News

Shopping? Who, me?

"Sheepish about stepping out as the credit crunch bites, [British] lovers of shopping are hiding behind their computers where they can spend, spend, spend in complete privacy," London's The Observer reports. "The Web offers the perfect opportunity for a new breed of 'stealth shoppers,' embarrassed about flaunting their wealth, or what is left of it." Leading the charge in tactful shopping is Net-a-Porter.com, an online luxury fashion retailer, which in October launched an option for "discreet packaging." "You've been shopping - we won't tell," reads its leaflet, which shows a picture of one glamorous woman whispering into another's ear. The company promises to deliver items in "unbranded, recycled brown paper bags - and we'll be the only ones who know."

Hardship at Harvard

At Harvard University, the talk of billion-dollar losses in its massive endowment fund has blown in a new age of austerity across the campus, The Boston Globe reports. There are spending cuts big and small, from hiring freezes to the elimination of cookies and soft drinks from small faculty gatherings. "Faculty members, who are not slated for raises next year, will be expected to pitch in on clerical work. (Question: How many Harvard philosophy professors does it take to work a Xerox machine? Answer: Unclear. It's never been done.)"

The biggest fan

Forrest J Ackerman, 92, died this month in Los Angeles. His obsessive devotion to science fiction and horror stories was so fierce that he helped propel the popularity of these genres. He was a writer, film buff, editor of pulp magazines and anthologies, a literary agent for dozens of science-fiction writers and a bit player in movies.

Forry Ackerman became a sci-fi fan at nine years old when he bought the first issue of Amazing Stories. He would eventually fill a Los Angeles house with 300,000 books, posters, masks, film props and other artifacts.

Over the years, he published as many as 50 short stories of his own, and wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. For instance, calling himself Laurajean Ermayne, he produced stories for an under-the-counter lesbian magazine called Vice Versa.

He said the term "sci-fi" came to him in 1954, when he was listening to a car radio and heard an announcer say "hi-fi." The term sci-fi just came reflexively, he said. (Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein had used the term "sci-fi" as early as 1949, but Mr. Ackerman did popularize the term.)

In 1938, he published the first story by a young fan, Ray Bradbury, and would later pay the author's fare to New York for a meeting that Mr. Bradbury said helped launch his career.

He played bit parts in more than 50 movies: He is eating popcorn behind Michael Jackson in the Thriller music video (1983) and played the president of the United States in the spoof Amazon Women on the Moon (1987).

He called himself "4E" ("Forry"), a moniker that anticipated text messages by decades. His middle initial, J, always appeared without a full stop.

Sources: The New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph

Pardon

"The Arctic tundra lets out a huge icy burp every year, explaining a long-standing mystery about why atmospheric methane levels spike at the start of every winter," New Scientist reports. "Torben Christensen at Lund University in Sweden and colleagues reckon the freezing of the ground squeezes the soil like a sponge so that it belches out huge amounts of the gas. The team measured the flow of methane coming from the ground in northeastern Greenland at the onset of winter. They found that levels of the gas rose at the highest rate ever recorded in the Arctic tundra." The researchers' findings are published in the journal Nature.

Oops

"There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal," Clifford Coonan reports in The Independent. "Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming 'Hot Housewives in action!' ... Chinese is a tonal language, which means words sounding the same can often have very different meanings depending on how they are spoken. There are tales of drunken teenagers walking out of tattoo parlours with characters reading, 'This is one ugly foreigner' or 'A fool and his money are easily parted.' "

Thought du jour

"If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless."

- U.S. sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling