Weekly Online Fanzine Issue 0557 
ERB ECLECTICA ~ MOTES & QUOTES ERB-Date: 2001.03.09 |
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Weekly Online Fanzine Issue 0557
ERB ECLECTICA ~ MOTES & QUOTES ERB-Date: 2001.03.09 |
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1935 Associated Press release photo of "Creator of Tarzan." Original press release caption read: |
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www.erbzine.com/bio 1934 ERB, Ashton Dearholt and two other investors, form Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises to produce Tarzan pictures. Their office is located at 8476 Sunset Boulevard. Plans are made to film a Tarzan movie in Guatemala. March: Ed and Florence Dearhold, Ashton Dearholt and actress Ula Holt spend much time together. March 29: A divorce decree is granted to the Dearholts. April 17: Ed moves from The Garden of Allah to 2029 Pinehurst Road. He and Florence are in contact every day. July 29: Ed, Florence with her two children, and Mrs. Gilbert take a vacation in Big Basin at Santa Cruz and on to San Francisco. They return home to a whirl of social affairs October 20: Ed moves temporarily into the Dearholt apartment in West Hollywood when the lease on his Pinehurst Road home runs out. October 21: Ed and Florence travel to Las Vegas where he takes up residency. He spends his time playing tennis, writing, phoning Florence, and making brief visits to LA. Emma is planning to contest the divorce and moves to 10452 Bellagio Road in Bel Air. October 28: The Los Angeles Times reports that ERB has taken up residence in Las Vegas, hinting that most temporary residents are there to get quick divorces. November 11: Florence drives back to Las Vegas with Ed while Ashton takes care of the children. November 12: Walter Winchell reports that ERB is staying at the Apache Hotel in preparation to end 34 years of marriage. His next bride will be Florence Dearholt of Queens Road, Hollywood. December 4: Ed files for the divorce at the end of his six-week residency. Emma has decided not to offer objections. (Reported in the New York Times) December 6: Ed is granted a "quickie" divorce on the grounds of his wife's "extreme cruelty" and "incompatibility of temperament." Emma receives a generous settlement. Ed is quick to point out that Florence marriage came to an end as a result of Ashton's interest in Ula Holt. Both in distress, Ed and Florence were drawn together as sufferers in common. Ed feels deep guilt over the burden and upset that the breakup has put on his sons. December 25: Ed and Florence announce their engagement at the Gilbert home. January 7: ERB is enthusiastic over the early Guatemala rushes, on what is to be a 12-part Tarzan serial. February 20: Florence's thirtieth birthday. March 31: Ed meets with his attorney Frank McNamee to make plans for the wedding. April 1: Times photographers stake out Ed's house. April 4: Ed and Florence take a Western Air Express flight to Las Vegas. They are married at the court house at 10:20 by Judge William Orr with witnesses McNamee and Mrs. Keller. They fly back to LA. Joan, who had been Florence's close friend, would never speak to her again. Florence's children, Lee, age six, and Caryl Lee, age four, became very attached to Ed ("Ebby"). April 5: The newlyweds board the S.S. Lurline for Honolulu. During the voyage they dine at the Captain's table with Jeanette McDonald and her mother. April 11: Ed and Florence dock at Honolulu and receive leis sent by Florence's friend Janet Gaynor who has a cottage on the island. April 11 - May 11: ERB and his bride swim, surf and relax on their honeymoon in Hawaii. |
An abstract of an article featured in Smithsonian Magazine
Read the entire article in the March 2001 Smithsonian.
Tarzan the Eternal
by Bruce Watson
From the restless imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs sprang the most timeless of screen charactersDuring the mid-1920s, a strange jungle fever swept much of the world: millions of people eagerly devoured a tale about a boy raised by African apes and clamored for more stories about the ape-man's heroics. Swinging down through the decades, Tarzan has become one of the most enduring and popular fictional characters in America.
The man behind Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, also cut a wide swath through the jungle of pop culture. In the first half of the 20th century, the most widely read American author was not Hemingway or Faulkner, but Burroughs, whose paperbacks and pulp stories lay strewn across the bedrooms of countless escapists like himself. His 74 novels have sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into a Babel of languages.
It's surprising to learn, notes writer Bruce Watson, that all this came from a man who described himself as a flop and didn't publish his first book until he was nearly 40. He tried his hand unsuccessfully as a soldier, a gold dredger and a pencil sharpener salesman. Perusing a rack of pulp fiction one day, he figured he could write better stories than what he saw. Six months and three stories after Tarzan first appeared, Burroughs began writing full-time.
In 1918 the first Tarzan movie was released; Tarzan of the Apes became one of the first films to gross more than $1 million. By 1920, Tarzan serials were running in movie houses. Across America kids belonged to the Tribe of Tarzan. Burroughs slogged on, eventually writing, or dictating, 24 Tarzan books. He sowed the seeds of science fiction and inspired the likes of Ray Bradbury, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Star Wars' George Lucas.
"We would each like to be Tarzan," wrote Burroughs. "At least I would; I admit it."
For more information on this topic, see our Additional Sources
page and explore the Archives of Smithsonian Magazine:Calling for Silents, Please! (October 1995) Beauty and the Beasts (May 2000) Out of Africa: Heady Adornments (June 1996) To purchase a copy of the March 2001 issue, click here.
Abstract of an article by Bruce Watson, originally published in the March 2001 issue of Smithsonian.
Copyright 2001 Smithsonian Institution All rights reserved.
NEW EVIDENCE STRENGTHENS CLAIMS OF ANCIENT LIFE ON MARS:
STUDY OF MARTIAN METEORITE REVEALS MAGNETIC FOSSILS
February 26, 2001 ~ Catherine E. Watson ~ Johnson Space Center, Houston, TXResearchers have found magnetic material in a 4.5-billion-year-old Martian meteorite that could only have been produced by bacteria. This new data strongly supports the primitive life on Mars hypothesis of David McKay and co-authors in 1996.
"There are no known reports of any organic process that could produce such magnetites," said Kathie Thomas-Keprta, an astrobiologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center and the lead researcher on the study. The Martian magnetites are identical to those found in a bacteria strain on Earth called MV-1. "This group of magnetite deeply embedded in the Mars meteorite is so similar to the ones produced by the Earth bacteria that they cannot be told apart by any known measurement," said David McKay, a geologist at JSC and a co-author on the paper. "We considered that perhaps earth bacteria or earth magnetite had gotten into the Mars meteorite," McKay continued, "but extensive examination and testing by both our team and many other investigators eliminated that possibility."
Scientists generally agree that ALH84001 is a member of the group of 16 meteorites found on Earth that originated on Mars. The potato-sized igneous rock is the oldest of them - about 4.5 billion years. It lay in Antarctic ice for more than 13,000 years. But the biogenic-type magnetite crystals are embedded in 3.9-billion-year-old carbonates within ALH84001. Previous work by co-author Chris Romanek, of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory has shown that these carbonates formed on Mars; thus the magnetite crystals must also have formed on Mars.
Using electron microscopy, team members examined the Martian magnetites still embedded in the carbonate and also removed about 600 crystals and examined the individual particles to determine their chemical composition and crystal geometry. "These crystals are so tiny, ranging from 10 to 200 nanometers, that nearly a billion of them would fit on the head of a pin," said Thomas-Keprta.
The authors found that about a quarter of the Martian magnetites from ALH84001 are identical to magnetites produced on Earth by the magnetotactic bacteria strain MV-1, which has been extensively studied by co-author Dennis Bazylinski, a geobiologist and microbiologist at Iowa State University who has developed many ways of culturing these difficult to grow microorganisms. No one has found terrestrial inorganic magnetites, produced either naturally or in the laboratory, that mimic all the properties displayed by biogenic magnetites. "There is currently no known inorganic chemical means of producing these magnetite crystals with their unique morphologies," he said.
Magnetite (Fe3O4) is produced inorganically on Earth. But the magnetite crystals produced by magnetotactic bacteria are different - they are chemically pure and defect-free. Their size and shape is distinct. Magnetotactic bacteria arrange these magnetite crystals in chains within their cells. These characteristics make the magnetite crystals very efficient compasses, which are essential to the survival behavior of the bacteria by helping them locate sources of food and energy. "Mars is smaller than Earth and it developed faster," co-author Simon Clemett of Lockheed-Martin at JSC noted. "Consequently, bacteria able to produce tiny magnets could have evolved much earlier on Mars."
"The process of evolution has driven these bacteria to make perfect little bar magnets, which differ strikingly from anything found outside of biology," added, Joe Kirschvink, a geobiologist at Caltech and a co-author of the paper. "In fact, an entire industry devoted to making small magnetic particles for magnetic tapes and computer disk drives has tried and failed for the past 50 years to find a way to make similar particles. A good fossil is something that is difficult to make inorganically, and these magnetosomes are very good fossils."
Mars has long been understood to provide sources of light energy and chemical energy sufficient to support life. Early Mars, the authors note, may have had even more chemical energy produced by active volcanism and hydrothermal activity. Also, when the team asserted in 1996 that Martian meteorite ALH84001 showed signs of life existing on Mars, that planet was not known to have ever had a strong magnetic field. But since then, the Mars Global Surveyor has observed magnetized stripes in the crust of Mars that show a strong magnetic field existed early in the planet's history, about the same time as the carbonate containing the unique magnetites was formed. Surface features also suggest that early Mars had large oceans and lakes. These attributes, coupled with a CO2-rich atmosphere, provided the necessary environment for the evolution of microbes similar to the fossils found in ALH84001.
For a more technical discussion of this paper please see the following Web site:
http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/astrobiology/biomarkers/recentnews.html
E-GENRE
ERBzine contributor G.W. Thomas is now editing his own e-zine at:
http://egenre.tripod.com/index.html
http://e-genre.tripod.com/issueone.htm
E-GENRE: The Newsletter of Genre E-Publishing
NASA Wants You ... To Identify Martian Craters
By Robert Roy Britt
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/click_workers_010202.htmlIf you ever dreamed of doing a little science -- maybe classifying some Martian craters -- but didn't think you had the necessary skills, NASA has a program for you. And it just might save you and other U.S. taxpayers a buck or two.
An interactive online project called Clickworkers lets volunteers study decades-old pictures of Mars from the Viking spacecraft and pick out some of the thousands of craters that need classifying. It's the kind of tedium that most scientists might like to rise above. NASA bills the project as an experiment "to see if public volunteers, each working for a few minutes here and there, can do some routine science analysis."
So far, participation is good, said Bob Kanefsky, a software engineer who dreamed up the idea, built the software, and oversees the program on a contract basis for NASA. Between 8,000 and 12,000 craters a day are being analyzed. Some volunteers have returned over and over for weeks. But some 37 percent of the work has been done by one-time visitors.
Don't you need some formal scientific training for this?
"Absolutely not," Kanefsky says. "The whole idea is to see if non-scientists can help with the 95 percent of the task that requires only basic human abilities like recognizing pictures. If you know a mountain from a hole in the ground, you can be a crater-marking clickworker."
Participation couldn't be easier. Using web-based software that requires no downloading, a volunteer uses a mouse to make four clicks around the rim of a suspected crater. The software then outlines the crater in red.
For those who want to get more involved, classifying craters is a bit more challenging. The online software displays a crater, and asks you to decide if it is fresh, degraded, or if it is a "ghost" crater, one covered by overlying layers of soil. Visual examples of each classification are given.
With volunteers doing the bulk of the heavy lifting, the project's budget is less than $40,000.
Actually classifying craters requires some training, but an online tutorial provides instructions. Since the project began Nov. 17, volunteers have contributed nearly 300,000 crater-marking entries and more than 80,000 crater-classification entries.
For now, the pilot project does not promise any significant scientific returns. If the idea works, however, officials say it might be used to identify features in new images returned on a regular basis by current and future Mars missions. For that to happen, the project needs permanent funding.
Kanefsky said no decision has been made yet.
The project, at http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top, is run by NASA's Ames Research Center.
Alien Internet Conspiracy
By David PachecoThere is a growing conspiracy that states the Internet was devised by aliens to gather and analyze the collective consciousness of the human race. Many dismiss the whole idea as laughably preposterous. Then there are others, like theorist David Pacheco, who brave against popular consensus to offer lucid and compelling arguments to suggest this conspiracy is indeed terrifyingly real. Regardless of whether you personally subscribe to this theory or not, you'll find Alien Internet Conspiracy a damn good read.
http://www.hardcorelinux.com/alien.htm
Mark Twain to the Rescue?
An astronomer is on an expedition to Darkest Africa to observe a total eclipse of the sun, which will only be observable there, when he's captured by cannibals. The eclipse is due the next day around noon. To gain his freedom he plans to pose as a god and threaten to extinguish the sun if he's not released, but the timing has to be just right. So, in the few words of the cannibals' primitive tongue that he knows, he asks his guard what time they plan to kill him. The guard's answer is, "Tradition has it that captives are to be killed when the sun reaches the highest point in the sky on the day after their capture so that they may be cooked and ready to be served for the evening meal". "Great", the astronomer replies. The guard continues, though, "But because everyone's so excited about it, in your case we're going to wait until after the eclipse."
THIS WEEK'S GALLERIES
CARTOONS
Mystery Man in Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows
Coincidentally, Cho and Huckenpohler are both Panthans
ART
Lord
Greystoke presents rare Frazetta illustrations done for Canaveral
https://www.erbzine.com/cards/art4/fftarzanearthscore.jpg
SCREEN HEROINES
See ERBzine 0608
https://www.erbzine.com/mag6/0608.html
THE COMPLEAT OAK LEAVES, Volume 1, which reprints the first 12 issues is, alas, sold out. But, still available are: #13 - "Vision of Venus" illustrated comic by Tim Conrad, of Marvel's CONAN fame. "Otis Adelbert Kline: A Memoir" by pulp legend Arthur J Burks. "OAK: An Overview" by ERB scholar Paul C Allen. #14 - Two by Otis Adelbert Kline: "Three Minutes Dead," which tells the tale of writing TAM, SON OF THE TIGER for Weird Tales from his deathbed, and a complete reprint of a short detective story, "Murder Is A Pipe," from 1939. #15 - "What Is The Source of Prophecy?" by OAK, an issue- length reprint from 1939. #16 - "A Letter from Otis Adelbert Kline" - a classic, according to E Hoffmann Price! This letter, longer than many short stories, goes into fascinating detail on the pulp era during Depression days, and is required reading for any fan or researcher interested in the forgotten facts of the fictioneer days. These are all in short supply. |
The only hobby periodical devoted to the life and works of fantasy author OTIS ADELBERT KLINE! A must for serious students of the pulp fiction field as well as enthusiasts who have enjoyed the many short stories and interplanetary novels of this exciting author. "The only author to be compared with ERB, but whose work is as original as Burroughs' own!" Upcoming OAK Leaves contents include a special CALL
OF THE SAVAGE movie serial issue. Reprints of rare and obscure short stories,
pulp covers and book jackets--as well as more new and previously unpublished
original material by OAK! Photos and behind-the-scenes inside info on the
early days of the pulps!
OAK LEAVES
Numbers 13-16
Visit our ERBzin-e OAK pages at:
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David Anthony Kraft reports:
An OAK book "of sorts" just came out from University Press of America. Actually a hardcover anthology, titled TECHNOLOGY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Monahan and Nolan, it includes a chapter from OAK's MAZA. He's in good company, among Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Henry Adams, e e cummings, Gore Vidal and John Updike, among others.
Lou writes: "My interest in ERB started in the early
1960s and continued.
At one time I owned all that I knew of (ACE and Ballantine)
and was happy when I discovered Project Guttenburg
but reading a scrolling text document was hard.
MSreader and other programs (MSword,MSpaint,Photo
Editor)
allowed me to reformat and edit cover art.
any thanks to PROJECT GUTTENBURG."
Our ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. ENCYCLOPEDIA
has gathered links to many more e-text versions of
ERB's novels at:
http://www.erbzine.com/mag8/0889.html
