Mindwbebs: a bunch of episodes I didn't have much to say about

This goes on a bit:
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My google skills failed me

What was the price of an IMB Selectric II in the early 1970s?

Julie and Julia

Needed more Julia and less Julie.

Did I miss any?

Am I right in thinking the following are the Eight Worlds, Version One stories?

"Beatnik Bayou"
"The Black Hole Passes"
"Equinoctial"
"The Funhouse Effect"
"Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe"
"Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance"
"In the Bowl"
"Lollipop and the Tar Baby"
"Options"
"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank"
"The Phantom of Kansas"
"Picnic On Nearside"
"Retrograde Summer"


The Ophiuchi Hotline

I know some sources put the Anna Louise Bach stories in the Eight Worlds (and I have a faint, horrible memory that Varley himself has tried to pull a Polesotechnic League - Terran Empire on 8W and the ALB setting), the two settings are irreconcilable. I'm also passing on 8W, V2, so no Steel Beach and no Golden Globe.

Sad

Both Alice Bradley Sheldon and Julia Child were in the American intelligence community but not in a secret history useful way:

Year      Sheldon                           Child
1941           
1942     joins US Army Air Forces         joins Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
1943 
1944                                      posted to Ceylon
1945                                      Leaves OSS
1946     Discharged
1947
1948                                      Moves to France with husband, 
                                   totally not a covert agent at this point
1949
1950
1951 
1952    Invited to join CIA
1953
1954
1955    Resigns to go to school
1956

Unsurprisingly what Child did really well was organize information. Sheldon analyzed photos, is that right?

This is what successful marketing looks like

(context irrelevant)

I didn't realize I could get books through anything except Amazon.

What I found on sale for essentially pocket change

Noted on wikipedia:

Budget 	£9 million ($13 million)
Box office 	$5,824,175

Ow. Tell me DVD sales made up the shortfall.

Noticed on boxofficemojo:

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: 	 $1,024,175 	   17.6%
+ Foreign: 	 $4,800,000 	   82.4%
= Worldwide: 	 $5,824,175 	 

Hrm, I wondered, could they possibly list the nation of origin for this film under "foreign"? Yes, indeed:

FOREIGN TOTAL 	- 	5/13/11 	$1,837,042 	38.3% 	$4,800,000 	12/4/11
[snip]
United Kingdom 	Optimum 	5/13/11 	$1,837,042 	45.2% 	$4,060,146 	7/31/11

The sales probably don't justify trying it but could the essential details of Attack the Block have survived an American remake?

Because this detail has come up a couple of times

QWP: Readercon's administrative structure:

The board of directors is elected from the concom; they serve different functions. The board's job is to handle business matters such as the disbursement of funds. (For example, the year that half our proceeds went to the Paul Williams Fund, that was a board decision.) The concom's job is to make the convention happen.

There are annual board elections. I believe we'll need a special election to replace the board members who resigned, and they'll only serve pro tem, until the next annual meeting in January. The concom is a much more static body; once you join it with the rest of the committee's approval, you're part of it until you decide to leave (or, in an extremely rare circumstance, voted off by the rest of the committee). For each convention the conchair and program chair are selected by the concom, and then concom members volunteer for the various duties necessary to make the con happen.

Mindwebs: Carcinoma Angels

Carcinoma Angels

At one time, nearly beyond living memory, Norman Spinrad was considered an up and comer, rather than the sort of author whose publisher cannot be bothered to spell-check the free sample of the book being offered. This story is from that period and is apparently was the first story Ellison purchased Dangerous Visions.

I'm pretty sure even back then there were more specific terms available than "terminal cancer". Maybe using one would have narrowed Wintergreen's search for a cure down some.

The part that particularly caught my ear was in the period when protagonist Harrison Wintergreen decides to commit good acts. Among them is this one:

"and organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million fecund Indian women".

I wonder if they were asked if they wanted to sterilized? My guess is no, because it was the 1960s (this actually is a little older than Ehrlich's The Population Bomb) and also because Wintergreen is at least a little malevolent in everything he does.

Speaking of Spinrad

Discuss:

Not that long ago, speculative fiction magazines were the proud last bastion of the Anglophone short story [...]