(1) TOLD IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. Writer and musical historian RL Thornton was inspired by Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John tales to track down YouTube videos of many of the songs referenced in those stories: “Dreaming in the Appalachian Pines with Wellman’s ‘John The Balladeer’” at Freakflag.

One of the great recent rediscoveries has been the stories of World Fantasy Award winner Manly Wade Wellman. In particular, his magical stories of high Appalachian wanderer and silver-stringed guitarist John have been republished by Valancourt Press in an anthology called “John The Balladeer” and in a larger complete two-volume set by Haffner Press (h/t to Michael Dirda of the Washington Post).

As Wellman’s dialect-laden prose slowly pulled me into his fantastic world of deep magic, my inner music geek started to wonder if all the songs in the Silver John stories were real. I knew that In The Pines had become notorious due to Nirvana’s stunning live acoustic take

(aka Where Did You Sleep Last Night), but what about the rest? Well, a little bit of YouTube diving reveals that Wellman knew his stuff!

So here are YouTube clips of the songs that are mentioned in Wellman Silver John’s adventures, In most cases, each song’s YouTube link is accompanied by the lyrics from the story and the performer’s name…

(2) GAMING’S VERBAL ARTEFACTS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Keith Stuart wonders why certain lines of video game dialogue are more memorable than others in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “Why random lines of video game dialogue get stuck in our heads”.

Some snippets of video game dialogue, like classic movie quotes, are immediately recognisable to a swathe of fans. From Street Fighter’s “hadouken!” to Call of Duty’s “remember, no Russian” to BioShock’s “would you kindly?”, there are phrases so creepy, clever or cool they have slipped imperceptibly into the gaming lexicon, ensuring that whenever they’re memed on social media, almost everyone gets the reference.

But there are also odd little phrases, sometimes from obscure games, that stick with us for seemingly no reason. I recall most of the vocal barks from the second world war strategy game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, even though I haven’t played it for 20 years. Why is it that I’ll lose my headphones, wallet and phone on a daily basis, but I have absolute recall when it comes to the utterances of burly soldier Samuel Brooklyn? Why am I doomed to “Finally, some action”, “Consider it done, boss” and the immortal “okey dokey” echoing through my head? What is wrong with me?

Fortunately, when I posted about this on Bluesky, I discovered I was not alone. Hundreds of gamers got back to me about the random game dialogue lodged in their own heads. Some were lesser-known quotes from famous titles: comic book writer Kieron Gillen is haunted by the line “I’ve not seen such bravery” from Gauntlet, while video game academic Kat Brewster wrote that she thinks about the game’s “ah, sustenance!” line all the time. Matthew Castle, of the gaming podcast The Back Page, simply cannot forget the way Beedle says thank you in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Game designer and artist Anna Hollinrake cannot escape the voice of the random Pokémon trainer who said: “Whether hot to trot or cool cat not, chill at my papa’s shop.” “It runs around in my head again and again,” she said. “Drives me mad.”

(3) SPRUCING UP MOVIE THEATERS. “Cinema Owners Invested $1.5 Billion On Upgrades Over Past Year” reports Deadline.

Exhibitors in North American laid out over $1.5 billion in 12 months to build or upgrade theaters including $920 million from the eight largest chains, according to a report by Cinema United (formerly NATO).

A year ago, the trade group heralded a pledge by the largest circuits to invest more than $2.2 billion to modernize and upgrade theaters of all sizes over three years. The update today sees the industry making good on the spend and likely to meet that goal as they evolve alongside a shifting industry that is skewing younger and where audiences are seeking premium entertainment experiences.

Cinema United represents nearly 64,000 screens worldwide and its Cinema Investment Report highlights the depth and breadth of investment as well as community impact. Theater owners are spending into an accelerating box office, which is good….

(4) FIGHTING BOOK BANNERS. Publishers Weekly has updates about eight selected book banning cases at the link: “Books on Trial: 8 Freedom to Read Cases to Watch”.

Book banning legislation chills speech, encourages teachers and librarians to soft censor, and demonizes content by LGBTQ+ and BIPOC authors. With accusations of obscenity, pornography, and material that’s harmful to minors, book banners aim to intimidate educators and librarians, who know their constitutional rights yet fear the wrath of conservative parents and politicians.

If the current political climate emboldens censors to target material perceived to be about “gender ideology” and critical race theory, it also rallies anti-censorship forces, which are drafting freedom-to-read legislation and taking lawmakers to court. PW looked at a few of the many federal and state legal cases shaping American’s right to read.

(5) REDFORD’S GENRE CLASSIC. The New York Times remembers when “‘The Twilight Zone’ Gave a Glimpse of Robert Redford’s Gifts”. (Behind a paywall.)

Long before Robert Redford played Bob Woodward, Jay Gatsby, Jeremiah Johnson or the Sundance Kid, he was Death. In a memorable 1962 episode of “The Twilight Zone” — often cited as one of the anthology’s best — the blond, handsome actor, still in his early 20s, played the most charming, calming emissary of the afterlife imaginable, assigned to escort a wary old lady into the great beyond.

That episode, titled “Nothing in the Dark” (streaming on Paramount+), was also the beginning of the end of Redford’s brief but prolific TV career. Watching him now as Mr. Death, it’s easy to see how he became one of the most beloved movie stars of the late 20th century. His presence is uncanny. He looks like he belongs somewhere else — on a bigger screen, perhaps.

We hear Redford before we see him in “Nothing in the Dark.” As the episode opens, the lady, Wanda Dunn (Gladys Cooper), is cowering in the basement apartment of a tenement building, avoiding any visitors because she knows her date with Death is past due. Then she hears a gunshot, and a young, nonthreatening voice from outside asks for help. She opens the door a crack and sees a policeman on his back in the snow.

Our first glimpse of Redford as the policeman is the same as Wanda’s. He looks small and helpless. He also seems, well … nice. Sunny, even. The very opposite of doom.

“Nothing in the Dark” was written by the frequent “Twilight Zone” contributor George Clayton Johnson, whose work on the show was highly compatible with the vision of its creator, Rod Serling, who liked to tell stories about frightened, ordinary people confronting their own weaknesses. (Death appears as a person in multiple “Twilight Zone” episodes.) To that end, another series regular, the director Lamont Johnson — no relation to George — goes deep into Wanda’s mind by exploring the cluttered, shadowy space where she has dwelled for too long, avoiding the light….

…The episode’s big twist comes after the introduction of its third character: an aggressive man (R.G. Armstrong) who barges in and seems like everything Wanda dreads. This man turns out to be a building contractor there to warn her that her home is about to be demolished. He too is reassuring in his way, explaining that sometimes society has to tear down the old to make way for the new. Times change and generations shift. Why, even Death looks young and spry nowadays….

(6) REMEMBER ARTHUR “TWO SHEDS” JACKSON? “Ipswich man’s tropical steampunk shed wins Shed of the Year award” reports the BBC. At the link, photos of the outside and inside.

A man who built what he describes as a “tropical steampunk shed” said it had not yet sunk in that he won a national award for it.

Ash Robertson, 42, from Ipswich, built his shed when he was in need of somewhere to work from, and when he and his wife welcomed their second child.

His shed, which includes elements of tiki beach bars, was nominated as a finalist in the cabin/summerhouse category at the Shed of the Year awards.

Mr Robertson, who built his shed almost entirely from second-hand items, said he never believed he would win an award for his design.

(7) PLANET OF THE APES BAR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hanging out at the bar is popular at cons, but drinking alcohol is not uniquely enjoyed by the human species.  This is, in fact, old news.  What is new is that researchers have found out just how much booze chimps consume through eating rotten fruit. Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day, corresponding to an estimated ethanol ingestion of 14 grams (±9), or the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks by international standards. That is almost a 330ml bottle of beer a day…. Research here.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

September 18, 1964 — The Addams Family series

The Addams Family series premiered on ABC fifty-one years ago this evening. I unreservedly loved that series which I didn’t rewatch until earlier this year after nearly twenty years of not watching it. It has held up remarkably well, and I do mean remarkably well. So well that even Suck Fairy which I watched it with had to admit that she liked it. 

The Los Angeles Times obituary of David Levy explained how he came to create the series: “The idea for the series came to Levy when he was strolling with a friend down New York’s 5th Avenue and passed a display of Addams’ books. One, ‘Homebodies,’ showed the entire group of Addams characters in a family portrait on the cover. Levy was stopped in his tracks by the sight and told his friend: ‘There’s a hit series!’”

Now let’s talk about the characters here. Who wasn’t perfect? Be it John Astin as Gomez Addams or Carolyn Jones as his wife Morticia, they played their roles perfectly. And no, I’m certainly not forgetting Wednesday, their child. (Surely the name comes from the English folk poem, Wednesday’s child is full of woe), Uncle Fester or Thing. Not to mention Lurch played oh-so-well by Ted Cassidy. 

It had pets, presaging to a great extent what Lio comic series would have. Aristotle was Pugsley’s pet octopus and Fang was his pet jaguar. Addams Family had a lion called Kitty Kat, and they had piranhas, Tristan and Isolde. Zelda was their vulture. Morticia had a very large carnivorous plant named Cleopatra and Wednesday has a pet tarantula by the name of Homer.

It didn’t last nearly as long as I thought did — just two seasons totaling sixty-four episodes shot in glorious black and white. 

Halloween with the New Addams Family aired eleven years after the series went off the air with new characters added in. Seven years after the series was cancelled, the animated version of The Addams Family aired for sixteen episodes. It’s notable for a young Jodie Foster voicing Pugsley Addams. Only Jackie Coogan and Ted Cassidy returned in voice acting roles.

Gold Key Comics produced a comic book series in connection with the show, but it only lasted three issues. No idea why it had such a short run as I feared it would’ve had a longer one given how popular the show was.

It has a perfect a hundred percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. That’s right, a perfect score. 

It streams on Amazon. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• BC pictures an early genre. 
• Bizarro finds a cookie dealer. 
• Dinosaur Comics accelerates the development of horror movies. 
• Non Sequitur proves the shadow knows. 
• Pearls Before Swine reveals a superpower. 
• Rhymes with Orange reaches out. 
• Rubes is sensitive. 
• xkcd voices punctuation.

(10) ALAN MOORE ON RADIO 4. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Alan Moore was on last night BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row. In it he discusses what he got right in predicting the future, what he got wrong, and why the glut of comic book superhero films is a sign of an infantalised society…  And he talks about his new book…

Alan Moore, creator of V for Vendetta and Watchmen on his new novel, The Great When.

You can access it here. Alan Moore is on in the last 15 minutes.

(11) FOR YOUR INFORMATION. Steven Johnson emailed what would have been a new comment on File 770’s 2013 post “Expain This, Scoffers” but for the fact that comments have been closed on that post for about a dozen years. Waste not, want not – I’m publishing it in today’s Scroll instead.

Searching for information on Jean Young, I wound up at the “explain-this-scoffers” page on File770 and realized it did not mention that the Jean Young “amateur geologist” was the member of the Geological Society of America, with an MS in Geology, who also has an entry in Fancyclopedia 3.

Though late in life she made her living working for the Post Office, she was also an ad hoc or honorary curator of geology at Luther college in Iowa.  Old fanzine correspondence mentions asks whether she has “read any good rocks lately” (somewhere in the Fanac collection.)

She did connect with Robert Lichtman and had at least one LoC in TrapDoor as Jean Young. From news accounts, I gather she died in 2007.

Apparently she was memorialized at a Zen ceremony in Iowa. I will try to find the rest of her basic life data and update her Fancyclopedia entry.

Anyhow, I would have commented on that old entry, but I gather that comments are closed, which certainly makes sense for blog management.

Her discovery of that meteor crater certainly rates a mention somewhere in fannish history, even if it does not rate with her drawings or her preference for fmz over fanzines as the name for the thing that connects so many of  us.

(12) ASTRONOMICAL RARITY. [Item by Steven French.] Einstein crosses are neat to begin with but this discovery is extra-cool! (The researchers also make a point of emphasizing the importance of international collaboration and, on the US side, Federal funding.) “Astronomers discover rare Einstein cross with a fifth image, revealing hidden dark matter” at Phys.org.

When Rutgers theoretical astrophysicist Charles Keeton first saw an unusual picture shared by his colleague, he was intrigued.

“Have you ever seen an Einstein Cross with an image in the middle?” his colleague Andrew Baker asked, referring to a rarely seen cosmic configuration.

Keeton hadn’t. The implications were enormous.

“I said, well, that’s not supposed to happen,” said Keeton, the Vice Provost for Experiential Learning at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “You can’t get a fifth image in the center unless something unusual is going on with the mass that’s bending the light.”

An “Einstein Cross” is a rarely seen cosmic configuration, in which the light from a distant galaxy is bent by the gravity of galaxies in front of it, creating four images. But the extra image in this Einstein Cross pointed to “something unusual,” which turned out to be a massive, hidden halo of dark matter. The existence of this invisible structure could only be inferred through careful computer modeling and analysis.

The discovery, made by an international team that includes Keeton, Baker and Rutgers graduate student Lana Eid, has now been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

(13) THAT’S BAD. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.]“Two ‘Flying Cars’ Collide During Air Show Rehearsal in China” reports Gizmodo.

Two “flying cars” collided on Tuesday during an air show rehearsal in China, injuring one of the pilots, according to a report from CNN.

The incident happened at the Changchun Air Show in Jilin, China, where two XPeng AeroHT aircraft collided midair, forcing one of them to the ground. The other vehicle was able to land safely, according to Electrek, and the cause of the crash is under investigation.

The company told CNN that the crash was the result of “insufficient spacing” and one of the flying vehicles “sustained fuselage damage and caught fire upon landing.” The condition of the injured pilot is unknown and XPeng didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed Wednesday.

Videos posted to social media appear to show one of the vehicles on fire as emergency crews work to put out the blaze….

How many years have I been saying no flying cars, until your flying car insurance pays to have installed on my house a computer-controlled, radar-guided anti-aircraft gun to shoot down drunks, kids, and people who “lose control of their vehicle” before they crash into my second floor bedroom?

(14) DATA POINT. An interior decoration hint from Reddit five years ago. “My girlfriend wasn’t happy I filled in her new picture frame”.

(15) EXOPONENTIAL. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Space.com reports:“We’ve officially found 6,000 exoplanets, NASA says: ‘We’re entering the next great chapter of exploration’” (assuming their budget’s not cut).

It might sound hard to believe, but NASA’s exoplanet count just reached 6,000 — and that’s with only about 30 years of hunting worlds beyond our solar system. In fact, only three years ago, that figure was at 5,000. At least at face value, the rate of discovery appears to be exponential — which is good, because, theoretically, there should be billions more worlds out there for us to locate.

“We’re entering the next great chapter of exploration — worlds beyond our imagination,” a narrator says in a NASA video about the milestone. “To look for planets that could support life, to find our cosmic neighbors and to remind us the universe still holds worlds waiting to be found.”

The news was announced on Wednesday (Sept. 17), which is serendipitously close to the anniversary of when scientists confirmed the existence of the first exoplanet around a sun-like star: 51 Pegasi b. Discovered on Oct. 6, 1995 by astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, 51 Pegasi b is a gas giant 0.64 times as massive as Jupiter that sits approximately 50 light-years from where you’re sitting. (To be clear, the very first exoplanet discovery fell in 1992, but that one was around a spinning neutron star, or pulsar. And pulsars are pretty wild. 51 Pegasi b was the first more “normal” exoplanet to be identified.) The right thing to do would be to end this paragraph with the 6,000 exoplanet discovery counterpart to 51 Pegasi b, but that’s unfortunately not possible….

(16) REPURPOSED RADIO TELESCOPE ATTACKED. “Ukraine destroys giant radio telescope used by Russian military” – Space.com has the story.

A giant radio telescope in Crimea used in the past to support missions to Mars and Venus and attempt to contact alien civilizations has been destroyed in a drone attack.

Ukrainian defense forces took down the 230-foot (70 meters) antenna dish to prevent Russian forces from using it to guide attacks on its territory. The RT-70 radio telescope has been under Russian control since the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. According to Defense Express, Russians carried out major upgrades to the 5,000 metric ton structure to use it for military communications.

The telescope reportedly served as an antenna for the GLONASS satellite navigation system, Russia’s alternative to the American GPS. Reportedly, the use of the RT-70 radio antenna increased the accuracy of GLONASS by around 30%.

(17) A JOKE? [Item by Cliff.] An astrophysicist talks about Dyson spheres…

….. At quite some length

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cliff, Steven Johnson, JJ, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]