(1) THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF VURGUZZ. In a very interesting discovery, Cora Buhlert has traced the origins of Vurguzz, the booze that gained international notoriety at the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg (but which American and British fanwriters spelled Verguzz).
Meanwhile, I’ve actually found your mystery drink. It’s called Vurguzz and is an universe drink from the Perry Rhodan novels, though it predates Perry Rhodan and was apparently invented by Perry Rhodan co-creator Walter Ernsting a.k.a. Clark Dalton and Jesco von Puttkamer (the NASA guy, though he started out as an SF writer) in the late 1950s for some collaborative science fiction novels.
Apparently, around 1960 German fans Franz Etti and Wolfgang Thadewald decided to mix real life Vurguzz from various spirits. No one remembers the exact recipe, though it apparently tasted like peppermint and may have contained the Italian herbal bitter Centerba 72, which has 70% of alcohol. Though Centerba 72 isn’t easy to find even today and quite expensive, so I doubt it was used for larger scale manufacture.
The name Vurguzz was eventually sold to a commercial distillery who produced a somewhat weaker version that was sold at Perry Rhodan cons well into the 1990s. That said, I have never seen this stuff sold at any con, but then I don’t go to the purely Perry Rhodan cons. I also most likely wouldn’t have tried it, because a) I’m normally driving when I’m at a con, and b) novelty herbal liquors are normally not a great idea.
Assisted by the correct spelling of the name I discovered that File 770 itself once reprinted German fan Waldemar Kumming’s“The Origin Story of Vurguzz”, a 2002 account written for John Hertz’ Vanamonde.
It all started 40 years ago. In the fanzine Munich Round-Up 8 was a whole page of “advertisements” for “The Bar to the Three and a Half Planets”, for Urm, the Newsmagazine for Retrotemporarians, for “Kraahkarm in Jelly, in 20-ton Containers”, and similar things, and finally for “Vurguzz, with 250% alcohol content.” Of course the alcohol over 100% was in hyperspace; this would allegedly lead to seeing not only double but 3 times after only one small glass of the drink.
The idea of vurguzz [pronounced “foor-goots” — jh] left Franz Ettle (who unfortunately died many years ago) no peace of mind until he had after various trials perfected a booze which had some of the effects. It had about 80% alcohol, and among other ingredients something that made it work very fast and strong but lasted only a short time. This vurguzz was poured at several German conventions, including an admission ceremony of the international and still existing Saint Fantony group. Later a liqueur factory took over but the vurguzz then had only 65% alcohol in it, that being the maximum allowed under German law. Lately the Pabel Verlag has been supplying a liqueur called vurguzz with only 17% alcohol content, apparently without knowing the story of the original vurguzz.
(2) STAR WARS NEWS. “’Star Wars: Starfighter’ First Look Shows Ryan Gosling At Sea” – Deadline says the film arrives in May 2027.
Shawn Levy posted to his IG, an early look at his Lucasfilm title Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling and actor Flynn Gray on set in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea #Starfigher,” the Deadpool & Wolverine filmmaker wrote on his Instagram.
Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, Simon Bird, Jamael Westman, Daniel Ings and Amy Adams are starring opposite Gosling in the movie penned by Jonathan Tropper. As previously reported, Starfighter isn’t part of the Skywalker saga episodes I-IX. That said, the movie is set five years after the events of Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker,
The film is set to hit theaters on May 28, 2027. Levy produces with Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy. Executive producers are Gosling, Dan Levine, Mary McLaglen and Josh McLaglen.
The next Star Wars movie is Mandalorian & Grogu set for Memorial Day weekend release next year, May 22. Disney already owns that holiday’s domestic box office opening record with this past summer’s Lilo & Stitch which bowed to $146M and is the only MPA movie year-to-date to cross $1 billion at the global box office.
(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 143 of the Octothorpe podcast, “A Major Movie in the Sand Genre”, has arrived. And according to their blub behind schedule, but we’re here seven days a week and ready to promote Octothorpe whenever it drops.
Octothorpe 143 is slightly late! We welcome Alison back to the podcast and read a bumper mailbag before getting into discussion of Seattle 2025, LAcon V, and Montreal 2027. Our artwork is by ATom! We recorded before the Seattle apology, and we might have more thoughts on that in a future episode.
An uncorrected transcript is here, and I for one find it invaluable.
(4) CENSORSHIP LITIGATION. Publishers Weekly says, “Book Banners Are Everywhere. These Lawyers Are Playing Offense.”.
Mark Herron isn’t exactly a media lawyer. His specialty is discrimination and employment rights, and most of his cases involve mistreatment in the workplace stemming from gender, race, or disability status.
That’s what made the case of Karen Cahall v. New Richmond Exempted Village School District so interesting to him. Cahall has been a third grade teacher in public schools south of Cincinnati for 30 years. In November 2024, she was suspended without pay for three days after a parent complained there were four books featuring LBGTQ+ characters in her classroom library: Ana On the Edge by A.J. Sass, The Fabulous Zed Watson by Basil Sylvester, Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea by Ashley Herring Blake, and Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff. The books were stored not on shelves but in bins, through which students had to sift in order to choose what to read. The titles were neither prominently displayed nor discussed in class. They were simply there—but that was enough.
Herron says the lawsuit over his client’s suspension centers on two issues. First, the county is very conservative, and there are several pastors on the local school board. The pressure to remove those books while other workers within the school wear religious insignia, Herron argues, infringes on Cahall’s own religious belief that LGBTQ+ communities should be accepted, respected, and loved.
The second factor is a policy in the school that forbids teachers from teaching about “contentious” matters. But no one can really say what that means.
“What’s controversial and what’s not?” Herron asks. “To an extent, that’s something two people can disagree on. Reasonable people can disagree on anything, so you can’t say don’t teach something controversial without more guidance.”
Assessing which materials are controversial in public libraries and schools is a costly endeavor, both in money and in time, and the organized push to ban books from public and school library shelves has increased dramatically over the past few years. In 2024, 5,813 books were challenged throughout the country, nearly 25 times more than in 2015.
In 2023, USA Today found that taxpayers across four school districts in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah paid at least $270,000 to review challenged books and assess whether they included “controversial” content. That’s about $67,000 spent per institution, meaning it costs nearly the average salary of a full-time employee to ban books in a given district.
This mass push to censor reading materials requires legal intervention in order to keep control of materials in the hands of librarians and teachers rather than giving it to outside actors. In late 2022, attorney Ric Jacobs says, a patron visited the Dayton Memorial Library, the only public library in rural Columbia County, Wash., and moved a copy of Juno Dawson’s What’s the T? The Guide to All Things Trans and/or Nonbinary from one side of the children’s section to another. The book, originally shelved with college materials meant for teenagers, was moved to an area with cartoonish furniture and picture books, where the patron snapped a photo of it and shared it on Facebook.
“That misleading social media post and the fervor from it started things off,” Jacobs recalls. Soon the library director faced demands to remove that book and others. When those demands were refused, Facebook users started a smear campaign, Jacobs says, in which they accused the director of being a pedophile. The director resigned in July 2023, but before long, the fervor moved to the ballot: organizers managed to acquire enough signatures to launch a local referendum to close the public library and return its books and resources to the state of Washington.
The measure ultimately failed. Jacobs filed an injunction on behalf of a local political action committee, called Neighbors United for Progress, to remove the referendum from the November 2023 ballot, and the county court ruled that the majority of signatures acquired were fraudulent. The affidavits, Jacobs says, were filed by signatories stating that they were asked if they wanted to protect local children and to sign if they did—with no knowledge that the library would close as a result. Shortly after, the state increased the number of signatures required to close a library from 10% of voters to 25%.
(5) AFTER THE PLAGUE. Science Fiction 101 devotes the 58th installment of its podcast to “Surviving SURVIVORS”, the Seventies British TV show. The post includes a curated set of links to Survivors episodes that you can watch on the Internet Archive.
Fifty years ago, schoolboy Phil [Nichols] was knocked out by a British science fiction TV show, the post-apocalyptic Survivors. Created by Terry Nation – who also created Doctor Who‘s recurring enemy the Daleks as well as Blakes Seven – Survivors ran for three seasons. And it’s had a long afterlife as a cult favourite, and as a long-running audio drama starring many of the original cast.
Survivors was about a plague which wipes out 99.998% of the world’s population, and its often grim aftermath. It follows the struggles of a handful of British people to survive and rebuild after the collapse of civilisation. At first it’s uncomfortably close to what we all experienced when COVID-19 came along, but thankfully COVID wasn’t nearly as deadly as the Survivors plague…
Today, Phil has persuaded Colin to take a first look at this sometimes harrowing (but ultimately life-affirming) ’70s classic, and together they discuss selected episodes from the series. As we announced a couple of weeks ago, all episodes are currently free to view on the Internet Archive, and we encourage you to at least sample the series if you’ve never seen it before.
(6) BELATED BIRTHDAY WISHES. CordCuttersNews celebrates: “62 Years Ago Today: ‘The Outer Limits’ Premieres on ABC, Redefining Sci-Fi Television” . The article appeared yesterday – September 16 is the anniversary.
Today marks the 62nd anniversary of a pivotal moment in television history: the premiere of The Outer Limits on ABC on September 16, 1963. This groundbreaking science fiction anthology series captivated audiences with its eerie narratives, thought-provoking themes, and innovative storytelling, leaving an indelible mark on the genre and television as a whole.
On that fateful evening in 1963, viewers tuning into ABC were greeted by an unsettling voiceover: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.” These iconic words introduced The Outer Limits, a show that promised to push the boundaries of imagination. Created by Leslie Stevens and produced by Joseph Stefano, the series stood out for its cinematic quality, blending science fiction, horror, and psychological drama. Unlike its contemporary, The Twilight Zone, which often leaned into moral allegories, The Outer Limits embraced a darker, more monster-driven aesthetic, earning it the nickname “the scariest show on television” at the time.
The series ran for two seasons, from 1963 to 1965, airing 49 episodes. Each episode was a standalone story, exploring themes like alien encounters, time travel, and the consequences of unchecked scientific ambition. Notable episodes include “The Architects of Fear,” which tackled Cold War paranoia, and “Demon with a Glass Hand,” a time-travel tale penned by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison. The show’s “bears”—the term used for its often grotesque creatures—were brought to life through inventive special effects, a testament to the creativity of its production team despite a modest budget…
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
September 17, 1926 — Roddy McDowall. (Died 1998.)
By Paul Weimer: Roddy McDowall’s genre work came into my awareness early. He was the voice of V.I.N.CENT, the robot in the much maligned (but a favorite of mine) movie The Black Hole. I might not have an ear for voices overmuch, but even I could hear his distinctive voice and connect it to the actor I then saw in episodes of Buck Rogers and Tales of the Gold Monkey. His voice popped up again in my ears as Sam in the Return of the King animated movie.
And from there, he continued to become a very welcome actor, in and out of genre when I encountered him. And it seemed like I kept running into him and his work everywhere I turned. His portrayal of the TV show host in Fright Night might be my most favorite role. The original Planet of the Apes films. An episode of The Twilight Zone (where he winds up as an exhibit in an alien zoo). An episode of the 1960’s Batman TV series had him so very nearly kill Batman and Robin (who had to be saved by O’Hara and the police rather than themselves as normal). He even shows up in the 1963 Cleopatra as Octavian.
One last thing I didn’t learn until some years ago, but delights me now (it would have made no impression until this century) is that he was an avid photographer, specializing in actor and actress portraits. Truly, a multi-modal talent.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Bound and Gagged introduces the other side.
- Frank and Ernest thought it was too soon to meet someone new.
- Jerry King finds employees like this AI application.
- Rhymes with Orange interprets petroglyphs.
(9) IT’S CLOBBERING YOUR LEISURE TIME TIME! [Item by Daniel Dern.] Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps movie is coming soon to streaming and disk. According to Marvel, the movie “will hit digital platforms September 23, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home [i.e., PAY-TO-WATCH, aka PVOD [“Premium Video On Demand” or vice versa — “Disambiguating” Dern], “followed by its arrival on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 14.”
Speaking of Blu-Ray, earlier today, my library system let me put in a reserve request for the BluRay. I’m number 19 on the list; at least six copies have so far been ordered by various libraries in the network. I expect my request for the new Superman movie will show up somewhat sooner.)
Also according to the above Marvel announcement, “The 4K UHD digital and Blu-ray releases feature hours of exclusive bonus content, including deleted scenes, a gag reel, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and filmmaker commentary by director Matt Shakman and production designer Kasra Farahani.
“Bonus features,” according to Marvel, may (as in, “may vary by product and retailer”) include:
* Deleted Scenes – Check out the scenes that didn’t make the final cut.
- Thanksgiving Soup Kitchen
- Fantastic Four Day
- Subterranea
- Birthday Sweater
- Taking Turns
* Gag Reel – Enjoy fun outtakes on set with the cast and crew of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
* Featurettes:
- Meet The First Family – The creation of the Fantastic Four saved Marvel Comics in 1961 and has only flourished as years have passed. Matt Shakman and the cast explain how they found themselves gravitating toward each role and creating the ultimate family unit.
- Fantastic Futurism – The filmmakers discuss the process of immersing the cast and crew in the film’s retro-futuristic aesthetic. Join Matt Shakman and crew as they discuss the experience of shooting in gigantic mid-century New York sets and stepping into an otherworldly era.
- From Beyond and Below – The team explores bringing complex characters from the page to the screen, including a larger-than-life Galactus, grounded Harvey Elder/Mole Man, and an emotionally rich Silver Surfer.
- Audio Commentary – Watch the film with audio commentary by director Matt Shakman and production designer Kasra Farahani.
And, from CBR.com: “The Fantastic Four: First Steps Gets Digital Release Date (And It’s Soon)”.
- “The home releases of the film will include bonus features like a gag reel that includes actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who played Ben Grimm/The Thing in the film, twirling in his motion capture suit to the point of complete dizziness. The gag reel also has footage of Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/Invisible Woman) repeatedly walking through the same door over and over again and Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/Human Torch) tripping down the stairs several times.
- A Collectible SteelBook is Also Coming: there will be an option to purchase commemorative SteelBook editions of First Steps, and an exclusive Amazon edition that comes with a magnet-front variant cover as well as five collectible cards and an issue of The Fantastic Four: First Steps #1 comic. (“SteelBooks are collectible steel cases for movies, shows, and games with unique artwork and premium feel,” sez Shout! Factory, “What’s So Special About SteelBooks?”, who distributes ’em — DuckDuckGo-ishly, Dern)
Just don’t let Krypto try to fetch or eat the disks or SteelBook 🙂
(10) CIRCULAR FILES. The New York Times says, “Cereal Box Records Sound Horrible. They Still Look Incredible.” (Behind a paywall.)
Most record collectors want the highest quality audio. But Duane Dimock, 68, is different. He’s proud to have one of the best collections of low-quality records on the planet. “They sound really bad,” he said of the hundreds of cereal box records he has amassed at his home in San Diego.
This forgotten format emerged in the 1950s. It used a thin plastic film to stamp records onto cereal boxes, providing a cheap cutout prize for children. At the peak of the trend, artists as big as the Monkees and the Jackson 5 had their greatest hits pressed into cardboard, helping to sell millions of boxes of cereal.
The disposable nature of these low-quality records means most were eventually thrown out or destroyed by their rambunctious preteen owners. But some survived, and today a small community of collectors continues to hunt down and preserve these forgotten treasures.
“I find them at garage sales, estate sales, swap meets,” Dimock explained in a recent interview. “I’ve even found cereal boxes that were used as stuffing behind picture frames.”
Lisa Sutton, 63, is more of a wistful nostalgic. She has held onto the original records she cut out as a child over 50 years ago. “It all started back in 1970,” she remembered. “I hated cereal, but I loved Bobby Sherman. When they started putting his records on the boxes my sister and I forced my mother to buy them. We would cut off the records and listen to them all the time.”…
(11) HOLLYWOOD PROTESTOR. “’Push back – or they’ll eat you alive’: James Cromwell on life as Hollywood’s biggest troublemaker” – Guardian profiles the actor.
Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on Wednesday 11 May 2022, James Cromwell walked into Starbucks, glued his hand to a counter and complained about the surcharges on vegan milks. “When will you stop raking in huge profits while customers, animals and the environment suffer?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the protest online.
But the insouciant patrons of Starbucks paid little heed. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to utter the words “star trek” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to shut down the store.’…
(12) DO THAT DODO THAT YOU DO SO WELL. Forget dire wolves and mammoths, how about dodos?“Scientists claim they’ve made ‘pivotal step’ in bringing back the dodo for first time in 300 years | Science” – the Guardian has the story.
Since its demise in the 17th century, the dodo has long been synonymous with extinction. But thousands of dodos could soon again populate Mauritius, the species’ former home, according to a “de-extinction” company that has announced a major breakthrough in its quest to resurrect the flightless bird.
Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday it has succeeded in growing pigeon primordial germ cells, precursor cells to sperm and eggs, for the first time. This is a “pivotal step” in bringing back the dodo, which was a type of pigeon, for the first time in more than 300 years, according to Colossal.
The Texas-based company, which has made splashy headlines for its plans to reestablish wooly mammoths and dire wolves, said it has also developed gene-edited chickens that will act as surrogates for the dodos. The chickens will be injected with primordial germ cells from Nicobar pigeons, the closest living relatives of dodos, which will in time, after gene edits to recreate the create the desired body and head shape, allow them to breed dodos.
“Rough ballpark, we think it’s still five to seven years out, but it’s not 20 years out,” Ben Lamm, Colossal’s chief executive, said about the timeline for the dodo’s return. Colossal is working with wildlife groups to identify safe, rat-free sites in Mauritius where the species could once again roam.
“Our goal is to make enough dodos with enough genetic diversity engineered into them that we can put them back into the wild where they can truly thrive,” he said. “So we’re not looking to make two dodos, we’re looking to make thousands.”….
(13) SHOCKWAVES. [Item by Steven French.] There is increasing evidence that an above ground cometary explosion was responsible for the disappearance of the Clovis culture in North America 13, 000 years ago, along with mammoths and other megafauna: “Evidence of cosmic impact discovered at classic Clovis archaeological sites” reports Phys.org.
Researchers continue to build on a body of evidence for a fragmented comet that is thought to have exploded over Earth almost 13,000 years ago, which may have had a role in the disappearance of mammoths, mastodons and most of other megafauna at that time, and in the vanishing of the Clovis culture from the archaeological record in North America.
Reporting in PLOS One, UC Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Earth Science James Kennett and collaborators present their findings of shocked quartz—grains of sand deformed by extreme pressures and temperatures—at three classic Clovis culture archaeological sites in the United States: Murray Springs in Arizona, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Arlington Canyon in California’s Channel Islands.
“These three sites were classic sites in the discovery and the documentation of the megafaunal extinctions in North America and the disappearance of the Clovis culture,” said Kennett.
The disappearance of the megafauna and the vanishing of the Clovis technocomplex from the archaeological record coincide with the onset of the Younger Dryas cool episode, an anomalous and abrupt return to near ice-age conditions that persisted for about a thousand or so years amid what was generally a warming transition from the Last Glacial Period.
There are several hypotheses for what may have happened to trigger that event; Kennett and team propose a scenario in which a fragmented comet exploded aboveground, sending shockwaves and extreme heat to Earth….
(14) MIRROR LIFE IS A REAL THING, AND IT IS SOMETHING OF AN ETHICAL HEADACHE FOR MOLECULAR BIOLOGISTS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, this ‘mirror life’ concept has also been a thing in science fiction. I first came across it as a teenager reading James Blish’s Spock Must Die!. In it, Spock transports to a distant planet, but it is protected by an energy field that reflects the transporter beam back to the Enterprise. What happens is that instead of Spock being transported (by a ‘Dirac jump’) the original remains and a duplicate appears beside him… It turns out that this duplicate is not a duplicate at all but a mirror version of Spock right down to the molecular level…
Now, in real life many of your biomolecules have ‘handedness’; that is to say they can be ‘left’ handed or ‘right handed’ just like your hands. If you take your hands you cannot place one hand exactly over the other; all you can do is put them palm-to-palm where they form a mirror image of themselves.
In real life, many amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) have handedness and this handedess is the same for all forms of life on Earth. ‘Why?’, is still something of a mystery (though one reasonably favoured theory is that this arises naturally our of chemistry and physics, but there are other ideas). Anyway, it would be possible to create ‘mirror’ amino acids hence ‘mirror’ proteins to the ones we find in real life. We might even create ‘mirror ‘microbes of life. Here, there are potential biomedical benefits as well as helping elucidate why life is handed the way it is.
The problem is that such mirror life might escape the lab, run rampant and cause unknown problems… So, what to do?
Scientists are mulling this over as an article in today’s Nature journal: “Mirror of the unknown: should research on mirror-image molecular biology be stopped?”
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Paul Weimer, John Coxon, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ken Richards.]
