I talked to Jim. The new Trek movie is getting more or less good reviews.

Jim and I are going to the Palisades IMAX to watch it. Jim is making reservations. I don’t know when Jim will be able to get the tickets as it is selling out fast. I hope it’s a late night one so I don’t have to sit with a bunch 10-year-olds.

A while ago I bought several odd lots from Forest J. Ackerman’s Garage Mahal. He was selling off some of his items to get a little cash. Most importantly, I got a note of thanks with his signature with everything that I bought.

Now the 4E has moved on to that great monster mash in the sky, his estate is up for sale at the Profiles in History auction site.

These are the real treasures and I can see where there are millions of dollars worth of items. One thing for sale is a First edition book Dracula signed by Bram Stoker and also signed by Bela Lugosi as well as most every actor who ever played Dracula.

I wanted to bid on the two items that were a collection of awards. One had FJA’s Hugo award from 1946 and the other has the World Fantasy Award (the H.P. Lovecraft bust). This would be the only way that I could ever get one of these. The bidding started at $300 and that’s out of my price range.

Here are the pictures from the website:

Group of awards presented to Forry J Ackerman including: Hugo Award which incorporates the rocket ship from the very first Hugo Award presented to Forry Ackerman in 1946, Pulpcon Award, skull with fez (unknown attribution), Fantastic Arts, Evans Retrospective 1946, Rondo Monsterkid Award, Moxie Smiff L.A.W. Award. $600 – $800

Group of seven Ackerman awards including: Lifetime Achievement & Mentor Award, Forrest J Ackerman Best Everything, metal Saturn Award, Chiller Theatre Magazine Living Legend Award 1996, Horror Writers Association Life Achievement Award, Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society Forry Award, and 2002 World Fantasy Award (H. P. Lovecraft bust), $600 – $800

Oh well, unless I win the lotto tonight, I am not going to get these.

Forest J. Ackerman Estate Auction

Very cool pictures from the 1957 London Worldcon. (via The Crotchety Old Fan)

Here is my favorite: John W. Campbell, Jr. and H. Beam Piper. Piper is moving up fast on my favorite Author’s list, and Campbell was the editor of Astounding and did much to shape modern Science Fiction.

1957 WorldCon Photos

Shinichi Hoshi is the Japanese Master of the short-short story. He wrote over 1000 of these flash pieces. I had a tough time finding any translations of his stories.

Read the review of The Cost of Kindness and Other Fabulous Tales, Shinichi Hoshi (1985)

Too much like real life:

I went to Nyack High School with Chuck’s sister. Now he has a spread in Modern Guitar Mag.

Chuck Loeb Interview

“She Gave Birth to you. She raised you. Mom taught you to be careful how you spend your money. Why pay $50 or more for a Mother’s Day Star? With FreeNameAStar.com you can dedicate a star to Mom for free.”

I made up a new web page on freenameastar. I have no shame.

D-99 is a future government agency known as the Bureau of Slick Tricks. This is the prototype of “Men in Black”.

Read my review of D-99, H.B. Fyfe (1966).

The shout box on this page shows as the last entry (at the time of this post) as being a notice that I have worked on the spam problem.

I made a change to the program to record rejected messages. It is very easy to identify spam. When I reject a shout message I write the raw data to a file. It looks like Russian spammers found the shout box through a Google search and added it to their list. I’ve been getting about 100 spam messages a day, all for pharmaceuticals, and not one made it through the filter.

An interesting side effect of all this spam is that no one in their right mind would use the shout box because it would fill up with spam in minutes.

Yet the shout box is a good idea and I like it. Perhaps I will make a spam proof one that is easy to add to a web page and release the source.

May 2nd (next Saturday) Nyack is having a town wide garage sale with events and music in Memorial Park.

I am interested in getting a table somewhere. I also want to wander around the village and see what I can find. Yard sales in Nyack are a problem because it is so hard to get in and out of town and it precludes going anywhere else. Also Nyack is a major antique center and the dealers will be wandering around grabbing all the bargains. Someone I know who had a Nyack garage sale had people ringing her bell three days in advance and it 6 AM on the day of the sale.

There will be music in the park Gazebo. I have to find out if my brother will be playing. Probably Chip Larison’s band will be playing.

Nyack’s 1st Annual Village-Wide Yard & Sidewalk Sale

I wasted a day and a half reading this. Del Rey has produced some good stuff, but Siege Perilous is pretty bad.

Read a review of Siege Perilous, Lester Del Rey (1966)

I tried to stretch this one out. I read parts of it slowly and I reread some of the chapters. I have suddenly become a real Clarke fan.

If you read or write Science Fiction you must pick up a copy of this.

Read the review of Voices From The Sky, Arthur C. Clarke (1980)

One of the people that works here uses this giant ball as a chair. He says that it is more comfortable and lets him get a little exercise while he works.

JT30.COM and CTHREEPO.COM, my two most extensive websites are 10 years old today. JT30.com existed as an AOL website starting around 1994, but CThreePO.com was purchased on spec without any clear idea of what I might use it for. I began writing Science Fiction essays for the site and when blogging started I used it for my blog. The blog will be six years old this August.

My oldest domain is AudioCD.com which I registered in November of 1998. I have never been able to make the AudioCD.com site gel and now CDs are starting on their downward slide as new technology replaces them.

My mother collects dolls made from the patterns created by Edith Flack Ackley, especially the dolls that Lucy Geist made and sold in this area. She had them as a child and now collects them as an adult.

In the picture below, the Doll on the left is a 50 year old Lucy Doll and the only one that my Mother has ever seen with pigtails. The doll on the right is one that my mother just finished based on the Ackley pattern.

My mother wanted me to take pictures and put these on the blog. She thinks that it is important that I do this.

Erica, after many months of scouring thrift stores for wool, finally finished her braided rug. It must have weighed 100 pounds. We put it down on the living room floor and Gracie the cat had to check it out. In the first picture notice how she aligns herself along the longitudinal axis in the center of the rug.

The Rug is 11-1/2 feet long and 8 ft wide. It contains several miles of wool strips braded and then sewn together. I have some close-ups of the patterns that the wool makes in the other camera.

Arthur C. Clarke was a a relentless advocate of the exploration of space from the mid 1930s forward. He corresponded with C.S. Lewis,who, in addition to writing one of the best fantasy books ever written The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, wrote Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet – two good SF novels. Lewis believed that it was bad to spread the evils of humanity to other worlds. He thought that the history of man was one long evil conquest of the earth and that it would be terrible if we started conquering other beings in space. Clarke and Lewis finally met in a pub to argue it out – with the help of a few pints.

From Voices in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke:

An extensive correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to the a meeting in a famous Oxford pub, the Eastgate. Seconding me was my friend, Val Cleaver, a space buff from way back (and now chief engineer of the Rolls Royce Rocket Division). Supporting Lewis was Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, whose trilogy, The Lord of the Rings created a considerable stir a few years ago. Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’s parting words were "I’m sure you are very wicked people – but how dull it would be if everyone was good."

I am enjoying Voices in the Sky, but sadly I will finish it on this evening’s bus ride.

One of the great writers of Science Fiction died today.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Obituary: JG Ballard

I am experimenting with Ping.fm

This allows me to update several blogs, twitter, and facebook all at the same time. You can do this from your computer or phone.

The hurtling moons of Barsoom. Beautiful woman who are hard to handle. Dangerous men who live and die by the sword. Llana of Gathol is a fun ride across the ancient purple valleys of Mars with John Carter, the greatest Swordsman on Earth or Mars, leading the way.
Read my Review of Llana of Gathol, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1963)

Sorry about the Geek break. I had to code up some barcodes at work and I used a different way of doing it, at least for me. I put the code up so the next poor programmer will not have as much trouble as I did to create all these files and javascript code.

3 of 9 Barcode Javascript using GIF files

The nucs came. I had a little trouble as the frames were all stuck together with bee glue and they didn’t fit into the hive at first. I had to pry them apart, to the consternation of the bees. One was a little more upset than the others. My eyebrow is swollen a little. (added an hour later – no pain or swelling).

From Drop Box

I finished this almost two weeks ago, but I did not get around to reviewing it until today.

These are older Anderson Stories that were published in Magazines and then released by Ace as 1/2 of a double.

They are fun stuff, but largely not memorable, except for last story World Without Stars. An unexpected subplot makes this one a great Anderson tale and worthy of being re-read.

Read the review of the Worlds of Poul Anderson

For a very long time I wanted to see what the graduate level Master’s course at Swinburne University was like. They offered a short course as an example of what the Master’s program was like. When the stock market crashed and the balance of trades when to blazes, the actual cost in Dollars dropped to the point where I could easily afford it.

Now that it is over I can safely say that I wasted my money. The course was so non-technical and so watered down that I think my 8th grade Science course covered astronomy in greater depth. The students had no science background whatsoever, as far as I could tell, and the online course materials were useless.

I can’t believe that anyone would believe that the course content was at a master’s level. I feel that I have been duped.

If you want to learn astronomy you would be better off buying a coffee table book about the solar system from the remainders bin and skimming it. You will get more information looking at the pictures than you would from the SAO Short course.

If you are interested in a Distance Learning Master’s program in Astronomy try James Cook University. This seems to be a more intense and technical approach to Astronomy. It is quite reasonable, especially since the dollar is still suffering.

Ruchi had a baby girl yesterday night at 9:30 pm, both the mom and the baby are doing fine.

New info:

Amishi Gupta

Born: April 14th at 9:32 PM
Weight: 7 lb. 9 oz.

There is a thing going on Friday night in the city: the Morgan Library & Museum will hold a special screening of “Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird,” a documentary. There will be a screening of It was a Dark and Silly Night, but if you can’t make it you can see the video below. It was pretty funny.

Gahan Wilson used to illustrate the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and I have some old Galaxy magazines that he illustrated. He is very cool and very weird.

The presentation is at the Morgan Library and Museum this Friday, April 17 at 7pm. It’s free. I would like to go, but, of course, I won’t be able to find anyone else who wants to go.

Please stand by…

There are a bunch of writers with whom I have shared more than a few Table of Contents, who have worked together to produce a shared universe concept. Each of the writers has a unique vision and approach to working on the concept they have named Sha’Daa.

Most of the times these thing fragment so much that they are hard to hold together, but it looks they have a winner here. The writers have worked closely to ensure a good read. Chris Bartholomew, an editor who has worked with me in the past wrote an excellent review over at her zine Static Movement.

Chris’s Review of Sha’Daa

I heard from Shaun at the the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It turns out that his bees come on April 18. This bee thing getting around and it seems to have infected spec-fic people. He’s not the first SF writer I’ve met who has found his way to beekeeping. He, like me, has never had a hive before and is operating on hope and a prayer.

He told me that it would be OK if I submitted a story to the zine. I would love to appear anywhere where John Shirley is published. I hope he doesn’t regret his offer. I revised to one of my stories for about two hours and then shipped it off to him.

Now the wait starts. Next to the reject, I dread the wait the most. Stories are often rejected, not because of bad writing, but because of a mismatch with the venue. I can improve the writing, but I can’t force a square peg into a round hole. I am not sure that this story is the best match for the venue.

As far as bees go, my package bees that I ordered last February are running late. Weather in Georgia is slowing down the whole bee trade and I will have to wait a week or two for my last batch of bees. The problem is that the bees arrive at one of the best flea market weekends in May, and I will spend that Saturday driving upstate in the truck to pick them up when I could be garage sailing or flea-ing.

I made a list up of many of the stories that I’ve published. 2007 seems to be missing. It is the year I changed computers here at work and offloaded everything to a USB drive so there appears to have been a synchronization issue. I know that I have another handful of stories so I will look around. I never kept track of the flash fiction that I wrote for some magazines so many of them are not on the list. I checked some of the websites that are still up and found a few of my stuff still there, including a story I wrote for Astounding Tales that I found on the WayBackMachine.

I also listed 16 stories that I wrote that were never published. These are only stories that received rejections at one point or another. These are stories that I sent out and received such a negative response from some editor that I immediately hid the story. I have a twenty or so others that I never sent out, but mostly because they need work.

The actual stories and my “work in Progress” files are on a missing hard drive somewhere in the basement. It is not lost, just not where I can find it easily. I will continue looking and then make links so all of my faithful fans (this might be an irrational number) can read them.

Speculative Fiction Resources – Keith’s Fiction