The day we left for the ICFA, I saw my first robin of the year.

As we were driving back from the airport 5 days later, I saw my first groundhog of the year. They're supposed to be in hiberation until early April, but I guess the 82F highs fooled at least this one.

What a world we are building.

(Back since Sunday but drowning in catsup catchup. People to whom I owe e-mails, be assured they are forthcoming.)

In much of the world, equities are traded by symbol, not by name. In the West, symbols are usually just strings of letters, sometimes abbreviations of the company name (Microsoft is MSFT, Sirius Radio is SIRI); sometimes they ARE the company name (Yum Brands, the holding company that owns a lot of food brands like Taco Bell, is YUM; 3M is MMM); and sometimes they're just unrelated or downright silly (US Steel is X; Southwest Airlines is LUV).

Unsurprisingly, because the names of the letters of the English alphabet sound alike, traders talking to each other often spell out symbol names--"M as in Mike, S as in Sarah, F as in Frank, T as in Ted"--because making mistakes is really bad. Getting AMN confused with ANN can be a 5000% error.

I realized shortly after taking a job in the equities industry that I really should learn a formal Radio Alphabet (e.g., the NATO phonetic alphabet), but I had so much else to absorb early on that I dragged my feet around it. About two months into the job, I was walking past the trading desk and I heard one of the traders telling a customer about a trade in symbol FPP, which he then spelled out as "fuck pussy pussy".

Within 5 minutes, I had a printout of the NATO alphabet taped to my monitor. I was never going to be at that much of a loss for words.

Tomorrow may mark the first time that the Direct Market New Comics Day has occurred 5 times in February.

The Direct Market came into existence in late 1972. When I started buying comics in the Direct Market in 1982, New Comics Day was Friday. It shifted to Thursday piecemeal between 1984 and 1990, and then to Wednesday sometime after 1991. I am not sure whether there really was a New Comics Day as early as 1980; if there was, it was probably Friday, in which case 1980 did have 5 NCD in February. So it might only have been 32 years:

Year	Day of Week
1976	Sunday
1980	Friday*
1984	Wednesday
1988	Monday
1992	Saturday
1996	Thursday
2000	Tuesday
2004	Sunday
2008	Friday
2012	Wednesday*

Because the regular shipping calendar only covers four weeks, DC used to run special events during these "Fifth Weeks". That hasn't happened in a long time, but it seems like tomorrow would have been a natural for a revival.

One of my favorite books is Michael Richie's Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television. It's a history of the very earliest days of television, the 20 or so years between the invention of television* and the launch of commercial television in the United States in 1948. Richie was annoyed by the degree to which standard histories of television overlooked the tremendous efforts and creativity brought to the enterprise of television during the pre-WWII era and set out to rewrite the canon to include the excluded. I respond on a visceral level to the unveiling of forgotten histories.

Many canonical histories of science fiction point to Hugo Gernsback as the inventor of the idea of science fiction; he did, after all, coin the term. No one seriously thinks he invented the method or techniques of science fiction, either as a writer (the dreadful Ralph 124C41+) or as an editor (of Amazing Stories, the first pulp dedicated exclusively to science fiction). Everyone knows that the techniques of science fiction go back to "Micromégas" and Frankenstein, through Poe and Verne and Wells and Shiel and so many other works that are clearly science fiction avant la future.

That first issue of Amazing in 1926 consisted entirely of reprints and served as a gathering-together of stories, exemplars of the types of fiction that Gernsback wanted to promote. As such, the more careful writers say that he was the first figure to approach science fiction as a distinct and coherent genre, complete with a community of readers. Although there are hundreds of works of proto-sf, there was never really a genre before Gernsback.

Well.

Over the last few years, Brian Stableford has been doing heroic work in translating French works of proto-sf into English--J.-H. Rosny aîné, Paul Féval, Maurice Renard, and many others. In the process, he has discovered that two French editors of the 19th century spent several years exactly carving out a genre of science fiction--gathering together sf works in their publications, catering to a distinct readership, and actively soliciting new works in this fiction-of-the-new. The only thing they lacked that Gernsback brought later (besides propeller beanie) was a single term for their new type of fiction--they didn't even use the existing term "roman scientifique". If they had come up with a term, it might well have become the standard.

So, there it is. A lost history of a forgotten future. Go, read.

*The invention of television occurred roughly in 1925-27 at the hands of several different people mostly independently, most notably John Baird and Philo Farnsworth. The difficulty of identifying the first "television" is not much less difficult than identifying the first "science fiction novel", for mostly the same reasons.

Back in the mid-1970s, Philip Jose Farmer wrote two sword-and-sorcery novels about the denizens of Opar, a lost city civilization created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1913 in the second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan.

The two novels sold decently well, but not well enough for DAW Books to publish the third novel in the series, focused on the cousin of Hadon, the protagonist of the first two novels.

Well, Subterranean Press is finally publishing The Song of Kwasin, as part of Gods of Opar, an omnibus with the first two. It's a shame that they didn't follow Farmer's observation that the third book was so distant from the first two that its best title would be Nowhere Near Opar.

I cannot find a music player for Android that

a) supports m3u playlists

AND

b) automatically bookmarks long audio files and resumes playing at the same point even if you go off and play another music file in the middle.

I would have thought both of these were common features, but no. "B" is a must-have for me--as noted, I listen to a lot of downloaded radio shows, and being able to stop, go to another file, and then come back in the same place is absolutely necessary. The only music player for Android that I've been able to find that does this is Astro Play. Anyone know any others?

The opening credits for the early 1980s family drama/comedy The Walking Dead.

Courtesy of The Comics Beat.

( Love and laughter )

From nellorat:

Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

"A benign demigod of boundless wisdom, his existence was devoted solely to observation and solitude."

--description of Uatu the Watcher from Lee and Kirby: The Wonder Years

Oh, dear. Oh, oh, dear.

Selecting works for the Graphic Stories Hugo is difficult because of the requirement to nominate specific stories rather than bodies of work. Since I most still read comics in pamphlets, and then don't re-read or re-buy them in collected form, it's hard for me to tell exactly what meets eligibility. However, I think all of these were published within or had their collected editions in 2011 and are thus valid.

So, here's my long list. Now I need to figure out how to trim this to 5. [ETA: I misunderstood the eligibility rules, which leads me to make a few additions and deletions. Thanks, stevendj.)

• House of Mystery: Conception (Matthew Sturges and Luca Rossi)


• iZombie: uVampire (Chris Robeson and Michael Allard)


• Joe the Barbarian (Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy)


• King City (Brandon Graham)


• Knight and Squire: For Six (Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton)


• "Locke and Key: Open the Moon" (Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez)


• Morning Glories: All Will be Free (Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma)


• Neonomicon (Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows)


• Oglaf, Collected Edition 1 (Trudy Cooper)


• Proof: Endangered (Alex Grecian and Riley Rossmo)


• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal vol. 2: The Most Dangerous Game (Zach Weiner)


• Secret Six: The Darkest House (Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore)


• Unwritten: Leviathan (Mike Carey and Peter Gross)


• The Weird World of Jack Staff by Paul Grist


• Xombi: The Ninth Castle (John Rozum and Frazier Irving)

Stricken because these both concluded in December 2010 and are thus not eligible, but they're still really good and you should buy the collections:

• Bulletproof Coffin (David Hine and Shakey Kane)


• Taskmaster: Unthinkable (Fred van Lente and Jefte Palo)

Almost made the list: Order of the Stick: Snips and Snails and Dragon Tails by Rich Berlew. However, this volume is really a collection of shorter pieces, not a coherent whole, and none of the individual pieces are quite of Hugo caliber by themselves. And I'm really tempted to mention X-Men Legacy #260 by Mike Carey and Khoi Pham (and others), but while it's a lovely, emotionally rich turning point for one of the best characters in the X-universe, it's really just a single chapter in the middle of a very long story, much of its impact depending on not just the stories immediately proceeding it but the 30 years of stories leading up to that. As such, nominating it makes about as much sense on its own as a random chapter from The Sword of the Lictor.

For next year, definitely expect to see Iron Man 2.0: Who Is Palmer Addley (Nick Spencer and Ariel Olivetti), the first Demon Knights arc and possibly the first I, Vampire arc, the current bifurcated Unwritten storyline, Warren Ellis's six-issue run on Secret Avengers (whatever its collective title ends up being), Casanova: Avaritia, and Locke and Key: Clockworks. And I suspect Journey Into Mystery will get in there, but I'm just starting reading that now. The "Finder" short stories in Dark Horse Comics Presents are brilliant; let's see if they turn into a story.

Back in December 2010 I complained:

The price of my monthly MTA (commuter rail) ticket just jumped 10%. . . . I hate how the Great Recession is slowly (or not-so-slowly) strangling government services, especially the services I use that encourage better methods of living, as public transit does.

Another example of that strangulation, about which I've seen very little discussion: The IRS has a policy whereby you can deduct a monthly amount from your taxable wage if you spend it on commuting expenses. As a wage deduction, this directly reduces your taxable income, so you get a discount on your commuting costs roughly equal to your highest marginal wage tax rate.

Until 2010, the maximum amount you could deduct for parking was much higher than the maximum amount you could deduct for mass transit: approximately $215/month for parking vs. $120/month for mass transit. In 2010, though, the mass transit benefit was increased to parity with parking, which is, if anything, not going far enough--tax policy should be used to encourage behavior which is less destructive rather than more destructive.

With the start of 2012, the mass transit benefit cap has dropped back down to $125/month, while the parking benefit increased to $240.

Stupid. Stupid. Our country is broken.