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  • Re: MT VOID, 05/23/25 -- Vol. 43, No. 47, Whole Number 2381

    From Gary McGath@21:1/5 to Evelyn C. Leeper on Sun May 25 16:06:33 2025
    On 5/25/25 7:56 AM, Evelyn C. Leeper wrote:

    THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928): "Comprachicos" is a term coined by
    Victor Hugo in the novel THE MAN WHO LAUGHS to describe people
    known in European folklore to steal and disfigure children for
    commercial gain, but their actual existence in Stuart England is
    questionable at best.  (The setting is straight from Hugo's
    novel.)  I'm not sure where in England one would have a blizzard
    like the one shown at the beginning.

    The film is best known for Conrad Veidt's performance.  Made in
    America five years before Veidt fled to Britain from Nazi Germany
    in 1933, it established him as an international star, and he had a
    very successful career in Britain, and later in the United States,
    where he is remembered primarily for his final role, Major
    Strasser in CASABLANCA.  In THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, his mouth is fixed
    in a permanent grin, meaning he can act only with his eyes, which
    he does magnificently.  So striking was his performance that it
    served as the inspiration for The Joker in BATMAN.  And the love
    story seems to have inspired Charlie Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS.  (This
    is just my opinion, though).

    _The Man Who Laughs_ may also have served as an indirect inspiration,
    through a book illustration that was quite different from the movie
    Gwynplaine, for Alfred E. Newman.

    For me and many others, Veidt's most memorable role was the sleepwalking murderer in _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_.

    Oh, an the ending is not Hugo's ending.

    You can tell because the protagonists survive.



    --
    Gary McGath http://www.mcgath.com

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  • From Gary McGath@21:1/5 to Jay Morris on Sun May 25 16:08:36 2025
    On 5/25/25 4:00 PM, Jay Morris wrote:
    On 5/25/2025 5:56 AM, Evelyn C. Leeper wrote:
              Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and
               nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. >>                                            --Anonymous

    To you or the toad. --Niven's restatement
    Well, most of the time, anyway. . . --programmer's caveat to Niven's restatement

    QI believes that the statement evolved from a quotation written by a
    famously witty French writer named Nicolas Chamfort who socialized with
    the aristocracy but supported the French Revolution. Chamfort’s
    collected works were published in French in the 1790s, and a memorably caustic remark about high-society was included. The words were actually credited to a person named Mr. de Lassay who functioned as a mouthpiece
    for Chamfort.

    Rostand's Cyrano makes a reference to it, apparently expecting the
    audience to get the allusion.

    --
    Gary McGath http://www.mcgath.com

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  • From Jay Morris@21:1/5 to Evelyn C. Leeper on Sun May 25 14:00:49 2025
    On 5/25/2025 5:56 AM, Evelyn C. Leeper wrote:
             Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and
              nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
                                              --Anonymous

    To you or the toad. --Niven's restatement
    Well, most of the time, anyway. . . --programmer's caveat to Niven's restatement

    QI believes that the statement evolved from a quotation written by a
    famously witty French writer named Nicolas Chamfort who socialized with
    the aristocracy but supported the French Revolution. Chamfort’s
    collected works were published in French in the 1790s, and a memorably
    caustic remark about high-society was included. The words were actually credited to a person named Mr. de Lassay who functioned as a mouthpiece
    for Chamfort.

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/03/eat-frog/

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  • From Dorothy J Heydt@21:1/5 to Evelyn C. Leeper on Sun May 25 20:02:49 2025
    In article <100v0i7$1c0cj$1@dont-email.me>,
    Evelyn C. Leeper <evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com> wrote:
    A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT covers events set after the first book.
    Only one character continues on (sort of) from it. We then see
    two chronicles laid out in parallel: one just after the first
    book, one decades earlier. Each explores what might happen when a
    human and an AI develop a long relationship. Eventually the two
    chronologies meet, and a plot develops. The story comes to a
    satisfying ending. Again, a good read.

    [Hal Heydt]
    I ran into a problem with this book that nearly caused me to
    utter Dorothy's "Eight Deadly Words". It's not the characters,
    or the plot or anything like that.

    My educational background is in Electrical Engineering and
    Computer Science (EECS major at UC Berkely), and thus a rather
    thorough grounding in and awareness of physical sciences. As
    such, I know about things like tidal locking.

    Chambers planetary system is a gas giant with a tidally locked
    moon large enough to retain an atmosphere. This is fine, no
    problems. However, she also asserts that it is tidally locked to
    the system sun. While tis is possible (there are two locations
    where the habital moon could be), it's not possible in the case,
    as she has it, that the gas giant is a large object in the sky of
    the side facing it. The orbital mechanics simply won't work, and
    that nearly made me give up on the book.

    Some time after the book came out, Chambers was GoH at FogCon and
    I had a chance to ask her about this. Her answer was that she
    wanted it that way. To me, that renders to book a work of
    fantasy, for all the SF trappings.

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