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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/06/97 -- Vol. 15, No. 49
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/~ecl.
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgibin/toccer?id=SteJekl&tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/eng-
parsed&part=0
The text of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. This will probably be a meandering discussion. I admit at the
beginning that I don't have a lot to write about this week. That
means a lot of side comments. The radio has just informed me that
Infinity is now the official luxury car of the new Broadway version
of JEKYLL AND HYDE. Just why they thought that would interest me,
I am not sure. I don't know exactly what that means. I keep
hearing things like Valujet is now the official airline of the
Olympic games. Or Eggo is the official waffle. The latter strikes
me as a darn good reason not to be athletic. But what does it mean
to be the official waffle or airline of the Olympics. I am sure
neither office goes back to Ancient Greece. Food was a lot more
primitive then. Perhaps Eggo waffles would have tasted good then,
just as an alternative to whatever they had to eat. They certainly
do not taste very good now. What did they eat in Roman times?
That would be really interesting, to have a recreation of what a
Roman would have thought was a good meal. We can read a little
about what the Romans ate, but do we know how to prepare it to the
taste of an ancient Roman, say Julius Caesar's favorite dish. Well
that is getting a little far afield of my original point.
You know you hear something like JEKYLL AND HYDE has chosen an
official car and you start to wonder what they were thinking of. I
kind of doubt that cars fit into the Stevenson story. Just as an
aside, I have yet to find anybody who knows what the name of the
famous Stevenson story is. That may be because nobody has ever
accurately titled a film version of the story. No, the story is
not entitled "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Look it up. The real
title of the story is "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde." Even Evelyn did not know that. And Evelyn is pretty good
about that sort of thing. She understood my joke about Bill
Clinton and just about nobody else has. I was in a room full of
people the weekend of Chelsea Clinton's birthday when the Clintons
went to see Broadway plays. I said that President Bill had said he
specifically did not want to go see OUR AMERICAN COUSIN. Evelyn
noticed something I missed--that I got a room full of blank stares.
What I discovered was that Evelyn had gotten the joke and nobody
else had. At the time it seemed a real jaw-dropper to me, but in
the interim I have asked quite a large number of people, many of
whom I consider erudite, and I have found only two more people who
knew the point of my quip. I suppose I will publish the answer
next week, but if you know the answer you might send me email and
let me know. No prize, but you will have the pride of having known
the answer. That puts you into a small elite apparently.
But I again digress. I know that at the time that the story took
place there were not a lot of automobiles around. I think of
JEKYLL AND HYDE as being about 1886, which would have been only
about a decade before Henry Ford did his inventing. I guess making
an official car has symbolic meaning. Fancy cars have often been
named for things that are scary and dangerous. You know. Jaguars,
Barracudas, that sort of thing. Are they saying it is a car that
looks good but can turn into a real monster. I am not sure why any
car would want to be associated with a horror story. What is the
official car of Frankenstein? Just something someone puttered
together in their garage? Somehow calling a car "the new Chevy
Dracula" would sound like it could be a real gas guzzler. Though I
guess it might attract a young crowd since it sounds like it would
be good for parking and necking once the sun goes down. An
Oldsmobile Mummy may look like and old patch-up junker, but it
keeps on going. Maybe it drags one tire. Would you want to drive
a Cadillac Godzilla? Probably only if you were into something
really big that had fins. Ok, I guess that's enough. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619