BruceH

Thank-you very much for all the good wishes! Happy to say I got the new Louis Armstrong bio as a birthday present. (Hopefully I'll read it before the next birthday rolls around.)

Will we soon be seeing bags that look like giant CD's?

Ah, so that's why my post count suddenly seemed to go down by about 1,000. I just noticed. No big deal, really...

That is a fuckin' bitch.

I wonder if she knows what a cassette is. Not a caption, just wondering.

I think it has something to do with the Earth being a sphere. Damn round Earth....

I expect I'll Netflix it when it comes out.

Just started it too!! Also reading that now.

It does pinpoint and send up that over-emotive style she had, particularly late in her career, that just seemed bizarre to people of my generation.

I only knew him from the rather annoying sausage commercials which my contemporaries and I grew up making fun of.

Happy Birthday and best wishes. :party:

"It was as if---"

Yes. I just caught it last night. What's next for our heroes, I wonder?

Guess I'll catch it on the damn DVD's.

Clarke isn't particularly depressing. (And then there's P.G. Wodehouse.)

British SF books in general seem to have incredibly boring covers, at least from what I've seen. I wonder why that is?

My favorite Sinatra ballad album is still In the Wee Small Hours.

It's a real classic for sure! And remarkably prescient about the advertisement industry culture! And the Supreme Court is trying it's best to make the book come completely true. I must say, though, when it comes to SF, Penguin has a real thing for dull, drab, rather ugly, and utterly boring covers.

I'll be looking.

Happy Birthday!! :party: We're both now staring at 50...but still, Happy Birthday!!!!!

Snot true! (Well, yeah.)

No, I've heard of "tricentennial" and even "quincentennial" (500 years.) Probably because I read a lot of science fiction when growing up. (FWIW, I suspect James Michener would use "centennial.") I've got to admit, while we're on the subject, one of my favorite words is "sesquicentennial" which means 150th anniversary. Back in my free-wheeling bachelor days a bunch of friends and I threw a party to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Michigan statehood. Good times, good times...

Yeah, you'd think so.

Matthew, in that #3 low pass you mentioned, I thought the guy standing was going to lose his head for sure. Yikes. That took guts (or stupidity) to just stand there like that.

What are some of the stories in this anthology? Amazon won't tell me a thing. John D Clark, "Minus Planet" (1937) Fritz Leiber, "Yesterday House" (1952) Larry Niven, "Neutron Star" (1966) Lester del Rey, "The Faithful" (1938) Don Wilcox, "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" (1940) - that's as far as I've got! Gee, the only one of those I'm familiar with is "Neutron Star." How do you shape up with the rest? (The last is the only one I've come across before.) Edgar Allan Poe, "Cosmic Disaster" (1839) Murray Leinster, "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) Fitz-James O'Brien, "What Was It?" (1859) and "The Diamond Lens" (1858) Richard Matheson, "The Test" (1954) Isaac Asimov, "Reason" (1941) H G Wells, "The Land Ironclads" (1903) I've read the Leinster, Asimov, and Wells stories. None too thrilled with any of them, although as I recall "Reason" was part of the I, Robot collection, which means I read it several times growing up.