THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/13/07 -- Vol. 26, No. 2, Whole Number 1449
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Mark Leeper on Television
Hot Topic: The Joy of Self-Immolation--Chili Peppers
(Part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Free Inside (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (Science Fiction Museum and Hall of
Fame) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Mark Leeper on Television (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"Cereal Thriller" will be broadcast on History TV in Canada Friday,
July 20th at 8:00PM. Mark Leeper is one of the people interviewed
for this. He was contacted based on his article "Free Inside" in
the 05/01/98 issue of the MT VOID, which is reprinted below.
Whether this will ever run on United States television is unknown
at this time. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Hot Topic: The Joy of Self-Immolation--Chili Peppers
(Part 2) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I was talking about fiery chili peppers and
specifically their active ingredient, Capsaicin. These are
plants from the same family spread around the world after having
been cultivated in the New World for millennia. But these plants
have always been treated with caution. And it is for good
reason. This is the family of plants is called the "nightshade
family" because all the plants that are close relatives contain
dangerous alkaloids. The family is called the nightshade family
because it really is just variations on the deadly nightshade
plant. In the family are potato, eggplant, tomato, green pepper,
tobacco, deadly nightshade (belladonna), jimsonweed, henbane,
mandrake and petunias. They are all plants that have been treated
with some caution. Certainly belladonna is a deadly poison and
parts of each of the plants are dangerous. Don't make a salad of
the leaves of a tomato plant. Eating unripe potatoes that are
still green is a bad idea because they still contains dangerous
alkaloids. Don't worry if you have eaten one or two, but don't
make a habit of it. Of course, the tomato fruit (yes, is a
fruit) was considered to be poisonous for a long time. What is
interesting was that it was known that poor people were eating
and enjoying tomatoes in many parts of the world, but they were
thought to be poisonous for the more wealthy. Tomatoes were slow
to get acceptance.
There was a time when a chili pepper habit, one such as I have,
was considered a bad thing. I know that people from my mother's
generation were raised thinking that hot peppers could be
dangerous. It took years to convince my mother that swallowing
something that was an irritant was not necessarily a bad idea. I
remember visiting her and being served her (delicious as they
were, Mom) scrambled eggs. I asked if there was any Tabasco
Sauce to be had on them. "Not for breakfast," she responded
without missing a beat. Eventually I convinced her that some
Mexicans eat for breakfast Huevos Rancheros, which are frequently
spicy. And I started showing her articles from the magazines she
subscribed to, extolling the health virtues of hot peppers. I
think I may have convinced her they were all right to eat for
someone other than her. But many people are not anxious to eat
piquent food. Go to any Thai restaurant and you will find that
out.
As I explained last week most drugs generally are not really good
to become addicted to. Capsaicin was thought to cause stomach
ulcers, for example. Certainly people who had stomach ulcers had
a lot of pain when they ate spicy foods and put irritants into
their stomachs. And yes, putting an irritant on anything as pain
sensitive as an ulcer is going to hurt. The conclusion that
somebody drew was that the irritant had actually caused the ulcer
in the first place. Nope. We now know that the bacteria
Helicobacter pylori cause most stomach ulcers. There are various
substances you can put in your diet to inhibit the Helicobacter
pylori. One of the best is . . . capsaicin. If you eat a lot of
hot food, you are actually less likely to develop ulcers. In
fact it has been at least twenty years since I have seen anyone
with any medical background who had a bad word to say about
eating hot peppers. Hot peppers have been exonerated of nearly
every health accusation ever made against them. And for every
negative claim that that proves to be untrue, three positive
claims seem to take its place. The negatives now appear to be
for those not allergic to them to keep them away from your eyes
and any other sensitive areas you want to protect form them--
including your tongue. Beyond that, feel free to use peppers as
hot as feels good.
Beyond that the serious health claims for hot peppers go beyond
good to almost being ridiculous. Eating or topically applying
Capsaicin it seems to help against prostate and other cancers,
arthritis, headaches, heart disease, sinus problems, weight
problems, and now diabetes. That is list is pretty much the full
slate. If you were to just fantasize what medical problems would
you want a single natural substance to help with, that is pretty
much the set you would pick. You would probably want it to help
against AIDS, but that is about the only one missing.
You might want to take a look at the summaries at these sites.
http://www.whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=140
http://tinyurl.com/3y4mhd
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2281222.stm
http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=344
http://ri.essortment.com/garlichealthon_rfzf.htm
Ironically, Capsaicin is really a defense system by certain
plants to protect them from being eaten. The strategy fails
spectacularly when it come to humans like me who actually enjoy
getting the worst of the plant's defense mechanism. It goes
against logic that humans should actually grow to enjoy applying
irritants to the most sensitive parts of their bodies, their
tongues. Well, it is like this. Our body has its own defense
mechanisms. The Capsaicin irritates cells on the tongue (and
elsewhere like the nose and throat) called trigeminal cells. The
cells pass the message of the pain to the brain. You brain
thinks something bad is going on in your mouth. Its reaction is
that the body has to flee this danger so it tries to kill the
pain by releasing endorphins. They are the same substances that
an athlete releases when experiencing the so-called "runners'
high." The eater knows that the body is not in trouble and is
free to just enjoy the positive feelings that the endorphins
cause. Okay, perhaps this is endorphin abuse, but there is no
law against that. People who for some physiological reason lose
the ability to produce the endorphins very quickly find that they
are no longer fond of spicy food. Note: there actually is a hot
sauce that calls itself Endorphin Rush. While it may not be a
real addiction in most cases, people do come to seek out this
endorphin rush. This is why spicy foods are so popular. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Free Inside (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
[originally published in the 05/01/98 MT VOID]
I was reading my cereal box this morning. That is pretty safe. They
don't get too many postmodern writers to write on boxes of cereal. In
fact I have often wondered who does actually write the text for boxes
of cereal. It requires a whole different writing style. For one thing
I think you really have to know your adjectives. Words like "light,"
"crispy," and "nutlike" have to come readily to the pen when writing
the text that goes on a box of cereal. But the one thing that I found
missing was "Free Inside."
Now when I was a kid the best thing to see on a box was "Free Inside."
I grew up in the Golden Age of Free Inside. You don't get great
premiums inside boxes of cereal any more. I am not sure you get any
toys in cereal boxes. I remember when Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker
Puffed Rice actually gave away deeds to land in the Yukon inside boxes
of their cereal. You probably think I am joking here, but they really
did. That was when they sponsored SGT. PRESTON OF THE YUKON. They
must have bought up a chunk of land, divided it up into something like
square-inch parcels, had legal deeds printed up, and gave them away in
cereal. At one time I owned three or four parcels of land in the
Yukon. And it worked. I suddenly got really interested in Sgt.
Preston and his lead dog King. After all, that was my property he was
protecting. At least it was out there someplace. Maybe someday I
would find it and build on it. Though a gumdrop was about all I would
have been able to place on it. Just to see my land I would have to
trespass on land owned by about 37 other one-time little cereal eaters.
Thinking about it, I am sure by now somehow that someone else has
gotten ownership of the land, but at one point it was mine. It was so
small that if it was all in one place I could hide it with my hand.
But it was mine and I owned it. That was the best Free Inside ever.
What are some of the other classics? I guess I remember this stuff
pretty well because this is what it took to form me. You really needed
something to get you through the day back then. You have to remember
that back then a Saturday morning was about as long as three and a half
of our days. And children have a lot of energy to dissipate. They
have good muscles, but much less mass than adults do. The square-cube
law says that little kids are going to have much higher muscle to mass
ratio than we do. I remember wondering why adults just wanted to sit
around at the end of a day, and now I know it is because they are
pushing around all the mass of an adult body. Perhaps children would
be more pleasant and also healthier if we put weights on their arms and
legs. But when I was small you could not just shut down all that
energy and just sit and watch SKY KING or CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT. You needed
something to do with your hands to dissipate excess energy. That's
what Free Insides were good for. Well, the Yukon deed might not be so
good. What kind of a kid would sit down and read the fine print during
WINKY DINK? (Okay, WINKY DINK was Sunday morning.) Probably it was
just the ones who grew into lawyers. No, for Saturday morning TV shows
I recommend a little toy rocket launcher that came free inside
something like Nabisco Honey Wheats. Basically it had a catch
mechanism and a spring. You put the little missile on it and it
clicked in place, then you pressed the catch and it fired. That one
was particularly memorable since it was an action toy. Sometimes you
just got little toy plane models of real planes. Somebody at the
cereal company must have served in World War II and remembered his days
of plane spotting.
I have heard people say that you got decoder rings and glow in the dark
rings in cereal. I think you had to send away for those with a proof
of purchase. I think you could get a little submarine powered by
baking powder in a box of cereal, but the frogmen that went to the
surface and then dived again, also powered by baking powder, were a
send-away offer. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
[This continues the description of the Science Fiction Museum and
Hall of Fame in Seattle.]
"FANTASTIC VOYAGES" included all the paraphernalia of space
travel. There were "Space Suits", both real ones from NASA, and
fictional ones such as helmets from Captain Video; Quarlo
Cobregney, RMENTNDO, from the "Soldier" episode of "The Outer
Limits"; Darth Vader from "Star Wars"; "Buck Rogers" (from
television); and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture". There were
also various uniforms from movies and television.
There was a claim that Arthur (?) Train's "Stranded" introduced
science fiction weightlessness in space, but what about Verne's
"From the Earth to the Moon" or Wells's "First Men in the Moon"?
(I think it was Arthur Train, but I did not note the first name,
and I cannot find any such story in the various reference works.)
The "Armory" had ray gun toys, covers with ray guns, the "Voice
Amplifier" from "Dune", phasers, the crossbow from "Barbarella",
daggers from "Star Trek", hand weapons of all sorts, the "fun
gun" from "Dr. Who", and blasters and disruptors.
"Communication Devices" included the inorganic selenite crystals
used as translators in "First Men in the Moon" and a diagram of
the Babel Fish from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
"Scanners and Medical Devices" had many items from "Star Trek",
but also copies of several James White books.
"Ad Astra ... To the Stars" had a section on "Spaceships" which
included "A Trip to Mars" by Fenton Ash. (Has anyone reading
this ever even heard of that?!) There was also "Across the
Zodiac" by Edwin Pallandep, another classic.
One of the really great items was the typed manuscript of "The
Skylark of Space" by E. E. Smith. There were also several
Chesley Bonestell paintings.
"Reality Strikes Back" was a section on how faster-than-light
travel has been treated when the author has wanted to acknowledge
the limitations imposed by relativity. Another section had space
travel from "Star Trek".
"Ships of the New Science Fiction" featured "A Fire upon the
Deep" by Vernor Vinge, "Startide Rising" by David Brin",
"Revolution Space" by Alistair Reynolds, "The Reality
Dysfunction" by Peter F. Hamilton, and "Consider Phlebas" by Iain
Banks.
The "Spaceship Scanning Station" showed a continuous video with a
lot of spaceships from different sources interacting. The ships
are from "First Men in the Moon", "Rendezvous with Rama",
"Farscape", "Forbidden Planet", "When Worlds Collide", "Star
Wars", "Star Trek". "Alien", "Flash Gordon", "Red Dwarf", "Close
Encounters of the Third Kind", "Futurama", "Babylon 5", "Cities
in Flight", and "Cowboy Bebop". For each of these there was a
"mission description" that would tell you about the ship, but
there seemed to be a few other ships with no description (e.g.,
"2001: A Space Odyssey").
"Teleportation" had a poster for "The Four-D Man", but Mark
pointed out that this is not teleportation. There was also
"Scale Changes". This had "Land of Giants", "Gulliver's Travels"
by Jonathan Swift, "Fantastic Voyage", "The Amazing Colossal
Man", "Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman", and "The Princess in the
Atom" by Ray Cummings. (I wonder if this was what Mark was
thinking of as being in the "Nanotech" section in "HOMEWORLD".)
Another section was "Time Travel". "Inter-Dimensional Travel"
included "The Quiet Earth"; "...And He Built a Crooked House" by
Robert A. Heinlein; "Moving Mars" by Greg Bear; "Little Girl
Lost" by Richard Matheson; "Islands of Space" by John W.
Campbell, Jr.; "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle; and
"Catch the Star Winds" by A. Bertram Chandler.
There was a section on "Rocket Packs".
The "Science Fiction Hero" also included villains, sidekicks,
etc., as well as "Heroic Satire". The latter had "Bill, the
Galactic Hero" and "The Stainless Steel Rat", both by Harry
Harrison. "Heroes of Every Size, Shape . . . and Species" had
"The Skylark of Space" by E. E. Smith, "Shambleau" by C. L.
Moore, "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" by
Octavia Butler, "Chanur" by C. J. Cherryh, and "Ender's Game" by
Orson Scott Card. They also had Captain Marvel's tunic and lots
of the merchandising tie-ins from "Star Wars".
"Artificial Constructs and Amazing Places" included "Flatland" by
Edwin S. Abbott, "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem, "Ringworld" by
Larry Niven, "Sundiver" by David Brin, and "Flux" by Stephen
Baxter.
One of the really amazing items the Museum has is "Jupiter as
Seen from Its Innermost Satellite", painted by Chesley Bonestell
in 1945. It was just hanging on the wall, not in a case, or
behind glass. There is something about being physically in the
same space with something like that that is impossible to convey.
It is the difference between seeing a picture of the "Mona Lisa"
and seeing the actual "Mona Lisa".
There was a case of Arrakis items and props from David Lynch's
version of "Dune".
Another anamorphic spherical screen was showing the planets
Solaris, Acheron (from "Alien"), Hoth ("The Empire Strikes
Back"), Pygmy Planet (from Jack Willlamson), Jupiter and Athshe
("The Word for World Is Forest" by Ursula K. LeGuin).
A display on Mesklin from "Mission of Gravity" by Hal Clement had
"The Slide Rule and How to Use It" from the 1940s by Harry Drell
and a Keuffel & Esser slide rule.
"Experimental Societies" included "Logan's Run" by William F.
Nolan; "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes" by Mack Reynolds; "THX
1138"; "We" by Yevgeny Zamiatin; "The Handmaid's Tale" by
Margaret Atwood; "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. LeGuin (but
not "The Dispossessed"); "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury; "A
Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess; "Utopia" by Thomas More;
"Matrix Revolutions" and "1984" by George Orwell. As a reference
to the last, they had a recent poster from a British campaign
about surveillance cameras on public transit, with drawings of
eyes watching you and suggestions of Big Brother. It was
supposed to reassure people, but somehow it did not have that
effect. Most of the "experimental societies" shown were
dystopias; for some reason the eutopias are not as engrossing.
One needs conflict, I suppose, but one could certainly find some
stories in which a eutopia is threatened from outside instead of
having the conflict as internal.
"Controlling the Masses" had "Minority Report", "The Prisoner",
"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. "1984" by George Orwell,
"Patterns of Force" episode of "Star Trek", "Earth" by David
Brin, and "Hominids" by Robert Sawyer. (Note: "Minority Report"
was based on a Philip K. Dick story of the same name. In
general, if the display featured the movie poster, I list the
movie title, not the story.)
"Visions of the Future" included "Perdido Street Station" by
China Mieville, "Neuromancer" by William Gibson, "Looking
Backward" by Edward Bellamy, "The Difference Engine" by William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
by Philip K. Dick, "The Steampunk Trilogy" by Paul Di Filippo,
"When the Sleeper Wakes" by H. G. Wells, and "Men Will Live on
Mountaintops" by Winsor McCay.
A video discussing "Cities of Tomorrow" had sections on "The
Jetsons" (discussed by Leonard Maltin), "Blade Runner" (Los
Angeles, 2019) (discussed by Bruce Sterling and Paul Sammon), and
"The Matrix" (Earth/Cyberspace, 2199) (discussed by Paul Sammon).
A final display, "Out of the Ashes" had "The Day of the Triffids"
by John Wyndham (I think they had both the book and the movie
poster); "The Long Tomorrow" by Leigh Brackett; "Damnation Alley"
by Roger Zelazny; "The Day the World Ended"; several items from
or about "Planet of the Apes"; "The World Wreckers" by Marion
Zimmer Bradley; "The Long Loud Silence" by Wilson Tucker; "Alas,
Babylon" by Pat Frank; "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart; "The
Postman" by David Brin; "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M.
Miller, Jr.; "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute; "City" by Clifford
Simak, "The Purple Cloud" M. P. Shiel, "The Scarlet Plague" by
Jack London, and an issue of "Astounding" (February 1941). There
was also an issue of "Fantastic Universe" from August-September
1953 featuring a painting of a half-buried Statue of Liberty that
almost certainly inspired the scene from "Planet of the Apes".
We finished this room about 12:30PM, taking about an hour. The
women's restroom on this floor has the zero-G toilet instructions
from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and a "Dr. Who and the Daleks" lobby
card reproduction. The men's room has a different lobby card and
no instructions. The same exterior signs are used here as
upstairs.
[to be continued] [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
No man really becomes a fool until
he stops asking questions.
-- Charles Steinmetz