Following is the “MonSFFAndom” column absent from Warp 109:
Given that no other MonSFFen presented themselves as candidates for office, MonSFFA’s sitting Executive Committee will be officially acclaimed to office for the coming year, 2021. The club’s elections were held during the Zoom session conducted in conjunction with MonSFFA’s January 9, 2021, virtual meeting, marking the first time ever the vote was carried out online, necessitated, of course, by current circumstances.
Cathy Palmer-Lister, Keith Braithwaite, and Sylvain St-Pierre all ran again for the same positions they had held in 2020: president, vice-president, and treasurer, respectively.
As they ran unopposed, and all were prepared to continue in their respective roles, they were unofficially declared acclaimed to office shortly after the vote. Official confirmation will come during the scheduled February 13 virtual meeting, at which time a formal announcement will be made ushering MonSFFA’s 2021 Executive Committee into office, with congratulations extended.
We’ll congratulate them here and now, wish them well with what will be another challenging year for the club, and at the same time thank all those MonSFFen who exercised their right to vote.
MonSFFA elects annually its Executive Committee. Any club member in good standing who is responsibly and reliably able to carry out the duties of office is eligible to run for any one of the three posts. A candidate may be nominated by another club member in good standing, or nominate themselves. All MonSFFen in good standing are eligible to cast a ballot.
Club’s Virtual Meetings Archived and Available on Web Site
The COVID-19 crisis compelled the club to move all of its activities online for most of last year, and we anticipate much the same approach will be required for the bulk of this year. September will likely be the earliest opportunity for a return to in-person meetings, so we’ll be holding our get-togethers on the club’s Web site and via Zoom for a while yet.
One of the good things about holding our assemblies online is that out-of-town club members are easily able to “attend,” and anyone who misses a meeting is able to access after the fact the presentations included as part of any given e-gathering. All of the posts that make up each virtual meeting remain archived on the MonSFFA Web site (www.MonSFFA.ca) for those who might have missed the fun day-of, or simply wish to again peruse the content that was proffered.
To facilitate that, we’ll publish here, within our synopses of each meeting, the URLs for each of the posts making up each of the online gatherings we’ve hosted, September 2020 until present. To access a specific post, or view an entire meeting, just enter the corresponding URL(s) into your search engine.
September 2020
The September 12, 2020, virtual meeting began with our usual recap of recent pandemic news, the agenda for the afternoon, a couple of coronavirus parody songs, these YouTube gems having become a staple of all of our e-meetings, and a trivia game prepared by Keith Braithwaite challenging folk to identify superheroes by way of their secret identities (Post 1: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13335).
Next came Danny Sichel’s treatise on Education in SF/F (Post 2: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13182), exploring the genre’s depictions of how human beings teach and learn, and what happens when aliens, and even our planet’s other sentient species, are thrown into the mix, all attendant ramifications considered. Danny provided his “students” with a variety of examples from page and screen, and covered, too, the many cool schools depicted in SF/F—Hogwarts, Starfleet Academy, Discworld’s Unseen University, etc.
We paused for our customary mid-meeting break, offering here our established format, the “virtual display table,” a “raffle,” and our Zoom session (Post 3: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13285). The display table photographically showcases the various genre-related crafting projects on which folk are working, our raffle affords people a chance to win a participation prize in exchange for a contribution to, or comment on the meeting, and the Zoom session enables MonSFFen to touch base with each other via a brief video-chat. On this occasion, the latest issue of Warp was announced available, too.
The afternoon’s second presentation followed, Joe Aspler’s roster of Shakespearean actors in SF/F (Post 4: www.monsffa.ca/?p=12804), with Joe providing a long list of Shakespearean-trained thespians who’ve appeared in genre film and television productions, from William Shatner and Patrick Stewart to Keanu Reeves and Bugs Bunny!—lots of Canadians on the list, no doubt thanks to the famous Stratford Festival.
Sylvain St-Pierre added a gallery of backyard insects and arachnids (Post 5: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13064), often the inspiration for the bizarre aliens and sci-fi monsters to be found, frequently in giant form, on vintage science fiction magazine or paperback covers, and in genre cinema.
The meeting closed with a few more coronavirus parody songs, the answers to Keith’s earlier trivia test, and a couple more items of interest (Post 6: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13342). Thanks were accorded all involved and an invitation extended to reconvene in October for the club’s next virtual meeting.
October 2020
Our October 17 online get-together featured Halloween-themed content, beginning with Keith Braithwaite’s comical 19 Basic Rules for Surviving Halloween (Post 1: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14092), liberally illustrated with EC Comics-type horror panels positively dripping with blood!
Next came Sylvain St-Pierre’s examination of The Many Faces of the Moon (Post 2: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13785), in honour of a full and blue moon both falling on October 31—Halloween—a rather rare occurrence. From the superstitions and mythologies surrounding the moon to the many science fiction stories involving our closest celestial neighbour to speculations of future moon bases and more, Sylvain provided detailed information and amusing commentary on the topic.
The mid-meeting break followed (Post 3: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13711), again comprising all of this intermission’s familiar features.
The latter part of the agenda advanced Joe Aspler’s Mad Scientist Hall of Fame (Post 4: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13663), featuring boffins ranging from absent-minded to evil! Josée Bellemare then volunteered suggestions (Post 5: www.monsffa.ca/?p=13522) for celebrating under quarantine this special spooky Saturday (Halloween 2020 happened to fall on a Saturday), and Keith returned to wrap things up with the meeting’s final chapter (Post 6: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14098), recounting the story behind the popular line of classic movie-monster “all plastic assembly kits” produced by the Aurora Plastics Corporation during the 1960s and early-1970s, and the ensuing “Monster Craze” sparked by these models. Thanks were tendered to all of the afternoon’s contributors.
On a sad note, condolences were also offered on the passing of Lucio Zarlenga, a long-time manager at the downtown hotel that hosted MonSFFA’s monthly meetings. Lucio had been a wonderful friend to the club, always cutting us a great deal on function space rental, and providing above-board service regarding our sometimes unusual requirements.
November 2020
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A typical November meeting would have been given over to the club’s annual fund-raising sci-fi book sale, but given the continuing pandemic, we instead built our online gathering of the 14th around the theme of books.
Keith Braithwaite began by putting up a gallery of sci-fi magazine- and book-cover art, asking if MonSFFen were able to identify the SF/F artists who had painted these amazing images (Post 1: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14802).
Next up was Joe Aspler’s Big Book of Failed, Bad, and Foolish Predictions (Post 2: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14308), a droll look back through history to see how even distinguished scientists and other learned men got it wrong! “The construction of an aerial vehicle which could carry even a single man requires the discovery of some new metal or some new force,” proclaimed Professor Simon Newcomb in 1901. The Nova Scotia-born Newcomb was America’s most eminent astronomer at the time. Two years later, the Wright brothers successfully made the first (disputed by some!) powered flights in their illustrious Flyer near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Our midway pause (Post 3: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14624) was true to the afternoon’s theme, highlighting in snapshots some of the sizable book collections of club members, and presenting for our merriment a number of book-related cartoons amid the break’s regular features.
Following this, we were presented with Sylvain St-Pierre’s Compendium of Unusual Books (Post 4: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14280), a collection of genre-flavoured tomes oversized and miniature, thick and thin, curio-like and elaborately decorative, including holy books and grimoires, pop-up books and hardcovers with hidden storage compartments cut into their pages. Josée Bellemare joined Sylvain to next mount a photographic tour of unique, beautifully appointed, and architecturally stunning bookshops and libraries from around the world (Post 5: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14485). Make-believe libraries, too, were included, like The Citadel (Game of Thrones) and the Jedi Library (Star Wars).
Keith closed the book on this meeting, divulging the names of the artists who had produced those cover images he assembled at the outset, and signing off until the next meeting with thanks to all involved (Post 6: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14823).
An addendum (Sign-Off: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14121) put up something of our own after-credits scene in the form of a vintage Merrie Melodies cartoon singing the praises of books.
December 2020
MonSFFA has not held a meeting in December for many moons. Rather, it has long been our practise to get together at a downtown restaurant/bar for dinner and drinks in celebration of the season. In the midst of a pandemic, clearly, that just wasn’t in the cards, so we opted to hold another of the online gatherings we’d been hosting since April, assigning a seasonal theme to the occasion, naturally!
Proceedings opened with seasonal greetings to all and the familiar introductory notes, plus a couple of Christmas-themed coronavirus parody songs, before the wrapping was torn off of Keith Braithwaite’s Trivia Challenge for the Festive Season and his personal list of must-see Christmas movies and TV specials, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), and Die Hard (1988) among them (Post 1: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15264).
Our Zoom session (Post 2: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15234) was expanded for the first time—courtesy MonSFFA’s recently acquired Zoom subscription—and began at 1:30PM, running pretty much the whole length of the meeting, in tandem with the Web site-based content. During this video-chat, Keith gave a brief talk on the Yuletide classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), sharing clips and underlining the film’s alternate history sequence, in which suicidal protagonist George Bailey’s guardian angel allows him, on Christmas Eve, the chance to see what things would have been like for his family and friends had he never been born.
Meanwhile, Sylvain St-Pierre’s tutorial went up automatically on the Web site, this being an historical overview of Christmas and other seasonal celebrations, from the Winter Solstice and Scandinavia’s Yule to the origins of Santa Claus and sci-fi’s many twists on the holiday (Post 3: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15232).
Joe Aspler next outlined the history and traditions of Hanukkah (Post 4: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15123), and included NASA video of astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman spinning the first Dreidel in space aboard the space shuttle Endeavour! Joe simultaneously gave his seminar live as part of the Zoom.
The usual mid-meeting pause followed, with our display table sporting a couple of Christmas articles (Post 5: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15150), after which Josée Bellemare put forward The Many Ways of Joy (Post 6: www.monsffa.ca/?p=14958), her rundown of the various traditions extant at this time of year, from Christmas and Hanukkah to Kwanzaa and New Year’s Eve.
Festivities concluded (Post 7: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15364) with the answers to Keith’s earlier posted trivia quiz, a nod of thanks to everyone who contributed to the meeting, and a closing “Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!”
January 2021
We began 2021’s MonSFFActivities with our January 9 virtual conclave, kicking off a new year with word on the latest public health restriction to be imposed in the on-going battle with rising COVID-19 case numbers: a Québec-wide nightly curfew, scheduled to begin this very evening at 8:00PM. Also, having suspended the collection of annual membership fees almost a year ago after the club’s March 2020 meeting, notice was here given of MonSFFA’s intention to start collecting said fees again, beginning in April 2021. Keith Braithwaite opened programming proper with his New Year’s Anagram Challenge, in which folk were tasked with unscrambling a list of names that sounded like those of fresh Star Wars characters, but were really those of sci-fi luminaries. And, as MonSFFA’s 2021 Executive Committee was to be selected during the afternoon’s Zoom session, a primer laid out the details of the club’s election procedures, modified this year to unfold online (Post 1: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15855).
At 1:30PM, our Zoom session opened (Post 2: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15635) and would run the length of the meeting, as it had the previous month. Shortly thereafter, Danny Sichel put up Other People’s Toys (Post 3: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15617), his discussion of fan fiction, or “fanfic.” He covered fanfic’s origins, definition, what motivates us to indulge in the form, what is and is not fanfic, the legal questions arising, and so on.
Break-time was upon us (Post 4: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15539) and during this recess, the club’s elections took place (see “Sitting Executive Acclaimed to Office for 2021,” above) and a request was made for more folk to pitch in with content for future meetings.
Joe Aspler was up next with his Libraries, Books, and L-Space (Post 5: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15619), exploring the power and magic of books and the places that house them through the works of Terry Pratchett and others. Amazingly, Joe even gave “proof” of the genuine existence of L-space, those multidimensional folds within which all libraries everywhere are connected!
Sylvain St-Pierre’s Stone Age Gallery (Post 6: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15622) was an assemblage of various things prehistoric, from paleontological drawings and murals to comic books about antediluvian exploits and screen adventures starring dinosaurs. Sylvain felt that the world could use a reset after last year, so why not start at the beginning?
Keith wrapped up by unscrambling for folks those anagrams he’d posted at the top of the meeting, giving thanks to those who saw to the afternoon’s programming, and inviting people to return the following month for another MonSFFA DIY, Virtual Meeting (Post 7: www.monsffa.ca/?p=15860).
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