Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: fred patten

December 18, 2015

Buzzfeed’s worst of 2015, Furry Chic in 2016, and Fred’s birthday. NEWSDUMP (12/18/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com. 

Fred Patten’s birthday was December 11 – Happy 75th, Fred!

300px-Fred_PattenRead an interview with Fred about the founding of Furry fandom, by esteemed novelist Phil Geusz.  Thanks Fred for bringing so much content that helps Dogpatch Press to put out Furry News every week day.  Sorry that this went out too late to share Furplanet’s weekend birthday discount sale for Fred’s titles.  But check them out:

“Accidental Guests of the Midwest Fur Fest” – outsider appreciation gets viral views.

This personal blog post got lots of love.  The Healthy Not Nuts blog covers a husband and wife’s thoughts on recipes, diet, health and photography.  It’s lovely when Furries add spice to the mundane!  “…how can you not love these creatures that look so cute, cuddly and happy all of the time?”  The post earned 267 comments.  The writer shared an appreciation letter for the post, where he mentioned getting over 20,000 views.

Furries in Buzzfeed’s “The 50 Worst Things On The Internet In 2015.” (NSFW)

Use this archive link (so they get no incentive to publish unforgivable crap).  Furries are in items 14, 20, 31, and 46.  There’s also bonus bronies, puppy and pony players. Whether it’s love or hate, at least things are never boring…

Goodbye to Furnation.

FurnationFurnation was one of the first visible Web presences for Furry fandom. It helped many to discover their fursonas in the 1990’s. Reddit calls it “the end of an era.” Flayrah gave it a feature under it’s tag for collected coverage. Social network Furrtrax made a generous offer of free hosting to keep it online.  I tried helping, but got the feeling that Furnation’s admin was too burnt out with health problems to devote an ounce of effort for community moderation. I also assume the build of the site might be antiquated and burdensome (perhaps technical, or with copyright for content built by individuals.) It’s influence lives on in places like FurPlanet (formed from Furnation Magazine), one of the 3 main Furry publishers.

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December 17, 2015

The Necromouser and Other Magical Cats, by Mary E. Lowd – Book Review By Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

NecromouserThe Necromouser and Other Magical Cats, by Mary E. Lowd.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, September 2015, trade paperback $9.95 (131 pages), Kindle $6.99.

This collection of 13 cat short stories by Mary E. Lowd contains nine reprints and four original tales. It also contains all of her popular “Shreddy” stories, including a new one written just for this collection; six in all.

Shreddy is an overweight tabby housecat; one of three pets – the other two are Cooper, a moronic labradoodle, and Susie, an idiotic spaniel — of a Red-Haired Woman enamored of electrical devices that she doesn’t really understand. Shreddy would undoubtedly take exception to being called a “pet”. He is an independent individual who just happens to share a house with her and her brain-dead, slobbery dogs. He is constantly in a battle of wits with the Red-Haired Woman (which she doesn’t notice), using her electrical devices (that he doesn’t understand, either). Whether Shreddy is using the Red-Haired Woman’s printer to reanimate dead mice (“The Necromouser”), using her smartphone’s games to bring deceased mice (“‘Brains!’ they all squeaked back in chorus”) and neighborhood dogs back from the dead as zombies (“Shreddy and the Zomb-Dogs”), using a TV dish to hatch a griffin’s egg (“Shreddy and the Silver Egg”), dueling with Whisperquick, the ghost mouse (“Shreddy watched with eyes dilated like a kitten high on catnip, wondering whether the Red-Haired Woman and the dogs could see the ornaments constantly rearranging themselves. Surely the Red-Haired Woman must notice that one of her Santa ornaments was wearing six hats while five others went hatless?”) for control over a plastic-&-metal Christmas tree (“Shreddy and the Christmas Ghost”), inadvertently entering a PlayCube (“Shreddy and the Dancing Dragon”), or coming to an accommodation with a Venus flytrap with a sweet tooth (“Shreddy and the Carnivorous Plant”), Shreddy is always determined to defend his turf, even if it almost kills him. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 16, 2015

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Mad_Dogs_and_EnglishmenMad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs.
London, BBC Books, January 2002, paperback £5.99 (249 pages).

Doctor Who is massively popular, but his adventures do not seem to offer much for furry fandom. But they do overlap in “The 100th Novel in the Record-Breaking BBC Worldwide Doctor Who Series”, to quote the back-cover blurb. Mad Dogs and Englishmen features the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann, 1996-2005) and his Companions at the time, Fitz Kreiner and Anji Kapoor. The novel is also a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing of The Lord of the Rings.

The first chapter is about Professor Reginald Tyler, a reclusive British university don who spends his life from 1917 to his death in 1974 writing and rewriting his magnum opus The True History of Planets, “an epic of dwarves and swords and wizardry. And definitely no poodles. Or at least there weren’t when the Doctor read it.” (blurb) When Prof. Tyler dies, his widow takes his towering manuscript to a publisher.

“She was the one who had hoiked out the dusty manuscript of the ongoing book and promptly sold it for a bomb.

One that set off reverberations everywhere.

Up and down the length of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on Earth, and other worlds besides.

Notably the dogworld.” (p. 3) Read the rest of this entry »

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December 15, 2015

The Cat, by Pat Gray – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

“Here is another of my reviews that was published ten years ago, edited in a manner that I didn’t like.  This is my original review, so it’s a bit different from the printed version.”

USThe Cat, by Pat Gray.
Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, UK, Dedalus Ltd., March 1997, trade paperback £6.99 (124 pages).
U.S. edition: Hopewell, NJ, The Ecco Press, November 1998, hardcover $19.00 (124 + 1 pages).

“A dark comedy with universal appeal, The Cat is the Animal Farm of the post-communist 1990s,” says the American dust-jacket blurb, while a Scottish review of the original British edition says that, “Gray’s reworking of the Animal Farm concept brings in a post-Thatcherite twist.” Animal Farm may live forever, but is The Cat really a modernization of Animal Farm for Britain of the 1990s?

“Chez Maupassant” is the typical British suburban home of the Professor and Mrs. Professor, their pet the Cat, and the presumably unnoticed Rat and Mouse. All live very comfortably, since the Professor is a gluttonous slob who leaves rich food everywhere.

“The cheesecake seemed to glow, luminous and fantastic, as the Professor skillfully slid it off its plate and cradled it in his large hand to prevent it breaking apart as his mouth closed in upon it. A look of childish pleasure crossed the Professor’s face, then a look of guilt, then he rammed the entire cheesecake into his mouth and began to eat.” (pg. 11)

The pampered Cat, the brash Rat, and the peevishly ineffectual Mouse (the latter two living under the house or within its walls) are best friends. Unfortunately, the Professor dies of a coronary three pages into the story (though leaving the fridge open). The animals are mildly distressed, but see no reason to fear a change in their lavish lifestyle — until Mrs. Professor moves to Brighton, leaving the Cat behind. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 14, 2015

Koa of the Drowned Kingdom, by Ryan Campbell – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

koa the drowned kingdomKoa of the Drowned Kingdom, by Ryan Campbell. Illustrated by Cooner.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, September 2015, trade paperback $9.95 (146 pages), electronic edition $6.99.

Koa of the Drowned Kingdom is the tenth of FurPlanet’s “cupcakes”; novellas instead of novels. It seems at one point to be a variant of the Cinderella legend, but that’s misleading.

The setting can be taken variously as another world, as completely imaginary with funny animals, or somewhere in Melanesia in the far future. It’s a civilization of giant mangrove trees rising out of the Southern Sea, inhabited by anthropomorphic fruit bats (flying foxes), otters, wallabies, and monitor lizards. (No other Melanesian fauna like rhinoceroses or monkeys, though.) Their money is the rupiah, the real life currency of Indonesia. Magic is real, though officially only practiced by the bats.

The society is developed in rich detail. Each mangrove tree is a huge separate Kingdom with homes and shops upon its branches, with the trees all locked together by rope bridges and boat travel at the bottom. Each giant tree is divided into habitats ranging from the Crown at the top, down through the Head, the Shoulders, the Belly, the Knees, and the Toes at the bottom which are the mangrove’s roots rising above and sinking beneath the ocean. The trees’ branches are Arms. The habitats are also divided socially, with the Crown inhabited by the flying fox aristocracy who set great prestige on their ability to fly, down through the Shoulders relegated to the upper classes, the Belly to the merchants, and the Knees to the lowest class, the otters who are fishermen. Nobody lives on the Toes, which dip into and out of the ocean. Different Kingdoms are the Kingdom of Titan, the largest tree; the Kingdom of Beards, whose branches are covered in beardlike moss; the Kingdom of the Great Drinker, a bulbous hollow mangrove with a large pool of drinkable water collected from rain and dew in its belly; and others – including the Drowned Kingdom, Atlas, once the mightiest of all until it was uprooted by the Great Storm and toppled beneath the Southern Sea. Kingdom can also refer to the social strata, with the Crown as the elite of the Upper Kingdoms and the Knees as the least desirable of the Lower Kingdoms. The division is not just social; the flying foxes use magic to keep other animals out of the Crown and Head Kingdoms. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 11, 2015

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

witwThe Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. Frontispiece by Graham Robertson.
London, Methuen & Company, October 1908, hardcover 6/- ([vi] + 302 + [ii] pages).

The Wind in the Willows is world-famous today. It was almost immediately world-famous. President Theodore Roosevelt praised it in 1909. Yet until Grahame died in 1932, he did not think that the entire book could be illustrated. The sole illustrations published during Grahame’s lifetime were of the famous “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter featuring the god Pan. Paul Bramson illustrated the 1913 edition showing Rat and Mole gazing at Pan as natural unclothed small animals, even though they get to him by rowboat and by implication have been of human size and wearing clothes just before that. Ernest Shepard’s illustrations in 1933, Arthur Rackham’s in 1940, and the Walt Disney animated feature The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949 made it “illustratable” – but usually by omitting the Pan scene.

The reason is because the narrative segues so often between Mole, Rat, Otter, Badger, the weasels and field-mice and hedgehogs and rabbits as natural English riverbank and woodland animals, and their being imitation humans – not just Toad in stately Toad Hall, but each having a small, furnished home – sometimes tiny, sometimes of human size; rowing a boat, presumably wearing clothes (Toad certainly wears clothes and is of human size when he disguises himself as a washerwoman, yet is of toad size when he enters Rat’s riverbank hole), capable of driving a motor-car and of being tried in court. Everyone was aware of the disparity, but because Grahame’s writing was so lyrical, everyone was willing to gloss over the disparity.

Natural woodland animals? The book begins with a blending of the animal and human worlds:

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December 10, 2015

College Catastrophe, by Jan – comic review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

ccbookCollege Catastrophe, by Jan. Illustrated.
Hong Kong, Tiger Knight Comics, November 2012, trade paperback, $12.95 (unpaged [127 pages]), e-book $3.95.

This is the collection of the online comic strip that Jan (this book gives away his real name as Chun Yan Miu) published from November 2000 to January 2013. The early strips were remastered between 2009 and 2012, so they all look “current”. He retired it to concentrate on his later, more popular Medievalish fantasy Swords and Sausages strip, although he has just started a College Catastrophe sequel: Nine to Nine, showing what is happening to its cast one year after graduating from college, beginning on November 1, 2015.

If you want to know what Jan did before Swords and Sausages, here it is – all 202 strips, plus fillers unavailable elsewhere.

College Catastrophe is a slice-of-life college comic strip with seven anthropomorphized students as the main characters: Jan, a lion computer science major; Wolf, a wolf physics major and Jan’s roommate; Phil, a horse math major; Amber, Jan’s vixen girlfriend; Shiera, a lioness Japanese major; Tor, a tiger fine arts major; and Andrea, Tor’s arctic fox girlfriend. Tor and Andrea were added to the strip shortly before it ended, and have been reused as the main characters in Jan’s fantasy Swords and Sausages.

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December 9, 2015

The Doorman, by Reinaldo Arenas – Book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.  Originally written for Quentin Long’s Anthro Magazine.

91I58R+W9CLThe Doorman, by Reinaldo Arenas. Translated from the Spanish by Dolores M. Koch.
NYC, Grove Weidenfeld, June 1991, hardcover 0-8021-1109-2 $17.95 (191 pages).

Reinaldo Arenas was a young Cuban novelist known for both novels of “magical realism” and a flamboyant homosexual life style. The Castro regime, notoriously anti-homosexual, imprisoned and tortured him, and finally exiled him as part of the Mariel boatlift of 1980. He wrote several critically-acclaimed novels, plays, and collections of poetry in New York during the 1980s. In 1987 he contracted AIDS and, giving in to worsening health, committed suicide in 1990.

The Doorman (El Portero) was published in 1987 but not translated into English until after his death. It was described as a semi-autobiographical surrealist fantasy; reviewers threw the terms “magical realism”, “sardonic Swiftian parable”, and “fabulist” around a lot. Juan, an idealistic young Cuban exile, ends up in New York City (just like Arenas). He eventually gets a position as a doorman at an exclusive luxury Manhattan apartment building. Juan is an overzealous idealist who appoints himself to be a friend of each of the tenants, with a mission to help them open a mystical “door to true happiness” (pg. 6). Alas, the tenants are all self-centered elitists who ignore him. But each tenant has a pet, and the pets listen to his message.

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December 4, 2015

Cat Crimebusters and Other P.I.s On Paws, Part 2 – Book Reviews By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Part 1 can be found here.

wish you were hereThe Mrs. Murphy series by Rita Mae Brown is another animal crime series where the animals actively detect, rather than just tag along with the human amateur detective while she (it’s invariably a woman) solves the mystery. The Mrs. Murphy books, officially in collaboration between Rita Mae Brown and her tiger cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, are up to 24 novels. The next is coming in May 2016.

Wish You Were Here. November 1990.

Rest in Pieces. June 1993.

Murder at Monticello. November 1994.

Pay Dirt. November 1995. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 3, 2015

Odyssey from River Bend, by Tom McGowen – Book Review By Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

“Here is another old review, fixed up the way that it should be published.”
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Odyssey from River Bend, by Tom McGowen.
Boston, Little, Brown and Company, April 1975, hardcover $5.95 (ix + 166 pages).

This was a minor children’s/Young Adult fantasy in 1975, but it is notable as one of the first novels to promote the theme of talking animals inheriting the earth after mankind has become extinct through its own mismanagement of the environment.

“It was an old village. Many generations of animals had been born, lived, and died in it. Its name was Jallakragga, which in the language of the animals meant ‘river bend.’

Around the entire village was a stout wall made of logs that had been cut and trimmed by the beaver builders, stuck upright in the ground, and plastered over with clay from the riverbank. The wall formed an irregular circle, and at several places along its length were watchtowers. From these, day and night, the wolf soldiers peered down, alert for any sign of the wandering bands of weasels or wildcats that roamed the forest and sometimes attacked villages. In the part of the wall that faced the great, dim mass of the forest there was a gateway, with a wide door made of thick logs. This door was kept closed and barred during the hours of darkness, and the logs were covered with carved, frightening faces, to scare away any wandering ghosts or wicked spirits that might try to enter.” (pgs. 3-4)

Jikatik and Ikatibby, two raccoon children foraging for food in the nearby forest in autumn, find an ancient object exposed where the river has undercut the bank.

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