Not sure why the editors at Charlton felt a need to publish a comic attacking those godless communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Love Diary #23 (September 1962), surrounded by the standard romance stories you’d expect to find in such a title, but for some reason, that’s exactly what they did.

“God is Never Out of Style,” drawn by Rocke Mastroserio and written by (your guess is as good as mine), instead of being about a woman’s search for true love, is rather a stern warning not to “scoff at the beliefs of our forefathers” and certainly never “be tempted at times to put your religion second.”

A check of the Grand Comics Database shows that this incongruous one-pager ran eight times, first in Teen-Age Love #27 (August 1962) and last in I Love You #44 (February 1963).

Bottom line—go to the beach instead of church and it’ll be your fault if we lose the Cold War!

I have no idea what teens thought about the story 50+ years ago, but since we won (we did, didn’t we?), I take it they took its message to heart.

Poet Robert Hass, who won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Awards last year from the Academy of American Poets, was one of 14 people interviewed for the January/February 2015 issue of Esquire about their 2014.

Among the many interesting things Hass had to say was this.

My younger brother once said to my mother, “I don’t know why Bob writes poetry. Nobody reads it.” And my mother said to him, “Yes, but they don’t read it for a long time.”

Here’s hoping we all have readers who don’t read us for a long time. Or something like that.

Mothers always put these things in perspective, don’t they?

I was flipping through the November 1950 issue of Marvel Science Stories this afternoon (as one does on a lazy Saturday), and while the content by the likes of A. E. van Vogt, Gardner F. Fox, and A. Bertram Chandler was intriguing, what interested me most was the back cover ad.

“Most Bald People Could Have Saved Their Hair Had They Acted in Time,” we’re told, with random italicization that doesn’t seem to make any sense. But what’s fascinating is the identity of the celebrity endorser doing the telling—”Rocco, Personal Barber of the late Thomas A. Edison.”

That’s right—the barber to the inventor known as the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed that a formula called Sayve is “the best Science can do to SAVE YOUR HAIR.”

One question, though. (more…)

Over the past couple of months, I’ve run across three romance comics containing stories about overweight women having trouble finding true love. And I’ve been intrigued by the message they were sending, in that two of the protagonists only arrived at happy endings after reaching a societally approved weight.

But body shaming isn’t limited to the stories. It spills over into text pages, too, as in this example, titled “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl,” from Young Romance #8 (April 1951). I have no idea who wrote this piece under the byline Charmaigne, but whoever it was starts off by making sure the teen reader of the comic is insecure about her appearance.

Oh, you may be just a few pounds overweight now, and your boyfriend might even like you that way … but that’s won’t last!

There’s only a few pounds difference between your pleasingly plump status of today and that of a tubby woman tomorrow.

So if you want to keep your man, you’d better not let yourself go, girls!

(more…)

We’ve already learned that the protagonist of the 1950 romance comic book story “Too Fat for Love” was required to slim down before finding true love, even though her man said he’d always loved her whatever her size, while the far more enlightened tale, 1949’s “Was I Too Fat to Be Loved?” didn’t demand its heroine lose a pound in order to embrace happiness.

A few years later, another tale on a similar topic—also titled “Too Fat for Love”—appeared in Great Lover Romances #3 (March 1952) and was later reprinted in Dream of Love #9 (1958). Which gives us a third chance to see how old timey romance comics dealt with society’s insistence that only women who maintain a certain idealized body size are deserving of love. (This time courtesy of artist Myron Fass and an uncredited writer.)

The story begins as “famous comedy star” Dorothy Drake takes a pie in the face on the set of her new movie. She hates being the butt of jokes, but knows that at her size, those are the only roles available. (more…)

So late last night—or early this morning, depending on how you keep track of these things—I attempted to book a table at Noma. With a milestone birthday coming in March, I figured, what better place to celebrate then at the Copenhagen restaurant that’s currently considered the best restaurant in the world? And since you might want to eat there someday, I thought I should share how it all went down.

Reservations for the date in question began at 10:00 a.m. Central European Time, which translates to 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, so I set an alarm for 3:45 a.m.—two alarms, actually, because I activated a Fitbit silent one to vibrate on my wrist in case the main alarm failed—and slept for a few hours before waking, stumbling downstairs, and being confronted by this pre-booking countdown screen.

I had no idea how many others around the globe were staring at something similar, but found out, once 10:00 a.m. Central European Time rolled around, that there were at least 1,449 of them—because I was number 1,450, with an estimated wait time of more than an hour. And there were equally as many behind me in the queue, because when I decided to try logging in using my iPhone, I was assigned a number greater than 3,000. (more…)

A few weeks ago, I read Joanna Russ’s 1975 review of the movie A Boy and His Dog, which had originally been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. I hadn’t intended to, and wasn’t deliberately seeking it out. I just came upon it the way one often does online, clicking through from link to link, and eventually ending up somewhere unexpected but necessary.

It’s a wonderful piece, and deserves your attention, as all of her work does, but the passage that intrigued me the most was a paraphrase of something Chip Delany once wrote:

According to Samuel Delany, a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

This stood out for me because, being a writer, I immediately wanted to understand more fully exactly what Delany meant by these three classifications. I could tell the concept would be helpful to my own writing. And as I thought, hmmm, how will I ever track down the source, I suddenly remembered that due to this connected world in which we live, I could simply ask the source directly, since Chip and I are friends on Facebook. So I reached out to query where I could find his full essay explicating this idea.

It turns out the essay “Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction” originally appeared in an issue of Khatru, and was then reprinted in his non-fiction collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. But not, unfortunately, my copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, as it’s a first edition. It can be found in the current expanded edition, though. I decided I’d pick up a copy at this year’s Readercon, where I could get him to autograph it, and then thought nothing more. (more…)

Some of the promises made by ads in the backs of old comics were small, like claims a pair of X-Ray Specs would let us see the bones in our hands and through the clothes of our friends. Other promises were larger, such as the one I told you about made in 1932 that a clipped coupon could turn someone into a professional writer.

But the inside back cover of Four Favorites #22 (March 1946) promised the most life-changing reward of all—a movie contract!

Send in a buck and you’d receive the book How to Get Into the Movies, and if you had, why, you might now be as famous as Roger Batton.

Who?

Batton, who provided the testimonial above, claims to have gotten a part in the 1944 film Song of the Open Road thanks to that book. One problem—the IMDb entry for that film includes no one by that name. In fact, there’s no entry for Roger Batton on IMDb at all!

As for Judith Allen, who wrote How to Get Into the Movies, she did seem to have had a legit acting career, though IMDb lists her with a total of 37 credits through 1952, rather than the 52 claimed through 1946 by the ad.

Did her book ever get anyone into the movies other than Batton, who (without having seen the film) I suspect only appeared, if at all, uncredited as one of the “Hollywood Canteen Kids”? There’s no way of knowing, I guess, but if I cared enough, I could check out her advice myself, because there’s a copy of her book available at AbeBooks for only $10.00.

I suspect, however, that her advice, whether the price is one dollar or ten, is still overpriced, and unlikely to get me or anyone else a movie contract. If you’re desperate, though, feel free to give it a shot.

I’ve been using a Fitbit since May 4, 2013. That’s right—Star Wars Day. Which seems a perfect day to have introduced a new piece of tech into my life. It’s been a great help in getting me to back away from the keyboard and move, supplementing the plans I’d already made to stay alive as long as possible.

In the 20 months since I strapped a Flex to my wrist, I’ve taken 6,909,017 steps, which works out to having walked 3,440.01 miles. And my feelings toward the product have been mostly positive. But it occurred to me today, as I wrapped a fourth Flex band around my wrist, that there’s one thing I don’t see much of online, even though my friends and I have spoken of it—that those bands wear out far more quickly than we’d expected.

Since the Flex tracks my sleep as well as my activity, I wear it 24/7, only removing it to recharge once every 5-7 days. This means that over the course of these 20 months of use, assuming I recharged at the lower end of the battery life, I would have only slipped the device from one of my wristbands approximately 120 times or so. Split that among the three dead bands, and that works out to only 40 removals and reinsertions each. (Check my math, OK?)

And yet, here’s what the stress of sliding out and then slipping back in those devices has caused those three abandoned wristbands to look like now …

(more…)

Before we get too much deeper into the first month of the new year, here are the dreams I’d previously shared with you one at a time over on Twitter during the last month of the old year, only now they’re all rubbing together making some kind of strange subconscious poetry.

Last month, I dreamt of Jimmie Walker, Gil Kane, James Gandolfini, Bonnie Raitt, Chip Delany, Ann Landers, and who knows, maybe even you.

December 2014

I dreamt I was having dinner at a steak house, and the waiter said their steaks were the best because their cows didn’t eat other cows. Dec 31

I dreamt I was in a televised Christmas special with a cast that included Jimmie Walker and we were the only ones who didn’t flub our lines. Dec 31

I dreamt I tagged along with @neilhimself as he went to chat with J. R. R. Tolkien, and man, do I wish I could remember THAT conversation! Dec 31

I dreamt my wife and I adopted a baby elephant, and as she led it off our porch into the backyard, I tried to snap a pic to share with you. Dec 30

I dreamt I was invited to a major fashion show, and when a model complained about ’20s hairstyles, said, “Every age has its own wonders.” Dec 31

I dreamt I wandered with a crowd on some sort of secret mission, and when someone started firing at us with a machine gun, only I survived. Dec 28

I dreamt my son and I got into a discussion of the Iron Man stories from Tales of Suspense, but when he kept calling me Mr. Edelman, I woke. Dec 28

I dreamt a friend loaned me his car and I couldn’t get it to start, until I realized he’d wired it so without your seatbelt, it never would. Dec 28

I dreamt I tagged along with my congressperson as she visited the NSA, and the agents there teased me with info about me no one should know. Dec 27

I dreamt Paul Di Filippo and Deb Newton brought along their dog to Readercon and gave her to me to mind — she followed me wherever I went. Dec 27 (more…)