of anger — worked long hours and was impatient with what he felt to be the excessively slow advancement of Project Panda, as the hydrogen-bomb development was known. … Teller had a thick Martian accent. He also had a sense of humor that could penetrate bone.”

    Steve “Developers, Developers, Developers!” Ballmer, Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan were also Hungarian Jews. Kissinger has a thick Martian accent. But the scariest Hungarian/Jewish Martian is of course Ron “But Wait, There’s More” Popeil, the inventor of Mr. Microphone, GLH-9 Hair in a Can and other alien products. How can you doubt that he’s an alien?

    From the website of Rosanna Hart, Linebarger’s (see my article “Psywarrior” ) daughter:

    “ARTHUR BURNS WRITES ABOUT PAUL LINEBARGER
    …
    “He was above medium height, terribly gaunt, bald, high-nosed, narrowing in the chin; he wore severe excellently-cut suits; his favourite hat was a soft black velour like an Italian film producer’s. He was constantly ill, usually with digestive or metabolic troubles, and had to put up with repeated surgery, so that in middle age he always lived close to the vital margin. He took time off from a dinner party in Melbourne for a long drink of hydro-chloric acid, at which a guest, quite awed, remarked that Linebarger probably *was* a man from Mars… “

    Linebarger was an alien for sure, what with the acid drinking and everything, but II wonder if Linebarger was one of the Hungarians…

    A sci-fi story called “Occam’s Scalpel” by Theodore Sturgeon comes to mind. Oh, I am not going to spoil the story for you. You should read it yourself.

    While reading Vonnegut I never realized that Kilgore Trout was based on Sturgeon. I always thought that a writer that good (I tend not to notice awkward style when the authors ideas are good) is respected, famous and well read unlike Mr. Trout.

  • And Then There Were None

    I have been hunting for Henry Kuttner’s autograph for a very long time. Henry Kuttner is one of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time (see my article about Kuttner). Kuttner died early and his signatures are very rare, fetching upward of $500. I keep a request for a book signed by Kuttner in hope that some ignorant bookseller might sell a signed copy cheaply. A few days ago abebooks wishlist emailed me a really weird item:

    “henry kuttner
    His personal baby book
    his very first book starts on april 7th 1915 and includes his first photograph, mother’s as well as his nurses’ signature, and documents his first 3 words (please nobody take offense) nigger, nigger, nigger. It was in the possesion of author C.L. Moore but now it could be y
    ISBN:
    Bookseller Inventory #22224
    Price: US$ 2500.00 “

    I hope nothing bad happened to Kuttner’s wife and co-author, C.L. Moore. Why would a thing like that end up on the market?

    Now, that’s a rather weird choice of first words for a baby. But the year being 1915 and everything, my guess is that little Henry must have been rather fond of the nursery rhyme that Agatha Christie used for her whodunit masterwork. Here’s a write-up from Rosetta Books, and eBook publisher:

    .. A note about the title — Christie originally called the novel Ten Little Niggers, a reference to an old nursery rhyme that she places, framed, in the guest rooms of the ten characters in the story. Each dies in the manner described in a verse of the sing-song rhyme — e.g., “Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there nine.” The rhyme ends with the words, “… and then there were none.” The offensive word, which carries an extra dimension of ugliness in American culture, was replaced with “Indians” for American publication. Ironically, “Indian” is now also a politically incorrect term, so the novel has officially been retitled And Then There None. As Charles Osborne points out in his delightful and indispensable study The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, the shift in the old American title creates a bit of confusion. For Americans think it refers to another nursery rhyme that begins, “One little, two little, three little Indians …” The nature of the original title reflects the time in which the novel it was written and the world in which Christie became an adult and a writer, one shaped largely by the British Empire and the racist thinking of the past. The cosmetic change of title to And Then There Were None is merely that, however. It erases a troubling shadow from an extraordinary, hugely entertaining achievement.

    Some somewhat related links:

    Straight Dope : In whodunits, it’s “the butler did it.” Who did it first?

    A complaint to Canadian Broadcast Standards Council :

    This case is, in the experience of the CBSC, unique; it marks the first occasion on which a Regional Council has been asked to review the title, as opposed to the content, of a television program. The broadcast in question is a cooking show entitled Gwai Lo Cooking which is aired by CFMT-TV (Toronto). The source of the complaint is the historic Cantonese expression “gwai lo” which is used as a material component of the show’s title. In its etymological background, “gwai lo” translates as “foreign devil” or “ghostly fellow” and it continues to be used by some Chinese to refer to “pale-skinned” Westerners. In the context of the title in question, “gwai lo” refers to the show’s host, who, although of Caucasian, rather than Oriental, much less Chinese, descent, speaks Cantonese and is able to offer North Amercian and European cooking recipes to the Cantonese-speaking Chinese Canadian community. …

  • Enter The Collector

    My abebooks wishlist finally found me an affordable autographed copy of Strugatsky brothers book:

    I also have a copy of “Space Apprentice” with a pasted in autograph of the younger brother. It’s interesting how similar their autographs are.