Tag: ABC Wednesday

P is for finding the print source via Facebook

Van Vogt and his agent, Forrest J. Ackerman, acting without attorneys, met a total of nine times during 1979 and 1980 with Fox attorneys and executives

My wife is not on Facebook. That is, by NO means, a criticism. There are plenty of reasons to avoid the social media vehicle. But it does make things interesting.

I joined Facebook to keep track of my sisters and their daughters. Niece Rebecca Jade traveled to Greece and Italy in May 2017 on a music Cruise, and I probably wouldn’t have known about that otherwise.

I’m FB friends with some of her work colleagues and relatives. One of my wife’s first cousins had an accident involving farm equipment in 2016. I would take his wife’s Facebook notices and email them to my wife and my mother-in-law.

So I appreciate the 17-year-old who deleted all her social media and felt much better.

On the other hand, my friend, writer/artist Steve Bissette, extols it as a source of research. He had seen MULTIPLE web texts claim that A.E. Van Vogt filed legal suit against people behind the movie ALIEN for plagiarism. Reportedly, van Vogt’s 1939 short stories “The Black Destroyer” and especially “Discord in Scarlet,” (both included in the revised novel-format THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE, 1950) were ripped off.

The supposed lawsuit was filed sometime in 1979 or 1980, but settled out of court. But Steve could not find ANY hard evidence for this claim, “not a single print source from 1979-1981 supporting this oft-repeated anecdote. NOTHING in the motion picture trade publications such as VARIETY or BOX OFFICE, or science-fiction magazines of the period.”

As it turns out, one of Steve’s friends found “what may be the one-and-only print source for this long-circulated rumor. From ‘Van Vogt Wins ALIEN Settlement,’ Locus #237 (Sept. 1980, Vol. 13, No. 9), page 3” with extra special thanks to Rob Imes for locating this singular print source article:

“A. E. van Vogt has settled out of court with 20th Century Fox for $50,000 after pointing out similarities between the movie ALIEN and his story ‘Discord in Scarlet’… Van Vogt and his agent, Forrest J. Ackerman, acting without attorneys, met a total of nine times during 1979 and 1980 with Fox attorneys and executives and reviewed excerpts from the various screenplays evolved for the movie. No question of direct plagiarism was involved; rather, van Vogt and Ackerman felt that since the story line was similar to the movie, Fox should buy the story or the entire novel [The Voyage of the Space Beagle]. Fox initially offered $30,000 for settlement of all claims; van Vogt suggested $130,000 for the story or $250,000 for movie rights to the book.

“Van Vogt feels that Fox should have hired someone with expertise in science fiction to act as ‘idea monitor’ before buying scripts in a field which has such a large backlog of copyrighted stories. While no one could keep up with the current output, most of the major ‘spectacle’ stories were published some time ago.

“The decision to accept the out-of-court offer was based in part on van Vogt’s age. Although he is in good health, a lengthy court battle might lead to a useless settlement after van Vogt’s death. Van Vogt, who married late last year, is 68.”

Now THAT is using Facebook for good.

ABC Wednesday, Round 21

O is for occupation: librarian, NY SBDC

It was a radical innovation when the discs were on a LAN

October 19 marks the 25th anniversary of when I became a working librarian, all, as it turned out, at the Research Network of the New York Small Business Development Center.

Now it’s not the first job I ever had in a library. I spent seven months as a page at the Binghamton, now Broome County (NY), Public Library back when I was in high school. I used to help people use the microfilm machines, find and then refile the magazines in the closed stacks, and check the shelves to make sure the books were in Dewey Decimal System order.

After 8.5 years at the comic book store FantaCo and a dreadful year at an insurance company, I was nagged by two librarians and a lawyer, all friends of mine, to go to library school. I was resistant to return to graduate school, having suffered a disastrous experience a decade earlier.

But this time, I survived, and even thrived in grad school. I worked in the dean’s office and one of my tasks was to calculate the demographics of the students. I discovered that I was, at that time, the average age of a student at UAlbany’s School of Information Science and Policy. There were lots of returning students.

The task has always been to provide reference to remote SBDC counselors who were meeting with their would-be entrepreneurs and active businesspersons, Still, the job of this librarian has changed a lot over the quarter century. We used to send packets of information via the US Mail or UPS.

My first phone was a shared line with the fax machine. When it would ring, I was never sure when it rang if I would pick it up and hear a wall of aural pain.

In the days before the wide use of the Internet, we had a number of CD-ROMs to use, and we had to take turns using them. It was a radical innovation when the discs were on a LAN (local area network) so that two or three librarians could use ReferenceUSA at the same time.

The World wide web, of course, changed our reference ability, but it was a gradual evolution early on. We wanted to be able to deliver data via email. Now EVERYONE has it, but in the 1990s, it was hardly a universal service, even at the colleges and universities where our SBDCs were housed.

When email became more universally available, sometimes the data packet was so big that it would bounce. Now, there’s a location on a closed website where counselors can pick up the information.

Being a librarian has changed a lot in the past two and a half decades, but finding the information remains the goal.

For ABC Wednesday

N is for Nicknames, names one nicks

Elizabeth was totally off the table, despite being the name of the only British monarch in my lifetime.

One of the great things my father did was to name me Roger, which does not engender a lot of nicknames. He also did not name me after himself, also good. That might have gotten m called Junior, or Bud (like on the TV show Father Knows Best).

I was thinking about this because Rob Hoffman wrote about nicknames, and specifically about how certain names are more prone to variations.

“Elizabeth – (Betty, Beth, Liz, Lizzie, Betts, Bette) This name provides a lot of flexibility. Elizabeth is royal, while Betty is a fun neighbor with a silly laugh. Liz is a ‘good-time,’ but Lizzie is downright dangerous.)” Which is why, when naming our daughter, Elizabeth was totally off the table, despite being the name of the only British monarch in my lifetime AND my late mother’s middle name.

Mom, BTW, was named Gertrude, after her mother. She was usually called Gertie by her cousins, which she disliked less than her formal name, but not by much. As an adult, though, she became Trudy and THAT suited her.

My father was named Leslie, but he always was Les in my reckoning. Les is also the shortened form of Lester, though, and some people, in an attempt to be formal, referred to him with that moniker. You could see him bristle.

Roger doesn’t really lend itself to shortening, other than Rog, and I like that. There have been attempts to give me nicknames, and I always fought them off. When I was a janitor at Binghamton (NY) City Hall in the spring and summer of 1975, one of the other custodians tried to dub me “Flash”, because I got my core work done in six hours, and then would do the extra stuff, such as buffing the floor, and still have time to talk to the police captain, or read, or clean the doors yet another time – glass doors always have fingerprints.

He and his colleague took as long as they could, never did work beyond what was required, and sometimes not even that. So they called me Flash, I acted as though I didn’t hear them. Eventually, they gave up.

For ABC Wednesday

L is for me doing the laundry

If the washer is on the left and the dryer is right in countries that read left to right, is different in countries where one reads right to left?

During my wife’s recuperation from foot surgery this summer, I had done the vast majority of the laundry. She sorts, I take them down to the basement to wash, I put them in the dryer, and then haul them up so she can fold them.

What I hate is going down the basement stairs. Like many houses of its vintage, nearly a century, the steps are high and the space going down is narrow. It gives me a case of vertigo. Usually, I just toss the basket from the landing to the basement floor, then gather up the clothes. Going up is MUCH easier.

Being unmarried for many years, I got to the point where I didn’t have to wash the clothes for three weeks. That’s because I had at least a couple dozen shirts and sets of undergarments, an amount my wife thought was crazy when we got married. Conversely, I think she has far too few.

Hey, who had a San Diego Padres tee for her school’s sports day? It wasn’t her. I have T-shirts from several movies, from the Coverville music podcast, and from various other occasions, to wear, depending on my mood. Only this year did I buy some solid color (not white) tees.

So I don’t mind running the machines, but doing it every other day or more is boring. In the past, I had gotten used to schlepping clothes to the laundromat. I ran into my friend Alberta recently, and she told me her washing machine died. But instead of buying a new one, she opted to relish the quietude of reading while the laundromat machines chugged along.

This is certainly true of me: it’s difficult to traverse the “mental load” part of household maintenance and the importance of figuring out how to share it.

On Facebook recently, someone said if the washer is on the left and the dryer is right in countries that read left to right, is different in countries where one reads right to left? But almost no one – not us – have a washer on the left. I wish it were so.

For ABC Wednesday

K is for Thou Shalt Not Kill

We all create our own theology.

My late mother had a fairly simple theology, which she said was to follow the Ten Commandments. Sometime in the last decade of life, I asked her what did that mean in this world. What is meant by graven images, e.g.?

Also, I asked what does Thou Shalt Not Kill mean? How does it apply to war, self-defense, defense of others, capital punishment, abortion, suicide, euthanasia, even eating meat?

It is evidently true that in biblical Hebrew… “killing (harag) and murder (ratzah) are two different words with two very different moral connotations, and the commandment uses the Hebrew word ratzah.”

The question becomes, Is the last word? I was looking at 78 biblical verses about Thou Shalt Not Kill. On a personal level, I was immediately drawn to Luke 6:31″ “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” This is generally known as the Golden Rule.

Also, from Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?”

I was a Methodist for the majority of my life, and the message for me has almost always been, “Use your head! Make up your own mind! Don’t just swallow everything the religious leaders have taught you.” I’ve also been struck by what a Unitarian once told me, that we all create our own theology. I think this true: God/the universe/whatever you call it has given us discernment and intellect.

So, for example, capital punishment makes no sense to me. I’ve written in the past about how a father of a young woman killed the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 went on a spiritual journey to where he found the idea of vengeance against her murderer, Timothy McVeigh, utterly abhorrent.

But we all find different paths on this journey. What are some of yours?

From ABC Wednesday

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