This is number 1 of 6 related posts which together make up our July 11, 2020, DIY, Virtual MonSFFA Meeting.

1) INTRODUCTION

MonSFFA had initially projected posting on its Web site two, maybe three of these virtual club meetings before we expected that things would get back to normal, just in time for our usual summer field trip and barbecue-in-the-park. That turned out to be an overly optimistic assessment.

To date, we have hosted fully three virtual meetings, and with the completion of this fourth, will have held more club meetings online this year than we have live, face to face! Our field trip has officially been cancelled, and we’ve tentatively pushed our barbecue into August, although we are not certain of ultimately being able to hold it at all. We are having doubts, too, about the viability of our November-slated Super Sci-Fi Book Sale.

All of this to say that the club may well be operating uniquely online for the rest of 2020!

The club’s Executive trusts that MonSFFen all enjoyed the quietly unusual St-Jean and Canada Day holidays, and apropos our American club members and friends, a healthy and happy, if understated, July 4th.

We hope this post finds all managing well as the quarantine is prudently lifted and commerce begins, step by careful step, to reopen. It is vitally important to continue following best recommended safety practises in order to help minimize a second wave of infections.

That means continuing the routine of washing your hands thoroughly and often, employing plenty of soap and rinsing with warm water. It means using a hand-sanitizer whenever the opportunity of hand-washing is not available.  It means maintaining social distancing outside of your home whenever possible, and minimizing contact with others outside of your “bubble” of quarantine fellows. And it means wearing a face mask covering nose and mouth when out and about in your community, especially on public transit systems, or at the grocery store or other commercial establishments.

Some jurisdictions have recently made the wearing of masks mandatory, including our own province of Quebec, which will require people to don the coverings while travelling on all buses, subways, trains, etc. as of July 13, just a couple of days from now. No mask, no ride!  

Very soon, mask-wearing may well be required in this province in all public areas, indoors and out! While the authorities initially thought ordinary non-airtight cloth masks to be of little use in stemming the spread of the coronavirus, that thinking has evolved as more about SARS-CoV-2 became known. Masks are now considered to be a significant impediment to COVID’s proliferation. Contrary to what you may heard from the usual suspects online, masks do not prevent your lungs from inhaling sufficient oxygen, thus causing you to pass out from hypoxia, nor does the wearing of one signify any particular political stance other than in the eyes of the misguided beholder, nor is this whole coronavirus thing a hoax!

As society reopens, we must all mind against letting down our guard. This pandemic is by no means over, and slacking off now will only contribute to its prolongation. We have all seen news reports of sometimes explosive surges in contagions occurring in jurisdictions in which the reopening of society, just weeks prior, was too recklessly executed.

Globally, over 12 million cases have been reported, with more than 550,000 having fallen to the virus. Canada’s share: 106,000-plus infected, over 8700 fatalities, with Quebec accounting for more than half of those respective numbers. Montreal’s situation is improving steadily but our city was one of the hardest hit in the world, so don’t let up on those safety protocols prematurely! Locally, there have been recent instances of outbreaks occurring when mitigation protocols were carelessly relaxed.

As always, to those of you deemed “essential workers,” please take all possible precautions in order to keep yourselves as protected from infection as can be!

This is our fourth virtual MonSFFA meeting. Today’s get-together will unfold right here on the club’s Web site over the course of the afternoon, beginning with this first post, and followed by subsequent posts at 1:30PM, 2:30PM, 3:00PM, and 4:00PM, with a concluding post at 4:30PM. All content will also be available concurrently on MonSFFA’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MonSFFA), however, the interface best suited for taking in this meeting is this very Web site.

We cannot yet meet face-to-face as we usually do, of course, and so this July virtual meeting has been prepared especially for you, MonSFFA’s membership. Fix yourself some tasty barbecued burgers or sausages, pour yourself a cool drink, then sit back, check out each of the afternoon’s posts, scroll down leisurely through the proffered content, and enjoy!

2) MEETING AGENDA

In This Afternoon’s Virtual Meeting:

1:00PM, Post 1 of 6

1) Introduction

2) Meeting Agenda

3) Opening Coronavirus Parody Song

4) Genuine UFO Footage Released!

5) A Second Parody Song

6) Sci-Fi Coronavirus Masks

7) A Third Parody Song

1:30PM, Post 2 of 6

8) Communication in SF&F (Part One)

2:30PM, Post 3 of 6

9) Mid-Meeting Break (Display Table, Raffle, Zoom Get-Together)

3:00PM, Post 4 of 6

10) “Real” and Reel: Flying Saucers and UFO Aliens

4:00PM, Post 5 of 6

11) Gallery of Genre Barbecues and Fire Pits

4:30PM, Post 6 of 6

12) Another Coronavirus Parody Song

13) Wanted! Sci-Fi Summer Drinks

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15) More Sci-Fi Coronavirus Masks

16) Thank-You!

17) Closing Parody Song

3) OPENING CORONAVIRUS PARODY SONG

The Internet is home to numerous very talented and funny songwriters/performers who have provided a note of gentle comic relief to us all during this lockdown, filking well-known rock and pop hits, à la Weird Al Yankovic. Whenever given, we’ve credited by name these creators. This afternoon, we begin with a tune most will recognize, interpreted by South Africa’s The Kiffness (www.thekiffness.com). This one more properly should have been featured last month, but we only just came across the track, and it was too good to pass up:

4) GENUINE UFO FOOTAGE RELEASED!

The coronavirus crisis has dominated headlines and newscasts for some four months, now, and perhaps for that reason, few seem to have noticed or paid much attention to what one would think an important development with potentially profound ramifications for mankind! Sci-fi fans and the like have always been more open than most to the possible existence of intelligent life beyond Earth and fresh evidence seemingly in support of that conjecture has reignited the conversation surrounding the nature of UFOs.

On April 27 of this year, the American military officially released infrared camera footage of what the Pentagon termed “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” or UAP. These short videos, recently declassified, were recorded by Naval aviators who, on separate occasions in 2004 and 2015, encountered fast-moving objects that executed flight manoeuvers one now-retired pilot says he could not explain. “As I got close,” the pilot recalled, the object he was tracking “rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds. This was extremely abrupt, like a ping-pong ball bouncing off a wall.”

A Pentagon spokesperson stated that the clips were released to “clear up any misconceptions” as to the veracity of the footage and “whether or not there is more to the videos.” The recordings are authentic and considered unexplained phenomena, says the Pentagon, without taking a position on whether the military believes the objects captured on camera to be extraterrestrial in origin.

The videos have actually been in circulation since 2017, when UFO devotee and former Blink-182 singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge obtained and publicized them online through his To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. DeLonge and several former CIA, Department of Defense, Pentagon, and Lockheed Martin “Skunkworks” employees founded the Academy in 2017. The organization is dedicated to researching collected data and materials related to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. UFOlogists have enthusiastically welcomed the official release of the videos, with DeLonge commenting that the Pentagon’s move was a step in the right direction, toward what he called “the Grand Conversation.”

Ex-Nevada senator Harry Reid, who more than a decade ago successfully pushed for a classified threat-assessment program to study such recordings of UAP, tweeted that he was glad the Pentagon had released the material, and that the “U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this” and evaluate “any potential national security implications.” The program ran from 2007 to 2012 before falling to other funding priorities, and its former director, Luis Elizondo, has said that he personally believes “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.” Elizondo, now involved with DeLonge’s Academy, further stated of the objects researched that the “aircraft—we’ll call them aircraft—are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory, nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.”

Skeptical astrophysicists have cautioned that there are often more earthbound explanations for such phenomena, including atmospheric effects, reflections, or possible bugs in the code of a fighter jet’s imaging/display systems. Just because an airborne object cannot be identified, goes the reasoning, doesn’t mean it’s an alien spaceship.

Here is a quick montage of extracts from all three videos:

Be sure to have a look at our essay later this afternoon on sci-fi films and television series that were inspired by, and in turn influenced the UFO phenomenon; check out today’s Post 4 of 6, going up at 3:00PM.

5) A SECOND PARODY SONG

This one comes via the YouTube channel of one Matt McAtee and will appeal to any Glen Campbell fans on the club’s membership roster:

6) SCI-FI CORONAVIRUS MASKS

As an essential worker delivering needed supplies by truck throughout Quebec and Eastern Ontario, I’ve begun wearing a mask whenever interacting with the folk receiving these goods. That’s me next to my truck in the photo.

A friend made the Star Trek-themed mask I’m wearing. At the peak of lockdown, driving along eerily empty highways and into seemingly near-vacant towns in far-off regions, I sometimes felt like a most-at-risk member of the Enterprise’s landing party, a so-called “red-shirt.” And so, I requested of my friend that she make my mask of red material and affix to it a Starfleet insignia. I had, in a flash of gallows humour, cast myself as a “red-mask!”

Simple, cloth face masks, originally and erroneously thought to be largely ineffective at abating the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, are now strongly recommended by authorities, and have even been designated mandatory in some districts. That being the case, I thought it fitting to showcase some of the many designs available to anyone who’d like to fight the virus while flying their geek flag!

Firstly, a few other examples of Trek-themed masks:

The entertainment conglomerates that own such popular franchises as Star Trek, Star Wars, and others, quickly eyeing profit potential, no doubt, have turned out a number of designs and made them available to eager fans. Here’s a selection of Star Wars motifs, a few of them rather clever gags:

Playing with the title of the retro-’80s Stranger Things TV series, the mask just below offers commentary on the times in which we are all currently living:

This hand-painted Pennywise mask is sure to freak out anyone who suffers from Coulrophobia!

Below are a number of examples crafted on a variety of SF/F properties or characters, from John Carpenter’s They Live to Lord of the Rings to Morticia Addams to Xena to Rick and Morty! A handful here are simply generic genre pieces, like the dragon mask. Cat owners, of course, will appreciate the cartoon depiction of a mischievously sociopathic kitty.

MonSFFA treasurer Sylvain St-Pierre sports this mask, which he claims has the effect of encouraging people to keep a healthy social distance away from him!

This mask is an exquisite work of art!

And this one, not so much. But it’s good for a chuckle.

We’ve saved a selection of cool superhero masks for the afternoon’s closing post; view them at 4:30PM.

7) A THIRD PARODY SONG

This track is by the Holderness Family (www.theholdernessfamily.com), who were dealing with the same tribulations with which pretty much every family under quarantine was dealing, including COVID-associated dishevelment: