Oh yes, now where was I? :) About the time I stopped posting on here, I went through a major life change: dialysis. My kidneys had started to lose function, so they cut me up a bit (putting in a catheter and what is called a fistula), and started me on the long, unending road that is dialysis. Dialysis is nothing less than a nightmare: in my case, I have to sit around for 3 1/4 hours attached toi a machine. If I move too much, an alarm goes off. I have to keep both arms completely still throughout the process. We all have TVs to watch, which can take away some of the boredom, but it still is a chore. When I can, I sleep through the process. Dialysis itself would be tolerable if it were just sitting around for over 3 hours. A lot can go wrong: if too much fluid is drawn off, you can get severe, body wide cramps. The nurses will atop the process where water is eliminated-- but you have to stay in that chair until the treatment is done. It doesn't matter how much pain you are in. They will inject saline into you to try to stop the cramps, but after that' you're on your own. I'v had my blood pressure drop to practically nothing. A couple of times, I was extremely disoriented. I onlot half remember those times, though I do have a half-memory of a nurse walking me around the place, hoping to get my blood pressure up. Sometimes they give us what they call "broth," which is a chicken bouillon cube semi dissolved in hot water. Personal autonomy is something you lose almost immediately. There are monthly blood tests, and they keep track of what they call "water weight" gain. You can't drink too much-- and I'm not talking about alcohol here. It's all liquids. Thirst? Forget about it! You're rationed a small amount of water per day. As for food, they test your blood every month. Foods that are not allowed are foods high in sodium, potassium, and phosphorus. A normal person could literally live a very healthy life just easting the proscribed foods. Here isa a partial list: all leafy greens ham sausage beans chocolate tomatoes potatoes cantaloupe watermelon all nuts all dairy just about all frozen dinners bananas squash brussels sprouts And on and on and on. I suspect that just about everyone on dialysis cheats from time to time. I know that I have imbibed of some of the forbidden foods. The main trick is to figure out how much of that stuff you can eat without it appearing on your blood test. There are things called phosphate binders, which are chemicals that attach themselves to phosphates and allow them to just pass through your system. Personally, I have found that plain old Tums work as binders. By taking an extra Tums tablet, I can have some of the high phosphorus foods without worries. Now, going to a dialysis center is an experience in and of itself. The place is, by definition, full of people who could have taken care of themselves, but chose not to. Drug addicts, diabetics in denial, we have them all. And, as you might suspect, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer either. OK< almost to a one, they qualify as idiots: the sort of people most of us would avoid. My case is a bit different. I'd had a heart operation, and they gave me this drug called trasylol. Trasylol was found out later to destroy kidney function, which it did in very short order to me. So there I am, in a center with a bunch of life's losers, forced to take dialysis through no fault of my own. Most of the time I make friends quickly when I am in a group of people. Not these folks. There's nothing in common; no reason to communicate. I sit by myself, talk to the nurses on occasion, and that's about it. I've thought about a kidney transplant, but having to take more than double the hand full of pills I do now is not appealing. I could so something called peritoneal dialysis at home, but that would involve further bodily mutilation, as well as having a tube sticking permanently out of my belly. Alternatives? There's going to a hospice, and just waiting to die. I've thought about it. I should think 100% of dialysis patients have thought about it. I'd blow up like a balloon, but at least they'd be injecting me with happy drugs, so the pain and depression wouldn't be too bad. I'm too much of a coward to go that route. Is there any hope? There's talk about growing artificial kidneys; I remember reading an article about how they are experimenting with printing artificial kidneys using a 3D printer. Printing body parts! That sounds like particularly absurd science fiction, but they're doing it now.

Not So magic Spells

I have been reading a lot of fan writing for a project I’m doing, and I must say that while I admire the enthusiasm fans have for Lost in Space, I am a bit less thrilled at the poor writing skills exhibited by some fans.

Now, I must emphasize at the outset that not all fans have poor writing ability. A good deal of the material I have received has been soundly written. But, just as in other aspects of life, the bad apples stand out.

I suspect some fans would be happier in the 18th century, before the time of dictionaries, when spelling was not set in stone: George Washington spelled the word pumpkin as “pompion,” for instance.

With Google, you can type in any word and get an immediate verdict on spelling. I remember one fan had sunmitted an article. He spelled Manitou as “Manatou.” Manitou Junction was the name of the town where the Robinsons landed in 1947. Manitou is an American Indian word meaning “great spirit.” There is no "Manatou."

Another fan made a mistake; he had listed the insults Dr. Smith had made to the robot. One of them listed was “adelphated armor bearer.” There is no such word as “adelphated.” The proper term is “addle pated.” Pate is a term meaning the head or the brain. So basically Dr. Smith was calling the robot addle minded, or stupid.

I have seen several fans simply copy that list, along with “adelphated.” Friends, this isn’t just us we’re speaking to with our writing: we’re speaking to the world. We just make ourselves stupid when we pass along errors like that.

Admittedly I have made similar errors—such as misspelling mustn’t and turmeric as “musn’t” and “tumeric”—in both cases, I’d made those errors for several decades.

The error that bothers me the most is the easiest one to avoid: the two forms of the word its. If you think the sentence “It’s head fell right off!” is correct, you are dead wrong. The rule is simple: use its if you’re describing an attribute of something: for instance, in the above sentence, the correct form would be “Its head…” etc. It’s is used when using a contraction: just think of this: try saying “it is” or “it has”—if that makes no sense, then don’t use it’s.

The above may seem like some minor quibbles, but after seeing the same mistakes over and over again, I felt I needed to say something. Have you ever driven somewhere and noticed every other person violating some basic rule of the road, to the point where you start to wonder whether it’s you who is in the wrong, and not them? The same is true with writing: after a couple of hours of reading clumsy writing, I start to think that maybe these people are right. I’m convinced that if I read enough bad writing my own writing will suffer (as an example, after a day of slogging through my slush pile, I forgot the difference between affect and effect—a quick trip to some grammar websites set me back on the right path)..

Folks, this is all about communicating. Anything that gets your ideas across clearly is good. Anything that gets in the way of that (bad spelling, bad grammar, using almost the right word instead of the right word, and so on) is bad.

Rules of writing are not that difficult. With such programs as Word, spelling and grammar errors are automatically detected (that breaks down when you make a typo and the typo is an actual word, then it doesn’t get spotted). So, to everyone, please go over your writing. Let it sit for a week and re read it. Show it to a friend to check for errors. Run a spell check.

Really, the bottom line is this: write everything as if you expect it to be published. This naturally leads to better writing.

Chex and Balances

Over the years, my family developed a few holiday traditions. Some were inadvertent, such as the plumbing conking out on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Some we did for a few years (celebrating St. Nicholas day, putting up a tree, putting up an elaborate 8 foot high star ornament on the roof) before giving up on them. Two things that always endured: making cookies, and making Chex party mix.

Making cokies was always a big undertaking: we’d bake at least 100 cookies. The kinds varied from year to year until Gold Medal issued a list of cookie recipes, all made from the same dough. That list supplied the entire range of cookies we made. My favorite on the list was Mexican swizzle sticks, a cinnamon and chocolate flavored cookie. Others were Greek clove crescents, and a cookie dimly resembling pfeffernusse.

Chex party mix was always a big production. At first it was a simple, no frills batch of mix. Then ingredients started to be added. And then more and more and more—until it was impossible to mix the stuff in a bowl: they just don’t make bowls big enough for that amount of stuff. So then I hit on the idea of using a trash bag to mix the stuff in. I’d put the measured out amounts of cereal, crackers, nuts and so on, pour the butter and seasonings over that, close the bag, and flip it over and over until everything was mixed. Then I had a couple of roasting pans where I would put the mix in and bake it.

The Chex project got so huge that we were considering getting a small cement mixer to mix the stuff together.

As far as seasonings go, back then, before the internet, Chex issued a party mix cookbook, with recipes that they don’t offer today. I liked my food spicy, so I figured why not combine a few spices? My Chex mix would have the standard set of seasonings, but I would also add hot sauce, curry powder and chili powder. The wonderful aroma the stuff gave off was beyond description.

I remembered every holiday, shopping at various stores, trying to find as many little crackers and types of snacks I could for the mix. If it was small and salty, it went in. The goal was to get as many interesting shapes as possible. The actual Chex cereal in it was secondary.

Mt frger died, and the cookie tradition sputtered on, with a token amount being made each year. But the Chex mix project would continue to grow.

Honestly, I can’t remember giving away much of the cookies or Chex mix to anyone over the years. We ate most of them ourselves.

I can remember fond memories of watching TV with a bowl of Chex mix on my lap, a glass of elderberry wine in one hand, and a big wedge of cheddar cheese in the other. Ah, pure contentment.

Even after I had to temporarily move into a nursing home, I still made Chex mix—only I bought the standard commercial grade stuff and mixed nuts into it. Most of the residents couldn’t get out like I could, so I would share the mix I made with them. When you have nothing, it’s surprising how little it takes to make you happy.

When I finally got out on my own, I continued on as before. The amounts of Chex mix weren’t as large, but I always made it every year.

And then—after one of way too many trips to the hospital, I was told I had renal failure: my kidneys were barely functioning. No more salt, no more nuts, no more cheese—a laundry list of foods I couldn’t have. That killed the idea of Chex mix—or did it?

I worked on reformulating Chex mix to contain no additional salt. I substituted no salt butter for the margarine, Mrs. Dash for the salt, and home made no salt soy sauce for the Worcestershire sauce. Nuts were still a problem—I added them anyway, figuring that a few nuts in a handful wouldn’t hurt.

The stuff came out of the oven. Though the ingredient list wasn’t as large as before (just two kinds of Chex, Cheerios and some unsalted peanuts), the flavor was excellent—in fact, even better than the original recipe. The butter flavor was really evident.

Sure, I can’t have a wedge of cheese or a glass of elderberry wine with it (mainly because the elderberry wine I’m making isn’t done yet), but I can still have my Chex mix. And, glory of glories, people that have tried it like it too.

Oh, and the cookies? I still make a few, all of them for friends.

Holiday traditions can be a real comfort, and are definitely worth the effort in continuing.

Six: the Mediocrity Unleashed

It isn't often that people on opposite sides of an issue can agree on something: that is what makes the film "6: the Mark Unleashed" so special. My girlfriend is an arm waving tongue speaking Pentecostal; I am the precise polar opposite.

6: TMU is a film about the coming of the antichrist, the tribulation, and all that wonderful suffering that some Christians actually look forward to seeing. It's a definitely low budget, direct to DVD film. If they can avoid showing something, they have someone narrate the missing part of the story. If an expensive effect is required it happens off screen. We see a guy pulled from his car. In the next scene we see four charred tires. Oh! They must have burned his car. But that would cost money! So let's just show the four tires.

The plot: The leader has taken over. People are enjoying life in great hedonism. Chips are implanted in some, and they are controlled by satellite uplink. And Christianity is outlawed.

We hear huge chunks of narration at the beginning of the film. Think of the most overused, hackneyed way of presenting a dystopian society in a film.

We see someone narrating new implant recipients on their rights and responsibilities in society. A disembodied head, in fact. I can see the script conference: "That's been done 10,000 times." "Correction: 10,001," the script writer would reply with a smug grin.

There is one fellow who is spreading Christianity, so he must be killed. So they capture an ex cop turned smuggler and torture him until he agrees to kill the Leader.

Now, what is funny is this: the torturer is bald, dresses in dark clothes, and has huge dark circles under his eyes. Uncle Fester, you have lost weight! Looking good!

In prison, the ex cop mulls over his options. Now, keep in mind this is a prison run by the antichrist, who hates Christianity. The prisoners talk of Jesus constantly: on the walls are hand written Bible verses. The prisoners are allowed to have Bibles.

The prison cells look like dorm rooms with bunk beds. The prison halls and cafeteria look like a high school. There are hardly any guards.

The antichrist fellow seems a tad bit incompetent; hardly the sort one would fear.

My father made a comment about Hogan's Heroes some years ago. He commented that the security at his old army base was a lot more strict than Stalag 13. Come to think of it, the security at the prison in that film was about as secure as a dormitory.

At one point the prisoners are talking about how happy they are that they are going to die, so they'll be with Jesus. The guards are more than happy to comply with their wishes.

Here is where the action starts. The ex cop escapes and brings some confederates with him. The cops give chase in their cop cars. The prisoners elude them by pulling over to the side of the road; the cops drive by. Oh yeah, that's believable.

Rather than try to attack the Christian leader, the ex cop decides to destroy the satellite uplink to everyone's chips, freeing everyone's minds. But, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Soup rise, soup rise, soup rise!" The Leader himself comes in to stop him,

Think of the most stereotypical villain/hero confrontation ver. Think of a cliché that has been used so often that it shows up on comedy skits. Hold that thought in your mind.

The leader walks in, clapping his hands slowly. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

The cop starts shooting guards. And then the Christian leader comes in briefly before leaving.

We next see the ex cop about to do a forced Jayne Mansfield/Marie Antoinette. He is happy because he will see Jesus. We then see one of his companions, who escaped, resolving to continue the fight. The end.

About all I can say about the ending is that it was a win win situation for all involved: the cop wanted to die, and he got his wish. Uncle Fester got to torture some people, so he was happy. Whatever message in the movie was lost due to its incompetent filmmaking.

What is interesting is that the main female star, Amy Moon, bears a striking resemblance to Carrie Ann-Moss from the Matrix movies. No, this is beyond a resemblance: there is no way you could tell them apart if you saw them; even the hair styles are the same.

My girlfriend, meanwhile, picked up on a lot of my criticisms. She also said "This is not bow the tribulation is supposed to happen."

Isn't it great? Both sides agree: 6:TMU stinks.

Stalking the Wild Link

I have been putting it off for a few days, but finally I could put it off no longer: I had to update the LOST IN SPACE links page on my website. I was dreading the task, because Geocities shut down on October 26. There were a lot of good LOST IN SPACE websites on Geocities; websites that contributed a lot to LOST IN SPACE fandom. Sure, archive.org would have some of them on file, but I knew deep down that the loss would still be great for us fans.

Some months ago, long before the Geocities debacle, I had emailed all of the people who had Geocities websites, asking them to email me if they had planned on moving their websites o new servers. No one replied. I am sure that at least some of the Geocities websites I have listed as missing in action have been moved to new servers. Hopefully in the next few months they will show up in search engines.

I have never really gone over how I look for new LIS web pages. Google.com is a good starting point. I type in keywords and go from there. If I find a website, I go to my web page’s HTML, using a program called Front Page. As an example, if I find a LIS website with the URL “epicfail.com” I type that on the search function on Front Page. If it doesn’t come up, it’s an unlisted website and it gets inserted. As you can all guess, a lot of LIS websites I come across in my searches are already listed on my links page.

There are other search engines, and I have used them successfully from time to time, but Google is the #1 choice. Other sources include other LIS web pages, email from webmasters, and what can be called “other”—for instance, I found one website by looking up the Facebook listing of a friend.

Keywords are vital in searching. Obviously, “lost in space” is at the top of the list. To be really thorough, I also try other words: “Dr. Zachary Smith,” “Jupiter 2,” “space pod,” and so on. Sometimes I will get millions of listings. I couldn’t go through all of them in my lifetime, so I usually go in about 20 listing pages or so before moving on.

I remember one fan complaining that his website wasn’t listed on my links page. I reassured him that if it wasn’t listed, it’ because it didn’t how up on search engines. I then asked him to send me the URL, so that I could list it. He declined: I guess he was happier complaining than having me do something about it.

I decided to look up his website. The first one I found was a domain name. The domain name had expired. I looked it up I archive.org. Archive.org sometimes includes website photos, and sometimes they don’t. All I could see were a bunch of blank boxes with very little text; hardly anything the fans would care about. Oh well, a dead end.

I looked some more. Aha! That website was on Geocities. So I typed the URL in archive.org, and… nothing. They didn’t save that page. So, apparently it was my fault that I didn’t list a website that was no longer on the web. That makes perfect sense to me.

I wasted half a day looking for something that wasn’t there.

Another bugbear in listing websites is figuring out what category they fit under. One fan just did a sort of episode guide for continuing LIS beyond the third season. It was interesting in a minor sort of way. But how do you categorize that? I finally gave up and put it under “fan fiction.” In another case, a website did the standard putdowns of LIS: that it was silly, campy, and so on. But they did it in a humorous fashion. Should I have put it under the humor section, or the hate site section? I decided on hate site in the end.

The Geocities debacle was about what I had expected. Anyone watching me editing the LIS links page would have gotten quite a chuckle: every time I came across another Geocities website, which was quite frequent, I would let forth an oath that would wrinkle the wallpaper and knock down small birds sitting outside.

Looking over the websites out there is an interesting task. On new, unlisted websites I have to let them load long enough so that I can see what category they fit in. When that is ascertained, I get all the information I need and move on to the next website.

On sites that are already listed, I wait just long enough to see if the website is still there, and then move on. This usually means loading the page long enough to see the top title before moving on.

To complicate manners, I am on dialup, which means that websites sometimes take an awfully long time to load. I have found that some websites don’t load up on my machine at all; I have a second browser handy to check if the websites are really gone.

Beyond all of that, I am happy to report that LIS is still well represented on the web. Now if the fans could just hire a psychic who could tell us which servers will be around in 10 years and which ones won’t, we’ll be all set.

Summary of a Life

December will mark 20 years since my father died. To many who knew him, he was a remarkable man. My father didn’t think so. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

My father’s name was Widman, and therein lies a tale. The family last name for generations was Widmann. That name had died out. A relative had offered my grandfather money if he would name his child Widman, to carry on the name just a bit longer. My grandfather readily agreed. My father didn’t object: he felt it was as good a way to name a kid as anything. That name would cause an interesting surprise nearly 75 years after my father was born—but that story comes later.

My father grew up in the 1920s, when kids actually did something with their time. I remember hearing tales of how he built stuff. Lots of stuff: kites (including one he called “The Angel of Death”), guitars, sailboats, and even a boat made out of cast concrete. When he wasn’t building, he was reading: his tastes went for old pulp fiction, including a pulp magazine called “The Old West,” as well as books about heroes we know even today: Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage.

I wish I had talked to him about his years as a young man, I remember him mentioning something about playing one of the guitars he made in a local coffee house in the 1920s or 1930s (I had assumed that coffee houses didn’t pop up until the beatnik era).

My father related the standard family stories too: while the adults were making bootleg home brew, he was making home made root beer. He even related a story of wanting some candy. He had a recipe, but the recipe required fat. All the fat he had was some leftover bacon grease. The candy tasted funny, but he had candy, and it tasted great to him.

He recalled, years later, how he had been canoeing one day, and suddenly had a pain in his chest, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Years later, he realized that he had had his first heart attack at 16.

Fast forward a few years, to 1939. In April of that year he married my mother. In September of that year WW2 began, a war that would shape much of his life.

In 1944 my father was drafted. Elements of his division, the 42nd infantry, were in Belgium during December of 1944. My father just missed the battle of the bulge, the last great German offensive of the war.

My father arrived in Germany. Basically the 42nd was doing what they call mop up operations. His division liberated one small German town in particular. It was a little town, not much to speak of really.

The town’s name was Dachau.

My father was morally outraged at what he saw. What decent human being wouldn’t be? He wrote a letter home, describing the horrors he had seen. It was published in a local newsletter; the first piece of writing he ever had published.

I often wonder whether that was a transforming experience for my father. Anti Semitism was a common belief system back then: I remember my mother relating a story about a sign in a park in St. Louis that said “No Jews Allowed.” I do know this much: my father never said one word against the Jewish people during the entire time I knew him. Did any thoughts of anti Semitism leave my father when he saw the reality of the final end product of such thinking, or did he always have respect for the Jewish people? I wish I could ask him.

The war ended in Europe. The war was still very much active in the Pacific theater. The scuttlebutt was among the men of the 42nd infantry was that since the 42nd was MacArthur’s division in WWI, that he was considering using them for an invasion of Japan (this is not true; the soldiers who were slated to invade Japan were already sequestered on an island).

My father was greatly relieved when he read the news about the atom bomb being dropped on Japan. He knew that would end the war.

My father never loaded his rifle during all the time he was in service in Europe: he didn’t want it on his conscience that he had ever killed a man. He felt it was unseemly not to have fired his rifle during the entire war. So one day he saw a raven sitting on the roof of a French barn. He aimed, fired, and missed. And that was the first and only shot he fired in WW2.

After the war, my father went back to his job as the driver for a milk truck. My sister had been born in 1949. Also that year my father had gotten into an accident on his milk truck. I presume there was some sort of collision. The milk cases slammed forward into him, breaking bones.

Darkness. Complete silence. No sound at all: no breathing, no pumping of heart, no circulation of blood.

“Oh my God, I’m dead,” my father thought. Over his body doctors were working to revive him. His body had turned cold, he had been out so long. And then the noise returned.

I was born 10 years later: the son of a dead man.

The years passed. My father got another job, delivering newspapers. I honestly don’t remember much of him from this time. He went to bed at 8PM, got up early in the morning, and would either read or watch television.

I remember a couple of stories from that time: my father had bought a bull to raise him for meat. He decided that he didn’t need the services of a professional butcher: he was a cook in the army, and he had a couple of military issue books on butchering meat, so why not?

I just remember him sitting at his butcher block table, cutting up huge chunks of meat, and occasionally pointing out to me what the parts were. My sister later told me that he threw most of the meat away.

My father also liked plants. He had a garden, and he often planted trees. He bought a peach tree. He nurtured it over the years, watering it, fertilizing it, making sure in every way that it was healthy.

The big day came: the first crop of peaches, something he had anticipated for years. He cut one open. It was a cling peach. He didn’t like cling peaches.

The next day, he cut the tree down.

I was busy myself. It must have gratified my father greatly when I decided that I wanted to try my hand at making root beer, or that I was interested in the same genre he had loved as a boy: science fiction.

Years passed, years spent with my father doing little but working. And then my father had another pain in his chest, one that reminded him of that time when he was 16. It was another heart attack.

The doctor told my father: either retire now, or die working. It wasn’t much of a choice.

At this point all of the interests my father had came out; interests he hadn’t had the time to express. He became interested in bonsai. He became interested in pottery, because those bonsai plants needed pots after all. He dabbled in painting with oil paints He taught courses in bread baking. And on and on…

Since he was interested in bonsai, he decided that he wanted to go where it all began: Japan. So he and my mother went. And therein lies another tale.

He needed his birth certificate to get a passport. He looked at his birth certificate, and realized that he had misspelled his name for over 70 years: it had been spelled Widmann on the birth certificate. .For the first and last time ever, he spelled his name as it was given, because he didn’t want there to be any troubles getting a passport.

My father enjoyed Japan. It’s my understanding that he impressed the bonsai masters there quite favorably.

Not too many years passed. My father went to a meeting of the Bonsai Society of St. Louis at Shaw’s Garden. He suddenly felt a pain in his chest.

Playwright Alfred Jarry’s last words were “Get me, get me, get me… a TOOTHPICK!” Robert E. Lee’s last words hearkened back to the civil war: “Strike the tent!”

My father’s last words were “When are the paramedics going to get here?’

As a postscript, I remember my father telling me about a movie that impressed him greatly: “Just Imagine.” It was a science fiction movie: 50 years after he had seen it he was still talking about it.

The movie itself wasn’t even listed in movie guides in the 1970s. I had assumed that he had seen the “Futurama” film at the 1939 world trade fair.

And then, one day, clicking through the TV channels, there it was: the film “Just Imagine.” I watched it with great interest. It’s a memorable film; not a great one, but it was the first ever science fiction film shot with sound. I felt a connection with my father.

The film had been lost for years, until resurfacing recently. Another bit of my father’s past.

Life on the margins

First off, I just found out that Starlog has ceased publication—for real this time. Finally, the happy event has arrived. My problems with Starlog have been mentioned in this blog. To the editors of Starlog, all I can say is: I’m here and you’re not. As they say, success is the best revenge.

Secondly, good news: work on the Alpha Control Reference Manual is finished, and is at the printer now: way, way ahead of schedule!

Work on The Lost in Space Encyclopedia continues. Publication has been pushed forward to April due to budgetary issues.

There are a lot of other great projects coming down the pike. 2010 will have a flurry of fan activity.

Normally I don’t talk about fan politics, but since I have become active in LIS fandom again, I suppose the subject is germane.

Years ago, when I started up LISFAN I was completely naïve about how science fiction/media fandom works. Some of the things I was right about: I assumed that LISFAN would get a fan following, and I would get offers from fans eager to contribute to my publications. But I didn’t expect any hostility from the fans. Here I was, putting out the best fanzine and other publications that I could. I just naturally assumed that if I was really positive, others would be too.

Now, the negative comments were few and far between, but I tended to remember them more than the positive comments. I also noted that the negative comments had one predominant theme: they were essentially over nothing; that is, they had no validity. At first I would write back to the complainers and try to explain myself, and my reasons for doing what I did. That, I would find out, was a pointless exercise.

For instance, in the early days of LISFAN I made a decision not to print photos in the fanzine. The paper I used, I felt, would not work well with photos; they would look muddy. I got a complaint about that. I explained why I didn’t use photos. The explanation was lost on the fan, like water rolling off a duck’s back.

After a while of trying to defend myself, I realized something: there are a class of people that like to complain. They get a sort of enjoyment out of feeling that they are right, and the other guy is wrong. Pointing out to them the silliness of what they are saying just makes them angrier: that takes away the whole fun of it.

I eventually figured out a second rule: the more people you deal with, the more likely that someone is going to be unhappy. It is unavoidable. Here is an exercise: Go to Google.com. Think of the gentlest, most inoffensive person that is famous that you can think of. Add the word “sucks” to their name. Hit enter. No matter what name you pick, there will be web pages blasting them.

A corollary of the above are the people that enjoy feeling ripped off. They love the “me vs. you” feeling; that feeling of them being right and the other person being wrong (I suspect this is so because they are wrong so often in real life that they hav to create situations where they are right). As an example, I had a customer in England. He had ordered some merchandise from me. He hadn’t specified how he wanted it mailed to him. He had sent a small amount of money for postage. So I sent it the cheapest way: surface mail, which could take months to arrive (surface mail no longer exists). He called me on the phone. He was angry.

“Where’s my stuff?” he said.

“I sent it surface mail,” I said.

“Why didn’t you send it by air mail?” he said.

“You didn’t pay for air mail postage—and you didn’t tell me to send it air mail.” I said.

He then raked me over the coals, calling me every dirty name that exists (and he might have made a few up too).

One final story on that subject: One fan sent me a letter of complaint. Hr had ordered something two years earlier, and he hadn’t received it yet. He was angry that he had to wait two years. I explained that I am no mind reader; that if something doesn’t arrive, it’s up to him to contact me so I can set things right. After that point, if I had to delay an item, I would send out postcards explaining the delay.

I’ve been the victim of rumors, both inside and outside of fandom. These things are like memes: that is, self perpetuating ideas. I decided long ago to stop the cycle: I refuse to pass on stories about other people. On occasion I will mention issues like the ones I have covered today—but I will not give out names.

I won’t even go into the many marginal types I have met over the years. Though SF/media fandom has a lot of great people, it also has a lot of gutter dwellers as well. The standard stereotype of SF/media fans as being 30 and 40 (and now 50) something single unemployed males who live in their parents’ basement, have never kissed a girl and who bathe twice a month (if that) do exist. I’ve met some of them.

Let me tell you one fan encounter: this fan was touring the country, trying to meet every major LIS fan out there. He showed up on my doorstep one day. He started talking about my neighborhood. “Boy, you sure have a lot of good looking girls here!” he said. His eyes darted back and forth as he said it. The average age of the girls in my neighborhood at the time was eight. I mentioned that. “Well, yeah…” he said, grinning goofily. I don’t need to comment further.

At present there is one fan who is quite unhappy with me. I won’t go into the specifics here. In summary, he had asked me for information, and I gave him that information. Why is he angry then? Because I didn’t get the information to him fast enough to suit him. He wanted a friend’s email address. I gave him that email address. And, considering all of the complaining he did for it (I had to get my friend’s permission to pass the email along, and that took some time), he still hasn’t contacted him. Of course, I am the villain in all of this. What is that old saying? Oh yes: No good deed goes unpunished.

I’d often wondered why some fans seem so eager to attack others. Then I read a wonderful book called “Resentment Against Achievement” by Robert Sheaffer. The premise of the book is a simple one: there are people who like to build themselves up by tearing others down. Mind you, it doesn’t work: those people are still dwelling in the gutter after their attacks.

After some thought, I realized I was guilty of the same thing myself, and almost overnight I purged that bad habit. Achievement of any type is to be celebrated. If a fan goes through the effort to do a book or a fanzine r whatever, I won’t attack them—even if what they put out isn’t very good. My public reaction will either be praise, or no reaction at all.

Fandom can be a great gathering of likeminded people. But it has to start with all of us.