TAFF Talk 8

interim issue: 2 July 1981

This purports to be yet another official Transatlantic Fan Fund bulletin from Dave Langford, 22 Northumberland Avenue, Reading, Berks, RG2 7PW. It's being issued to anyone within reach, on the date you'd normally expect Ansible in addition: Ansible 19 has been put back a week or so, owing to hideous injuries sustained by the editor at the Brum Group Party at the end of June. Instead of typing merrily away he's been spending time writhing under the cruel hands of dentists or wasting away in their still crueller waiting rooms. Read all about it when Ansible arrives; giggle heartily as Langford tries to drink gin and tonic through a straw; sympathize as sensitive Ian Maule faints on merely hearing about the accident...

TAFF has a problem. Not money: there's over £700 in the kitty at this end alone. But -- to needlessly refresh the memories of my almost omniscient readership -- the coming TAFF race was intended to result in the election of one delegate from British fandom who would make a sponsored trip to the 40th World SF Convention next year in Chicago (Chicon IV). With the increased interest in doings across the water since Seacon, there's been quite a bit of interest in TAFF, and half-a-dozen or more UK fans have at one time or another muttered about standing for the (as Lord Bulwer-Lytton would have put it) coming race. Then, suddenly, the arbitrary deadline of 30 June was reached, and those interested parties were found to have evaporated wholesale. Let's not conceal the dismal truth: right now we have a dismal and for all I know unprecedented situation whereby one solitary candidate (Kev Smith, as it happens) is standing for TAFF.

Choices: (1) We have a farce of a race with a candidate standing against 'Hold Over Funds' -- I don't like that and neither does the candidate. (2) We put TAFF into cold storage until after the next trip in the other direction (US fans, by the way, show no lack of interest in coming here): I don't like that, either. (3) I shout at all you apathetic sods out there, via this flyer, and hope for a bit more response and some additional candidates in time for the extended deadline, tentatively set for mid-August. Fortunately the mighty administrators (Stu Shiffman and myself: Stu hasn't had chance to comment on this problem yet) allowed plenty of time for TAFF campaigning, until Easter 1982, so a late start will do little harm. Come on... is nobody interested in free trips to a Worldcon any more? (American readers are invited to urge favoured UK fans to stand...)

Meanwhile, if only to make a little more room in my house, I have a few choice items which you're invited to spend good money on. (All the stuff listed in Taff Talk 7 is also still available, by the way.) Twll-Ddu 19 still only 50p!

Top of the list is Jackie! (sometimes known as Jakcie!), an anonymously published booklet whose anonymous publishers have donated huge piles thereof to TAFF -- in a moderately anonymous way. This is a 20pp A5 offset booklet, centre-stapled, which collects what I think must be just about all the infamous flyers produced by the Jacqueline Lichtenberg Appreciation Society's all-potent Comite (or Comittee), which sources inform me has now gone into hiding somewhere in Devon. This is a marvellous sourcebook for anyone wishing to set up a fanclub for a really triffic writer like Jackie, or to detect subvursives (sic), or to practise selur nager (not the same as selyn nager, mind you), or to write to Charles Platt, or to become completely normal. Recommended. A snip at 50p (pf).