Disney has gone on a trademarking kick lately. This has included such high-profile misfires as attempting to trademark Seal Team 6 and the Dia de los Muertos.

Less well-known in this wholesale attempt at cultural appropriation is their application to trademark Snow White in all forms except literary. “All” includes all dramatic forms and visual media, as well as bed sheets, jams and jellies, video games, and a whole Disney-trademarked laundry list of others. I suspect they left off literary because that wouldn’t pass the laugh test.

Visual and dramatic art prior to Disney’s 1937 animated feature include at least one film in 1902, the 1912 stage play by Jessie Braham White (the first time the dwarfs have individual names), a 1913 film, the 1916 movie with Marguerite Clark (Famous Players in Famous Plays) made from that stage play, another 1916 film (Snow White in the Dark Woods), a 1927 Little Snow White three-reeler, and the Betty Boop Snow-White cartoon (1933, featuring Cab Calloway singing the Saint James Infirmary Blues). Graphic representations include practically every illustrated version of Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmärchen from 1812 to date. Later works number into the dozens, including a so-racist-it-can’t-be-shown WWII-era parody of the Disney Snow White, Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs, Snow White and the Three Stooges, a Mr. Magoo version, 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror, and the recent film Snow White and the Huntsman (and its coming sequel). The German dance-metal band Rammstein used Snow White in a transformative work (possible under copyright, not possible under trademark) in their music video for Sonne. Let’s not even mention the twist into surrealism as Snow White surfaced in the recent Mormons-Behaving-Badly Jodi Arias Murder Trial (in which it became clear that neither the prosecutor nor the witness were terribly familiar with the story, but which did get us the defense attorney rising to her feet to deliver the astounding, “Objection! Relevance, speculation, fairy tale!”).

The story of Snow White.

Once upon a time there was a queen who was sitting at her window sewing. (This is unusual in fairy tales—more commonly the women spin rather than sew.) She pricks her finger on her needle and spills three drops of blood onto the window sill. She says, “I wish I had a daughter with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as dark as ebony.

She does so, and names the child Snow White.

[The Queen dies and the king remarries.] [The new queen|the queen] has a magic mirror, which always tells the truth. She asks it “who is the fairest in the land,” and the mirror replies “you are.” Then, one day, the mirror replies “Snow White is the fairest in the land.” The queen becomes jealous of [her daughter|her step-daughter] and decides to kill her. The queen [[takes her [daughter|step-daughter] into the woods, planning to abandon her there so she will be eaten by wild beasts] [commands her huntsman to take her [daughter|step-daughter] into the woods and slay her]. [The queen does so|The huntsman, however, rather than slay the girl himself, abandons her in the woods assuming she will be devoured by wild beasts.] [The huntsman slays [a deer|a wild boar] and brings back the [heart|liver and lungs| of the animal. The queen [is pleased|commands the cook to prepare the meat, then eats it.]

The young princess wanders in the woods. Far from dying by misadventure, however, Snow White comes to the house of the Seven Dwarves while the dwarves are away. The house is [neat as a pin with tempting food set out|incredibly messy]. Snow White [samples the food (too hot, too cold, just right) and the beds (too hard, too soft, just right)|cleans the house and prepares a delicious meal] then falls asleep.

When the dwarves arrive home from a day of mining [tin|copper|gold] they discover [someone has been eating their food and sleeping in their beds|someone has cleaned the house]. They discover Snow White sleeping, wake her, and hear her story. They agree to provide her sanctuary, but warn her she must never speak with strangers.

Meanwhile, the queen asks her magic mirror who is the fairest in the land. The mirror informs her that Snow White is still the fairest in the land and that she is living in the house of the Seven Dwarves.

[The queen disguises herself as a peddler, goes to the house of the Seven Dwarves, convinces Snow White to buy a corset, and laces it on so tightly that the princess cannot breathe. She falls down dead and the queen leaves. When the dwarves arrive home they find Snow White, cut the laces on her corset, and she revives. The dwarves renew their warning not to speak with strangers.]

[The queen learns through her mirror that Snow White is still alive, so she again disguises herself as a peddler, goes to the house of the Seven Dwarves, and convinces Snow White to buy a (poisoned) comb. When she puts it in her hair she falls down dead. The queen leaves. The dwarves arrive home, find Snow White, notice the comb, remove it from her hair, and she revives. The dwarves again warn her not to speak with strangers.]

The queen learns through her mirror that Snow White is still alive so she poisons [an apple|one side of an apple], disguises herself as a farm wife, and goes to the house of the Seven Dwarves. Snow White informs her that she isn’t allowed to speak with strangers. The queen offers her an apple. Snow White [is suspicious at first and asks the queen to show it’s safe by taking a bite from it herself. The queen does so from the white (unpoisoned) side of the apple] Snow White accepts the apple and takes a bite [from the red (poisoned) side of the apple]. It catches in her throat, she chokes and dies.

When the dwarves arrive home they can’t tell what’s wrong with Snow White. But because she is so beautiful they put her in a glass coffin, with her name and position written on it in gold lettering. They put the coffin [on top of a mountain|in a forest glade|in a cave deep under a mountain].

[The king, Snow White’s father|A handsome prince] [becomes lost and stumbles on the glass coffin|hears from travelers about a marvelously beautiful princess in a glass coffin|has a dream involving a princess in a glass coffin], [seeks it out|sends his servants], and fetches it home. Along the way back to his castle [the cart in which the coffin is being carried hits a pothole|one of the servants carrying the coffin stumbles] and the piece of apple is jarred out of Snow White’s throat. She recovers.

[The king [puts aside|executes] his wife and marries Snow White|The prince marries Snow White].

[Snow White invites her [mother|stepmother] to her wedding.] [The magic mirror [does not inform the queen of the situation because Snow White is now the fairest in some other land|informs the queen that the new princess is the fairest in the land]].

[The queen accepts the invitation. On her arrival [she is so surprised by the identity of the new bride that she falls down dead|Snow White has red-hot iron shoes put on the queen’s feet and makes her dance until she falls down dead]].

We skip over a mid-19th-century Swiss version in which a traveler finds Snow White living with seven men and slays her for her immorality, and the 1970s porno film, 7 Into Snowy.

The Disney version introduces the idea that a) the prince has some kind of relationship with Snow White prior to the poisoning incident, and b) the dwarves are the ones who bring about the death of the queen. The love’s first kiss theme is added. The dwarves’ names differ from those in the stage play.

Graphic and dramatic versions tend to leave off the gold lettering on the glass coffin.

So, what is my interest in this?

I myself, with Doyle, wrote a Snow White story (not based on Grimm, nor yet Disney, but on a family telling from my mother, who would have learned it from her mother (from Vienna) or father (from Bavaria). In the family version we don’t have dwarves (Zwerge) at all, but rather Zaubermenschen (magic men). The working title for our story was “Snow White and the Seven Vampires.” It was published (with an illustration, which Disney’s trademark on all graphic representations would forbid) under the title “The Queen’s Mirror” in A Wizard’s Dozen: Stories of the Fantastic edited by Michael Sterns, Jane Yolen Books, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993. Later, I re-published the story, using the frontispiece of the 1912 stage play’s printed edition in the cover art. If Disney’s trademark goes through I doubt I’d be able to do that, or, indeed, use any illustration whatever for a cover.

A new Superman movie is out. Folks want to talk about it. Here is a place where SPOILER warnings are not required, because everything inside is a great big fat honkin’ SPOILER.

Especially the laser-unicorns wearing Superman suits.

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06/05/1997

Myths Over Miami
by Lynda Edwards

Captured on South Beach, Satan later escaped. His demons and the horrible Bloody Mary are now killing people. God has fled. Avenging angels hide out in the Everglades. And other tales from children in Dade’s homeless shelters.

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building — always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. “They eat light so they can fly,” eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. “There’s a lot of killing going on in Miami,” he says. “You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.” The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children’s terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. “If you wake at night and see her,” a ten-year-old says softly, “her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she’s marked you for killing.”

The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.’”

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county’s various shelters and the streets. For these children, lasting bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is permanent. A common rule among homeless parents is that everything a child owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast packing. But during their brief stays in the shelters, children can meet and tell each other stories that get them through the harshest nights.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast’s fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The “secret stories” are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed — or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash. …

The fifth of June, 1465, saw a very unusual event enacted outside of the city walls of Ávila in Spain. A broad wooden platform was erected—all the chroniclers were impressed with its size and height—and on it sat enthroned a wooden effigy of the king, Enrique IV of Castile, dressed in mourning, wearing a crown and spurs and carrying a scepter and sword. Then, in front of a crowd of the common people, some of the greatest nobles in the land read out a bill of accusations against the king: That he was sympathetic with the Moslems; that he was a homosexual; that he was of peaceful character; and that he was not the true father of his daughter, the infanta Juana.

As each charge was read, one of the symbols of rank was removed from the statue. Finally, with the cry “¡A tierra, puto!” the statue was thrown from the platform, while the mob lamented the death of the king.

Then Enrique’s half-brother, Alfonso, age 12, was brought forth, proclaimed the new king; crowned and acclaimed by the mob.

WTF, you may be saying. That was the same question that Enrique IV asked when he found out. He was one town over in Salamanca at the time. If they wanted to depose him they could have done it in person. Alas, Enrique didn’t act as if he was no longer the king. In a letter he sent to Pope Paul II a month and a half later Enrique asked that the plotters be punished. The pope sent a nuncio who arrived early the following year, but the question of WTF? remained. WTF were they thinking? remained a major question until the death of Alfonso XII three years later.

So, WTF?

Flashback! Let’s turn to Enrique’s father, Juan II de Castilla. Juan married his first cousin, María de Aragón, and had four children, of whom only Enrique survived to adulthood. Juan had been a big booster of the new concept, hereditary monarchy. Up to that point, the monarch was chosen from a pool of eligible candidates, elected by the nobles and acclaimed by the people, after which he or she could be crowned.

Young Enrique grew up, and married Blanche of Navarre. Blanche was fifteen years old, and Enrique fourteen, at the time of their marriage. Years passed, without an heir. People started talking. The story was that Enrique was unable to perform with her due to a curse. After thirteen childless years the marriage was annulled in 1453. Blanche returned to Navarre, where an examination by pious matrons determined that she was still a virgin.

Juan II was in despair. His son Enrique wasn’t pulling his weight in the nice shiny-new primogeniture program. So Juan, after the death of María, married Isabel of Portugal in 1447. Isabel was younger than Enrique. Juan II managed to have two more children, Isabel and Alfonso, by Isabel of Portugal before he died.

Juan II died in 1454, making Enrique king. A year later, in 1455, Enrique IV married his cousin, Juana de Portugal. (She was his step-mother’s cousin too, as it happened. A lot of that going around: Blanche of Navarre had also been Enrique’s cousin.)

Six more childless years passed. People talked more. Seven years after the marriage, in 1462, Enrique’s wife Juana of Portugal had a daughter, Juana of Castile. Hurrah! The succession was secure! He wished.

Here’s where the soap opera starts. Enrique IV had a favorite, Juan Pacheco, the Marquis of Villena. The two had grown from boyhood together and were very close. But all was not happy in Segovia. Enrique IV met Beltrán de la Cueva, a handsome young man from a minor noble family. Soon honors and riches were falling on Beltrán, and by 1461 it was clear that Beltrán was in and Juan Pacheco was out.

Unlike Beltrán, Pacheco was one of the most powerful nobles in Spain. His younger brother, Pedro Girón, was the richest man in Iberia, with personal holdings that weren’t equaled until the 19th century. His uncle was Alonso Carrillo, the Archbishop of Toledo—Carrillo, among his other qualities, was a noted alchemist, reputed sorcerer, and so deeply political that even his conspiracies had conspiracies.

Those three—Juan Pacheco, Pedro Girón, and Alonso Carrillo—were the main nobles who stood on that platform outside Ávila four years later. Archbishop Carrillo himself was the one who removed the crown from the head of the wooden dummy-king.

With the new king Alfonso (they thought) firmly in the faction’s pocket, Pacheco set about a propaganda campaign: Enrique was given the name “the Impotent.” His daughter, Juana, was dubbed la Beltraneja: the daughter of Beltrán. This lit off a civil war which ran in a desultory fashion for three years, culminating at the Second Battle of Olmedo (where both sides declared victory). Alfonso died a bit later, of natural causes, ending the entire affair.

So that’s the backstory.

Now to the farce.

Pacheco and Girón had originally wanted to accuse Enrique of heresy: That he had attempted to get them to convert to Islam. Carrillo pointed out that this did not pass the laugh test. That left deposing him for being a bad king, for which there was precedent.

At this time the Inquisition was already trying statues for heresy, in cases where the accused heretic had died or was otherwise unavailable. Like the Farce of Ávila, these occasions featured a statue dressed in mourning, which suffered the sentence of the court and was executed. Another precedent was the trial and deposition of the Master of the Order of Santiago in 1431, where a statue representing the master was placed in his chair, then stripped of its symbols of rank by the commanders of the order, who forbade him ever to use his titles again. In that case, it worked. The master went home and didn’t use his titles any more.

Since the time of Edward II in England, a fully dressed statue of a newly-dead king would be carried from town to town, and a new funeral held in each, so that everyone could see that the king was, in fact, dead, and had an opportunity to pray at his funeral.

At Ávila the statue of Enrique IV would have been understood to be the real king, who was accused, found guilty, and stripped of his power. The crowd lamented for the death of the old king, then acclaimed the new king, now dressed with the symbols of state (crown, scepter, sword, and seated on the throne). Presto! a legitimate king. In theory. Or, rather, in untested hypothesis.

Alfonso XII’s elder sister, Isabel, was betrothed to Pedro Girón. (She was also, serially, betrothed to Alfonso V of Portugal (her sister-in-law Juana of Portugal’s brother), and simultaneously to her cousin, Ferdinand of Aragón. Alfonso V of Portugal for his part got over his disappointment in not-marrying Isabel by getting betrothed to his niece, Juana “la Betraneja” of Castile.)

Pedro Girón, for all his vast wealth and huge private army, died suddenly a year later: Some say of plague. Some say of burst appendix. Others that he was poisoned. Others that he was bewitched.

Beltrán de la Cueva, first Duke of Alburquerque, took the side of Enrique during the civil war that the Farce (unexpectedly, at least to Pacheco) precipitated; nevertheless Beltrán too was displaced from Enrique’s court, to be replaced by Juan Pacheco, again. Enrique put aside his wife, Juana of Portugal, in the care of Pedro of Fonseca in order to spend more time with Juan. Pedro promptly got her pregnant. With twins.

The death of Enrique in 1474 was followed by the War of the Castilian Succession, which sought to determine who would be the next Queen of Castile. The choices were Isabel (Enrique’s half-sister), or Juana (Enrique’s daughter). Beltrán fought on the side of Isabel. Pacheco fought on the side of Juana — the woman whom he himself had delegitimized as a child of adultery, “Beltrán’s daughter.”

Isabel won.

A note on the Second Battle of Omedo: When it was over, Enrique held the field. His advisor, Mendoza, told him that he needed to declare victory. Enrique replied, “Where is the victory? All I see are dead Castillians.” Over in the other camp, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, adviser to Alfonso XII, said, “Get out there and declare victory.” Alfonso did, and thus the matter remained in doubt.

A note about the word “farce.” At the time it didn’t have the connotation of screwball comedy that we understand today. It would have meant only “secular drama” (as opposed to religious drama or judicial drama).

Applications for the Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop (taught by, among others, Miss Teresa and Mr. Patrick) close three weeks from tonight at midnight, EDT.

Now in its seventeenth year, held every autumn on Martha’s Vineyard, this is a one-week intensive workshop on writing commercial fantasy and science fiction. We deal with both novel-length and short fiction.

This year’s instructors:

• Debra Doyle
• Elizabeth Bear
• James D. Macdonald
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• Sherwood Smith
• Steven Brust
• Steven Gould
Special Guest: Scott Lynch

We have food, music, pancakes, jellyfish, lighthouses, stars, and a pretty good track record. Three out of three of this year’s RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Book Awards in SF/Fantasy, for example (Scalzi, former instructor; Jemisin, graduate; Bear, current instructor). The writers’ successes are their own; still, we’re proud of ‘em.

Class size is limited to 24.

Application information is here. (Short version: 8K word writing sample plus a $25 application fee.)

Learn the VP Oath and discover for yourself the Horror that is Thursday!

Teresa is Editor Guest of Honor at ConQuest 44 in Kansas City this weekend. It’s the first time any con has had TNH as a solo guest, rather than as part of “Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden,” so naturally she’s been looking forward to it. It’s also one of her (and my!) favorite regional SF cons anywhere. In not unrelated news, the external pins were removed from her left foot earlier this week, which means she can now (cautiously) get out of the house and go places after twelve weeks of being almost totally housebound.

As luck would have it, though, the same mid-continent weather system that spawned the deadly tornado in Oklahoma City is now sending band after band of thunderstorms over the East Coast. Our mid-Thursday-evening flight to Kansas City was cancelled mid-Thursday morning, and we were automatically rescheduled onto a flight leaving Friday morning. But we can read the weather forecasts, and it looked (and still looks) like that flight won’t be going anywhere either. In fact, it looked increasingly likely that we might not make it to Kansas City until Saturday.

It occurred to us, however, that while thunderstorms routinely ground passenger aircraft, automobiles can punch through thunderstorms just fine. New York to Kansas City would be rather a long drive…but New York to Cleveland, Ohio, on the other side of the weather system, is entirely manageable. With admirable alacrity, the ConQuest people rebooked us onto a noon-Friday flight out of Cleveland, and we grabbed a one-way car rental and set forth early Thursday afternoon.

For science-fictional good luck, and because it’s at pretty much the right point in the drive, we got a motel room in Clarion, Pennsylvania, which is indeed the town where the famous SF writing workshop was originally held. Now it’s 6:00 AM on Friday and we’re about to check out and drive the rest of the way to Cleveland. Yesterday’s drive across Pennsylvania was gorgeous, with ever-changing light conditions through the mountains and valleys, and only occasionally terrifying as the bands of heavy rain reduced visibility to near white-out conditions. (I should note that not only is TNH a very skillful driver, but also that her instruction in case she’s pronounced clinically dead is that she be put behind the wheel of a car, since that’s the single thing most likely to revive her.) So that’s where we are—driving from New York to Cleveland in order to catch a flight to Kansas City. Hey, it’s better than missing half the con.

Meanwhile, I see from Locus’s Twitter feed that they’ve now posted, to their web site, some excerpts from their recent interview with us. Worth a look if you haven’t got a copy of the magazine itself.

If you absolutely have to talk about the herd of laser unicorns that so unexpectedly appear at the climax of the latest Star Trek movie, but do not dare do so in public because your friends will look at you sadly for spoiling the film for them, THIS IS THE PLACE to talk about the laser unicorns.

For here there be SPOILERS!

I really don’t want to get back into the business of being a big critic of Wikipedia, a site I use every day. But if, like me, you use it and care about it, you really should read the article Andrew Leonard has on Salon today: ““Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Wikipedia.”

As Andrew asks: if this has been going on, with (up until today) no consequences to its perpetrator, what else don’t we know about?

Urban light rail — and a construction site that’s been allowed to eliminate a whole block’s sidewalk, not even building a protected detour for pedestrians.

This recipe is from the intensely talented fantasy author Stacia Kane, and is reprinted here with her permission. Stacia is originally from the USA but now lives in England.

Steak Pie

I like puff pastry crusts for meat pies—I like a high crust-to-meat ratio—so I buy it ready-made; making puff pastry is so time-consuming (all that buttering and folding and rolling and resting in the fridge and buttering and folding and rolling and resting in the fridge), and I’ve actually never gotten great results. Pepperidge Farm makes a really nice ready-made puff pastry; you can find it in the fridge or freezer section in any grocery store (I also did smaller pies using their little round hors’d’ouvres pastry crusts: one with ground beef and one with shredded chicken, which are much quicker than the steak pie). (Here in the UK I use Jus-Rol, but Pepperidge Farm is the way to go in the US.)

I have made a nice hot-water pastry for meat pies, too, but I like puff. All those flaky layers.

So, here’s what I do, for a regular 9-inch pie. You’ll want to do this either quite early in the day, or the day before, because ideally the filling will be cool when it goes into the crust:

3 lbs stewing beef (if you want, you can buy a chuck roast and cut it into chunks)
1 16-oz can/bottle dark (stout) beer; I prefer Murphy’s Irish Stout to Guinness (really, I’ve used both and for me there’s no comparison)

1 onion, chopped fine (if you want; I use onion powder, usually)

In a large frying pan/saucepan/braiser with a good lid, brown the beef in a Tbsp or so of butter, with a tsp of olive or vegetable oil to keep it from scorching. Brown it in batches (I put the browned meat in the upturned lid to save washing dishes).

If you’re using chopped onion (I’ve minced a shallot in there, too, on occasion), add it after the meat is browned and stir it until it’s soft. Then add the beef back in, and add a handful or two of

flour

Stir well to make a sort-of roux; this will help thicken the filling later.

Once the flour is cooked (just a minute or two), add salt and pepper; not too much at first, maybe a tsp of salt and half a tsp of pepper?

Then add your herbs etc. I usually use (all of these are dried, as this is a long-simmered dish):

½ tsp or so of:

rosemary
thyme

¼ tsp or so of:

marjoram
sage

a dash of nutmeg/rub the nutmeg over the microplane grater once or twice

Now add at least a tsp or two of Worcestershire (VERY important!). Sometimes I add a splash of soy, too. If you have some Kitchen Bouquet that’s great to add. I also often add a bit of beef stock concentrate, just as a flavor boost.

This next bit depends on how hot your burners run. Mine run very hot—it’s hard to get a good low simmer—so I add the entire can of beer (slowly so it doesn’t foam over). When I had a burner that ran lower I’d add about ⅔ of it and wait to see if it needed more. So that would be my recommendation unless you have a hard time simmering something low.

Scrape up all the fond (most of it probably came up already with the flour/Worcestershire, and especially if you used diced onion).

Add two or three bay leaves (I use three).

Cover and let simmer 2½ - 3 hours. I like the meat VERY tender; you may want to stop simmering sooner, but as with any stew beef recipe you’ll want to give it at least a couple of hours. Check it every once in a while to see how the liquid level is doing. When it’s done, taste it and adjust the seasonings. Remember that the pastry crust is rather bland, so it’s okay for the meat to be a little more highly flavored.

At some point during the cooking, preheat your oven to 400° F and thaw one of the pastry sheets. You want it to still be cold, but not frozen hard. Personally, I just sort of push and manipulate it with my hands to fit it into the pie dish; you may want to roll it out, but I’ve made this at least a hundred times over the years so no longer bother with all of that. I just plop it into the dish, push it into the edges, and trim the excess (which I then squeeze into the parts where it isn’t covering the rim of the dish). A good way to keep it from shrinking too much is to fold the tiniest bit over the rim of the pie dish. It will still shrink some but that won’t matter too much.

Some people only use a top crust. IMO that’s not a pie, that’s beef stew with a pastry lid. (Like I said, I am a pastry girl and like a high crust-meat ratio.)

Anyway. Shove that bottom crust into the oven and bake it about fifteen minutes (or according to package directions, but don’t give it the full time, just most of it). This will help keep the bottom crust from getting too soggy. Again, you’ll want to do this fairly early on, because ideally this bottom crust will be cool when you add the filling. (I have often added hot filling to hot crust, and it’s fine if you just don’t have time to let it all cool etc.—it won’t ruin the pie or anything—but it really is nicer if you can let it all cool, both for a less-soggy crust and a thicker filling.)

Once the meat is done, let it sit uncovered for a while, stirring occasionally. It will thicken as it stands. It’ll still be a bit liquidy, FYI, but it won’t be AS liquidy. Take out the top crust when the package tells you to, in terms of how far in advance.

I have a little Le Creuset pie bird. They’re very inexpensive, and good/kind of fun to have, but they’re not necessary. If you have one, plunk it into the center of the bottom crust and add the filling around it. If not, just add the filling. I recommend spooning the filling into the crust, because you can control the liquid level better. Honestly, you probably only want like ¼ cup of the liquid in there.

The top crust is easier than the bottom crust, and again, I just trim the ends off and plunk it on there. Also again, make sure it’s still quite cold! Otherwise it won’t rise and flake as nicely. If you have a pie bird, fit the center around the bird’s beak and cut a few more vent slices in the top crust. If you don’t, make an X in the very center and reflect back the points so you have a little hole, and cut some vents—I usually do four vents, which makes it look pretty. The vents also really help the top crust puff and flake up.

Pop the pie into a 400° F oven. Set your timer for ten minutes. Take a look at the ten minute mark; is it browning? It’s not uncommon for the edges to puff and brown before the center (which will look sunken and bumpy as it “melts” over the meat before puffing up), so there’s nothing wrong if it’s doing that but at some point you may want to cover the edges with foil to keep them from burning. Also at that ten-minute point, give it a turn to help even cooking.

Check it again at twenty minutes. If the top crust isn’t fully puffed and golden, give it another turn and another five-ten minutes. This really depends on your oven and even stuff like humidity etc. Usually my pies take about twenty-five - thirty minutes for the top crust to be all nice and flaky/puffy.

Let the pie sit five minutes or so before cutting (longer if you can, up to about fifteen).

You can use the leftover cooking liquid to make gravy, but keep in mind how highly flavored that liquid probably is; you’ll want to add water and simmer it down. Sometimes I use gravy mix and add a few Tbsp of that liquid to that, because I’m lazy and because at that point I’ve got my big burner going with potatoes to mash and at least one smaller burner with vegetables, and there’s not room for the big braiser I did the meat in, too. But that’s up to you.

This is just as good as leftovers, and really, you can easily make the meat the day before and just assemble the pie as usual. I’ve actually put the filled bottom crust into the fridge before when dinner plans suddenly changed, and just popped the top crust on and cooked it the next day, and that worked great, too.

You can add whatever seasonings you want, of course. Sometimes I add a bit of mustard powder. Whatever you like. I stick to the savory herbs, because that’s what I like. And I really don’t recommend garlic in this; I’m not sure why but it just always tastes weird to me to have garlic in here. But hey, give it a try if you like.

Sorry if these are a tad disjointed; again, I’ve made this so many times I don’t really even have to think anymore about what I’m doing. But that’s the basic recipe/method, and again, one of my absolute favorite dinners and something we all like and have a lot. So I’d love to hear what you think!

Ray Harryhausen died today at the age of 92.

I can’t stress enough how much a part of my life he and his work were. I remember being ticked at Lyndon Johnson for preempting Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in order to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Using … numerous pens. About half a letter per pen, then put that pen aside, pick up another, and write another half-letter… meanwhile my movie was playing on WPIX, New York. In those pre-videotape days, if you missed a film in the theaters during its first run, you might catch it in a second-run theater a year or two later. If you missed it then you had to wait for it to come on TV. And if you missed it on TV it might be years before it came around again. If ever. (I did eventually get to see it, when I was in college.)

I’d seen Jason and the Argonauts the previous year, in a theater, and the skeleton fight had made me into a Harryhausen fan.

Every Sunday the New York Times had a TV section listing for the following week: Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. Channels 9 (WOR) and 11 (WPIX) had the Creature Features. 13 was PBS. 2, 4, and 7 were WCBS, WNBC, and WABC. Channel 5 was WNEW. I’d take the listing, and circle in red pencil the shows I wanted to watch. WOR and WPIX had most of them. Any time a Harryhausen film film was listed, it got circled.

(Channel 5 had Soupy Sales in the afternoon, which was the only thing worth watching if there weren’t any decent movies showing. Channel 11 had Ivanhoe, starring a very young Roger Moore.)

I remember seeing It Came From Beneath the Sea on a black-and-white TV that my father built. It Came From Beneath the Sea featured the giant octopus (which only had six arms if you got around to counting them) attacking San Francisco.

One of the disappointments of my youth was going to The Bedford Playhouse (in Bedford, New York, years before it was cut up into a two-screen theater, when movies were a dollar, and, on Wednesdays, when the show changed, they’d have a double feature for that same dollar) one Saturday afternoon, because they had a hand-lettered sign out front promising The Mysterious Island. Alas, the film that actual showed was some Brit invasion-from-outer-space/bodysnatchers-ripoff film.

On my wedding day my new bride and I, after the ceremony, went to a double-feature of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Warlords of Atlantis (along with many members of the wedding party).

You can keep your CGI for all that — the stop-motion animation that Ray Harryhausen did… that was real movie magic.

The latest Locus features an interview with us. It’s not online—the contents of the printed magazine and their web site mostly don’t overlap—but you can buy a printed copy (or a downloadable ePub, Mobi, or PDF version) here.

It was a slightly disquieting experience, not least because I’ve been reading Locus for (unbelievably but truly) 43 years. The interview was taken in Liza Trombi’s hotel room one morning at last year’s Worldcon. Their basic method is to have a lively conversation with the interview subject, transcribe the whole thing, and then remove all their own questions and prompts, so it looks as if the person being interviewed is a prodigiously voluble monologuist. Or, in our case, a pair of prodigiously voluble monologuists. (Low-hanging fruit. Go for it.) Then they send the transcript back to the subject, for fact-checking and horrified second thoughts.

By and large, their method works well. When we’d finished chatting with Liza, we both had the sense that we’d been dismally incoherent, but when the transcript arrived in our email a few months later, somehow they’d managed to make us look much smarter than we remembered being. It did turn out to be a lot more about our long-ago past in fandom, and 1980s NYC publishing, than I think I expected when I walked in the door. But that’s really okay.

(I posted a brief excerpt from the interview to our calling-card page at nielsenhayden.com, which was about a year and a half overdue to be updated anyway.)

This is a thread for SPOILERS concerning the recent film release.

No need for ROT-13 or SPOILER Alerts inside here, because this thread is for SPOILERS.

When some guy loses his life savings playing a carnival game, you just say, “Hunh?” When a government ministry lays down millions to buy pixie dust, you have to say “Wow!”

If you’re going to have security theater, you need props. Allow me to introduce Mr. James McCormick, sentenced yesterday in the UK to three ten-year jail terms (to be served concurrently, eligible for parole in five), for selling magic wands.

The ADE 651 is the device that made Mr. McCormick’s fortune. ADE stands for Advanced Detection Equipment. It’s the fourth device in the series, following the ADE 100, the ADE 101, and the ADE 650.

Let’s back up a bit. Allow me to introduce the Gopher. This is a gag golf-ball detector, sold in joke-and-party stores in the US for under twenty bucks. What it is, is a plastic handle with a metal rod attached to the front on a hinge so it can swing left and right. When your golf ball goes into the rough and you can’t locate it, pull out your handy Gopher and the rod will swing to indicate which way it lies!

This works by the same principle that moves the planchette on a Ouija board. Tiny involuntary muscle movements make your hand tremble, causing the rod to swing. As to how well it works, the words “random chance” should appear in your mind.

The War On Terror brought a huge market for bomb-detection technology. McCormick saw his chance, bought up a bunch of Gophers, peeled off the labels and replaced them with labels of his own. He repackaged them, and sold them for $6,000 and up (up to $30,000-$60,000 each) to security forces in twenty different countries. It was proved in open court that mold-marks and imperfections in the Gopher handles were identical with the mold-marks and imperfections in the handles of the ADE 100.

Over the ten years that McCormick sold the things he made improvements. To make the device seem more trustworthy he made the handle heavier. Later versions came in hard-sided carrying cases with pre-cut foam packing. The device now had two parts; the handle with the swinging rod attached by a cable to a belt pouch where the detector box was located. That box had a slot into which you’d put a plastic card identifying what it was you were looking for. The box, though, contained no components. The cards, colorfully printed on one side and with an RFID pasted to the other, were just pieces of plastic.

As to how Mr. McCormick sold the things: A combination of high-pressure sales tactics and sleight-of-hand. He claimed that his detector could find any explosives within a kilometer; through lead; through ten feet of earth or twenty feet of water; or from an airplane. The detectors could also supposedly find bank notes, ivory, blood, and a wide variety of drugs. He used fancy words like electrostatic ion attraction and electrochemical (Thermo-Redox) detection to describe how they supposedly worked.

The ADE didn’t have any apparent power source. McCormick explained this by saying it was powered by the static electricity generated by the operator.

He also used old-fashioned bribery. He supposedly sold $122 million worth of the devices to the Iraqi government, but at the cost of $65 million in bribes, leaving him with just $57 million in profit (from which he’d have to subtract the manufacturing cost of up to $60 each).

McCormick bought a house and a yacht. Not just a house, an $8 million house in Bath, England. And a vacation home in Florida. And another in Cyprus. That’s a pretty nice-looking yacht, too.

Let us suppose that you are trying to sell the Card Color Detector 5000. The most advanced Card Color Detector in the world, operating by Heisenbergian Macro-Wave Format Vibration. Here’s how you make one: Take a length of thread. Tie on a finger ring. There you go! Now explain that the CCD 5000 will swing in a straight line over black cards, and in a circle over red cards. To prove it, lay down a series of playing cards face down. Hold the CCD 5000 above each in turn. It works every time! (It’s lots easier for you to do this demonstration if you use marked cards.) Now allow the person to whom you’re selling it to try. Each time it correctly determines the color, say, “See how well it works!” Each time it doesn’t, say, “You weren’t relaxed enough.” Put it in a nice box, include a four-color glossy brochure, and slap a five-figure price tag on it. Remember: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.

The “not relaxed enough” line was the actual excuse for why the thing didn’t always function: The operator wasn’t relaxed. Nothing says “relaxed” like “trying to detect terrorist bombs at a police checkpoint in Pakistan.”

As Judge Richard Hone at the Old Bailey said:

“The jury found that you knew the devices did not work, yet the soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere believed in them, in part due to your powers of salesmanship and in part the extravagant and fraudulent claims made in your promotional material.

“After a six-week trial, I am wholly satisfied that your fraudulent conduct in selling so many useless devices for simply enormous profit promoted a false sense of security and in all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals.”

Worried that you won’t be able to detect explosives now? You can smile! The GT200, manufactured by a different conman company is still on sale! They’re being used right now today in Mexico (among many other countries) to find weapons and drug caches.

And, presumably, golf balls.

It’s the end of an era for the famous (and at times infamous) Hotmail service. Hotmail pioneered Web-based email prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 1997. In making the move to Outlook.com, Microsoft’s online team will leverage the brand of the company’s widely used Outlook software, while seeking to bring its consumer email service into modern world of tablets, smartphones and other devices.

“We’ll have one clean story across Microsoft for how you get mail,” said Microsoft’s Dharmesh Mehta. “Outlook equals mail from Microsoft.”

It started in 1996 as HoTMaiL. Web-based email. Now … it isn’t. As of 03 May 2013 @hotmail.com is deprecated.

North Country Computing Terms

• Log On: Making the wood stove hotter
• Log Off: Don’t add any more wood
• Monitor: Keeping an eye on the wood
• Download: Getting the wood off the truck
• Megahertz: When you’re not careful getting the firewood
• Floppy Disk: What you get from trying to carry too much wood
• Ram: That thing that splits the wood
• Hard Drive: Getting home in the winter time in the snow
• Prompt: What the mail isn’t in the winter time
• Windows: What you shut when it’s cold outside
• Screen: What you shut when it’s black fly season
• Byte: What those dang black flies do
• Chip: Munchies for the TV
• Microchip: What’s in the bottom of the munchies bag
• Modem: What you did to the hay fields
• Keyboard: Where you hang the keys
• Software: Those dang plastic forks and knives
• Mouse: What eats the grain in the barn
• Mainframe: What holds up the barn roof
• Port: Fancy wine
• Random Access Memory: When you can’t remember what you paid for the rifle, when your wife asks.

I’ve been thinking about the ways people fight* for a long time. It’s a “sticky” subject for me: something that draws my attention, over and over. And because I’m a classifier and a categorizer, I’ve been thinking about classes of arguer. In the end, I’ve come down to two: truth-shouters and cutlery-loaders. Both styles are perfectly valid ways of dealing with conflict, but they don’t work well together.

Truth-shouters look to arguments to bring out the things that they’re unable to express any other way. There are some truths that cannot be spoken (or even, sometimes, thought clearly). But the emotional singularity of an argument, when the rules of discourse change, means that these things are suddenly articulable. They can be shouted. (Note that “truth” in this context is “as factually understood by the shouter”. Sadly, anger does not turn truth-shouters into Thomas the Rhymer†‡)

Cutlery-loaders are completely different. For them, arguments are a chance to blow off steam, to express their emotions without spending as much attention on the words they use to do it as they would otherwise. They’re like the characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie who, running out of cannonballs, load the ship’s cutlery into the cannon and fire that off.

Needless to say, arguments between these two types do not go well. A truth-shouter will take the cutlery-loader seriously (because arguments are the place for difficult truths.) Meanwhile, a cutlery-loader will assume that a shouted truth is just some random fork and ignore it or, worse yet, counter it with something worse and less true. And it can drive cutlery-loaders nuts to be called on things they said for emotional effect rather than content.

(There are probably other ways that truth-shouters hurt cutlery-loaders in arguments. Being a truth-shouter, I don’t necessarily know them, and hope for instruction. Also, I’ve probably biased this discussion towards truth-shouters. I’d be happy to have a more cutlery-loading view as well.)

The most hideous fights I’ve suffered through or witnessed have been across argument-type lines, particularly when some piece of fired-off cutlery triggers a truth-shouter’s Goddamned Tapes.

I bring this up because a number of discussions in recent DF threads sound to me like truth-shouters trying to deal with cutlery-loaders. It’s worth asking yourself, when an argument goes particularly spectacularly badly, whether the other person is shooting forks while you’re shouting truths (or vice versa).

* In the sense of quarrel, not in the sense of box
† Besides, at least as Kushner wrote him, True Thomas was a cutlery-loader. Awkward.
‡ However neat a Thomas the Rhymer/Hulk crossover fic would be.

This is part of the sequence of Dysfunctional Families discussions. We have a few special rules, specific to the needs and nature of the conversations we have here.

1. If you want to participate but don’t want your posts linked to your contributions to the rest of Making Light, feel free to choose a pseudonym. But please keep it consistent within these threads, because people do care. You can create a separate (view all by) history for your pseudonym by changing your email address. And if you blow it and cross identities, give me a shout and I’ll come along and tidy it up.
2. On a related note, please respect the people’s choice to use a pseudonym, unless they make it clear that they are willing to let the identities bleed over in people’s minds.
3. If you’re not from a dysfunctional background, be aware that your realities and base expectations are not the default in this conversation. In particular, please don’t do the “they’re the only family you have” thing. Black is white, up is down, and your addressee’s mother may very well be their nemesis.
4. Be even more careful, charitable, and gentle than you would elsewhere on Making Light. Try to avoid “hlepiness” (those comments which look helpful, but really aren’t). Apologize readily and sincerely if you tread on toes, even unintentionally. This kind of conversation only works because people have their defenses down.
5. Never underestimate the value of a good witness. If you want to be supportive but don’t have anything specific to say, people do value knowing that they are heard.

Previous posts (note that comments are closed on them to keep the conversation in one place):

• Have a Dysfunctional Families Day
• Dysfunctional Families Day: Inversion Experience
• Dysfunctional Families Day: No Expectations
• Dysfunctional Families Day: Tangled Emotions
• Dysfunctional Families: You Must Be This Unhappy To Ride
• Dysfunctional Families: Circled Strangers
• Dysfunctional Families: Fish Hooks
• Dysfunctional Families: Everybody lined up for the parade?
• Dysfunctional Families: Sitting and Rising
• Dysfunctional Families: Surviving and Thriving

The Arthur C. Clarke Award is, as its site says, the most prestigious award for science fiction published in Britain. It has gone to some very fine books. (Including some written by non-Britons; certain Canadian SF awards with an unwholesome obsession with official citizenship or immigration status should please copy.) (Also including this year’s winner, Dark Eden by Chris Beckett; congratulations!) And I have no particular bone to pick with the fact that it’s a juried award. I’ve served on the jury for juried awards. I think vox-pop awards like the Hugo are what they are and juried awards are what they are. No problem there.

No, the subject of my gratuitous, out-of-left-field rant is capitalization, specifically the capitalization in the basic mission statement on the front page of the Arthur C. Clarke Award’s site:

The Arthur C Clarke Award is the most prestigious award for Science Fiction in Britain, presented annually for the best Science Fiction novel of the year.

Perhaps I am the only person in 2013 who reads Excessive Upper-and-Lower-Case Style this way, but I don’t think so. When I see people prosing on about “Science Fiction” when they could just as easily be saying “science fiction”, what it sounds like to me isn’t dignity. What it sounds like is this:

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. (—A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)

I rest my extremely silly case.

I don’t have the gene or mental quirk or whatever it is necessary for writing fanfic. Seanan McGuire even bit me on the arm once to see if it would transfer over, but it didn’t. So I’m just gonna leave these here:

• Mashup of Dragnet and The Man Who Was Thursday.
• A story about Saruman’s political corruption of the Shire, titled “Sharkey’s Machine”.
• Hitler, Robot Fighter — “This fascist kills machines.”
• A story from the point of view of one of the cylon fighter ships in the new Battlestar Galactica, written as a pastiche of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
• Anna Karennadanna.
• “Their faith was weak, they needed proof;
  You kicked an old man off the roof.
  ‘It’s one less mouth to feed!’ That’s how she knew you….”
• A Deadwood/My Little Ponies mashup titled “Herpy Doves”.
• Sentai giant robot story, but crew are characters from The Office (US version). Jim, Pam, Michael, Dwight, not sure who should be 5th. (Though Titan Maximum already occupies a similar environmental niche.)
• “There have always been Blackadders at Cold Comfort.” (For some reason, everyone I mention this to thinks it has something to do with A Game of Thrones.)
• The Bill and Ted movies, told from Ted’s point of view, in the style of the Book of the New Sun. (Or maybe vice versa.)
• Dr Who, Dr Which, and Dr Whatsit. (Not sure what TESSERACT would be an acronym for.)
• The Seinfeld characters in the Labrys Arms apartment building from Dhalgren.
• The Dread Chocolatier Wonka.

Y’know The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray, the guy who gave us Mondegreens?

The question was, “Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands, O, whaur hae ye been?” The answer is, they were off burning Auchindoun. Y’see, the Earl of Moray was a Mackintosh, and Huntly owned Auchindoun. The rest follows.

The Burning of Auchindoun Child #183

Balvenie Castle¹ in Dufftown used stones from the ruins of Auchindoun in its construction.

From today’s Manchester Union Leader comes this story:

Epsom man says he was taken for a $2,600 ride at carnival in Manchester

The title of this entry comes from this marvelous page of Carny Lingo put up by Wayne Keyser:

Flat Store or Flat Joint — Generally, gambling game, a game at which money is the prize rather than goods. The game at a flat joint is always entirely unwinnable. So called because the “wheel of fortune” or whatever other rig is played there, once set vertically for all to see, is now set flat horizontally so that only the player and the agent can see it. After you lose a bunch of money they might throw you some sort of prize to get rid of you. “Almost all of the carnies don’t like the flatties because you can’t win at their game and they take people for lots of money. I have seen a flattie take people for a week’s pay, their car, sometimes even their home. There is no way any other type of agent comes close to making the money a flattie does.” (Anonymous) “Always leave the mark with a dollar for gas”, say some carnies.

Part of Making Light’s beat is fraud, and that’s what we have here. This is the story:

MANCHESTER - An Epsom man says all he wanted to do was win his kids a prize at a carnival on Saturday. Instead, he ended up embarrassed, angry and out $2,600.

“You hear about stuff like this, but you don’t expect it at a carnival like this,” said [Name redacted—JDM] of Epsom. “The two guys at that game knew what they were doing, and they were very good. I know I fell for it. I was feeling good and I never recognized what was happening, but you just don’t think about that at something like a carnival like this.”

This isn’t about blaming the victim: There isn’t anyone I know, including me, who can’t be taken by the right pitch on the right day.

[Name redacted] attended a Kids Carnival, operated by Fiesta Shows, at the JFK Coliseum on Beech Street Saturday afternoon, when he decided to try to win his kids a prize at a $5 game called “Tubs of Fun.” The goal is to toss two softballs into a large tub - also known as the Bushel Basket Toss. [Name redacted] said he came close to winning a prize, but fell just short. That’s when he started receiving encouragement from the two carnival workers to keep playing. “They said they would double my money if I could get 10 balls in the bucket,” said [Name redacted]. “I was loud and into it, and they said I was helping to draw a crowd over to the booth. They said I would win my kids an X-Box Connect, which are like $400 I think. So I gave it a try.”

Yep, you get into the moment. This speaks to situational awareness. It’s why a lot of the people at the Station nightclub fire didn’t try to leave until it was way too late. You’re in the zone, you’ve got tunnel vision, and … bad things happen. This guy eventually laid down enough to buy six X-boxes with enough left over for dinner at the best place in town.

The story doesn’t stop there. When he got home, he got to thinking … that he’d been had. Which he had been. He went back to the show the next day:

[Name redacted] said he returned to the carnival Sunday and complained to management. He said a manager gave him $600 and an oversized, dread-locked stuffed banana for his troubles, but was told that was “all they could do” for him.

A two-thousand-dollar stuffed banana. With dreadlocks.

From Carny Lingo:

Mark — A townsperson you focus on as a victim. When a carny spotted a towny with a big bankroll, he would give him a friendly slap on the back leaving a chalk mark so other carnies would know that this customer had lots of money. Often the ticket seller would mark the ‘mark.’ The booth would have a high counter, above the average person’s eyesight, and the ticket seller would short-change the customer, leaving the change on the counter. If the customer didn’t notice or didn’t count his change, the ticket seller would lean over to give him some “friendly” advice about the best attractions, putting his hand on the customer’s shoulder to point him toward the show he simply must see, simultaneously dusting his back with chalk from a hidden supply. If the customer instead complained about the wrong change, the ticket seller could always push the remaining change to him and say “I told you to take it.” And what do you do when you spot a mark? You “play” him - that’s right, just like you play a fish. But a carny truism is, “Always leave the mark a dollar for gas.” With gas money he can go home (you don’t want him stuck there growing angrier with you every minute).

The mark informed the police and the newspaper. The newspaper investigated, and discovered….

On Sunday night, a woman working the guest services booth at the carnival who gave her name as “Chrissy” said she was aware of the claim, but that the workers involved were not there. She attempted to reach a manager, Dan Delisle, who oversees the game booths, but he did not answer his cell phone.

“He’s already broken down a few rides and games, and is probably headed off to the next spot,” said Chrissy. The Fiesta Shows schedule has carnivals in both Sharon, Mass., and Derry later this week.

A call to Fiesta Shows’ New Hampshire Sunday night seeking comment was not returned.

Apparently Chrissy didn’t give a last name. What a surprise. Yeah, the guy you want to talk to “probably headed off to the next spot.” Bet this isn’t the first time she’s told that story. It isn’t even technically lying. She didn’t say that he had left, just that he’d probably left. And she didn’t say when he’d “already” broken down a few rides and games. Maybe she was referring to the the games and rides he broke down last week. You know how one day blends into another. Three gets you seven that the name on the young lady’s birth certificate isn’t anything even close to “Chrissy,” either.

The police don’t offer much hope:

“It will be assigned to the detective division, but where it goes from here is uncertain right now,” said Manchester police Lt. Mike Hurley. “It may be difficult to track the people down, because I believe they may be from out of state, but the detectives will get started on it this week. We’ll see how it plays out.”

Me, I have a bad feeling.

From AARP’s Scam Alert
7 Rigged Carnival Games:

“It’s not that every carnival game is rigged, but any can be, and many are,” says Bill L. Howard, who’s been investigating carnival games since 1978 and wrote Carnival Fraud 101, a guidebook for law enforcement officers on tricks of the trade.

5. Tubs of Fun

The goal is to toss two softballs into a large tub. You may remember this as the Bushel Basket Toss. But farming baskets have been replaced with plastic “muck” buckets from home improvement stores so that the ball gets extra bounce.

The real trick: “From inside the booth, the carny tosses a softball and from his vantage point, it stays inside the tub,” says Howard. “Then he gives you the second softball for a practice throw — and it stays in for a win.” Why? The carny’s first ball remains inside the tub to deaden it and prevent your toss from bouncing out. But once you hand over your money, he removes both balls and hands them to you. Without a deadening ball, guess what? Your first toss bounces out.

“You might as well throw your second ball across the midway because no way it will stay inside the tub, either,” says Howard..

The next two places this particular carnival will play, this week, are apparently Sharon, Massachusetts, and Derry, New Hampshire. Seven gets you ten that the particular guys that Name Redacted saw won’t be anywhere to be found on either lot.

I don’t think Name Redacted will get his money back. They gave him the old razzle-dazzle.

From Carny Lingo:

Razzle or Razzle Dazzle — Usually dressed up as a “football” game in which the player must scores a specific number of “yards”. Played by spilling 8 marbles from a cup onto a game board with about 120 numbered holes. The numbers are added up to a total which the jointee compares to a conversion chart to determine the number of “yards” scored. The numbers most likely to come up are worthless or only indicate that the player must add to, or even double, his cash bet. The chart is incomprehensible to the player, who must believe the flattie’s constant patter claiming that a win is almost within reach with just one or two more bets. The cost per game builds up exponentially and the winning score is claimed to almost within reach for a big payoff. This game can empty a mark’s pockets quickly and completely, and some marks might even get ‘put on the send’ (q.v.) to come back with more money. A definite swindle covered in the “Games” chapter of my book “On the Midway”.

I am flabbergasted that, with a less than a week to go in the Starstruck: Harry Palmer Kickstarter, it’s still $19k short of the money needed to put the book out in color.

Y’all know about Starstruck, right? One of the best science fiction comics ever published? A complex, gorgeous, sprawling, punk feminist space epic that started out in 1980 as a stage production (by Elaine Lee, with art production by Michael Kaluta), then spawned a prequel in comic book form a couple of years later. Most recently, thanks to colorist and designer Lee Moyer, much of the old material has been republished in a book from IDW.

But there’s still some old material that hasn’t been reprinted, and new material yet to see the light of day! The Kickstarter project has already passed the threshold for putting out the second book in black and white, but here, click these thumbnails to check out a couple of scans I just made from my copy of the IDW book:

For more, check out this gallery of Starstruck covers on Kaluta’s website. Wouldn’t it be a shame to not have that beautiful artwork in color?

(Also, for fans of Strong Female Protagonist — Elaine Lee is Michael Brennan Lee’s Brennan Lee Mulligan’s mother.)

(Oh, I almost forgot: That artwork is ©2011 Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta.)

I’ve recently been asked about posset recipes. This one, for a Sack Posset, is from The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened: Whereby Is Discovered Several Ways for Making of Metheglin, Sider, Cherry-Wine, &c. Together with Excellent Directions for Cookery: As Also for Preserving, Conserving, Candying, &c. (1669), page 111:

TO MAKE A SACK POSSET:

Boil two wine-quarts of Sweet-cream in a Possnet; when it hath boiled a little, take it from the fire, and beat the yolks of nine or ten fresh Eggs, and the whites of four with it, beginning with two or three spoonfuls, and adding more till all be incorporated; then set it over the fire, to recover a good degree of heat, but not so much as to boil; and always stir it one way, least you break the consistence. In the mean time, let half a pint of Sack or White muscadin boil a very little in a bason, upon a Chafing-dish of Coals, with three quarters of a pound of Sugar, and three or four quartered Nutmegs, and as many pretty big pieces of sticks of Cinnamon. When this is well scummed, and still very hot, take it from the fire, and immediately pour into it the cream, beginning to pour neer it, but raising by degrees your hand so that it may fall down from a good height; and without anymore to be done, it will then be fit to eat. It is very good kept cold as well as eaten hot. It doth very well with it, to put into the Sack (immediately before you put in the cream) some Ambergreece, or Ambered-sugar, or Pastils. When it is made, you may put powder of Cinnamon and Sugar upon it, if you like it.

It’s interesting to see how recipes get grouped during different periods. For Digby, sweet drinks containing cream were part of a continuum that included semi-solid cream-based desserts. These days we’d group the semi-solid desserts with recipes for custard, flan, mousse, and possibly ice cream, and hive off the fancy beverages into a separate chapter.

The other thing I’ll note is that in New York, possets and syllabubs gradually shed their sack, sherry, eggs, and cream, ending up as the wonderfully confusing New York “egg cream” that’s a mixture of milk, U-Bet chocolate syrup, and seltzer.