I just noticed there’s been zero activity here for close to four hours. Certainly that’s not beyond the realm of possibility, but it’s unusual enough — especially midday on a Friday — to warrant making sure nothing’s amiss.
So if somebody could respond with “Kowalski says hi,” I’d appreciate it (my own posts always go through, so I’m a useless test subject).
Comics I Don't Understand 
Kowalski offered to repair your kitchen, but he can’t reach the high cabinets.
Kowalski is having a busy day and couldn’t catch a break, but she finally got a round tuit.
That’s not Kowalski. He’s much taller.
Kowalski decided to quit while he was ahead.
Did any of those responses come from Houston?
Kowalski’s head will get back to you, chop-chop; as soon as he’s through with tonight’s skull session.
Kowalski? Kowalski’s not here, man.
@ Bill – I really wish the dateline above the post’s title would include the time. I think it used to do that on the old site.
It’s weird, Kilby: responses are time-stamped, but the posts themselves aren’t.
Kowalkowski says “hi” as well!
Your recent post was on the Arlo page, which doesn’t get listed as activity here.
That is true, billybob: but there were other posts here today.
Even Kowakski isn’t tall enough to tough those puns with a 10-foot Pole.
It reminds me of a barely-remembered science fiction story from the 1950s: At a large social gathering, conversation seemed to lag, stall, every 20 minutes. I don’t remember more than that, but I often check my watch at any lull in a social gathering.
I recall that too! I think the speculative explanation was that we might have been planted here by an alien civilization, and these pauses are for our brains to tune in to possible messages.
BTW, one colloquial expression for that is “angels passing”. But that wasn’t the idea of the story.
A. Bertram Chandler had a short story with the same premise, but it’s not “every twenty minutes” but (disproportionally, anyway) at “twenty minutes to the hour” and at “twenty minutes after the hour.” It’s set on a ship in deep space (though it opens during a cocktail party of sorts on said ship), and the characters discuss the legend and decide to test it out. Bad idea. (The alien intelligence is hostile.)
The Chandler story is “The Silence” from the February 1959 FANTASTIC, but surprisingly supposedly never reprinted (except in one cheap all-reprint magazine), so I wonder if there isn’t another story with this premise out there that might have been seen by more eyeballs over the years.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?82378
Snopes has an entry on the “twenty minutes after the hour” version, and TVTropes has one about silences occuring every seven (not twenty) minutes.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sudden-silences/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SevenMinuteLull
I just posted a longish entry suggesting the sf story sought might be “The Silence” by A. Bertram Chandler, but my entry seems to have vanished into ether, possibly because I included three URL links in it. I’ll wait to see if it reappears before I try reconstructing the whole thing. Poot.
I found the answer to the other story on the theme in my notes after some digging; the description below comes from an old blog entry by sf fan James Nicoll which is no longer online:
“The Last Prophet”: A man spends his time trying to explain to people his great discovery: he knows why social gatherings almost always go briefly silent at twenty minutes to the hour. No one is interested, so he eventually hits on the idea of paying someone to listen to him. He gets part-way through his explanation – that it’s a mechanism installed in us by God, who has left us and wants us to listen out for his return – but he falls silent (at twenty minutes to the hour of course) before getting to the important part: that God is due back soon. In the silence God announces his return and the last prophet never gets to make his prophecy. ”
The story is by Mildred Clingerman, originally from the August 1955 MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45022
I turned up the datum that such silences are sometimes called “the Harvard pause.”
https://ask.metafilter.com/40370/What-is-the-Harvard-Pause-really-called
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2123103-what-is-this-phenomenon-called
https://shoreacres.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/angels-passing/
Annnnd I just (well, half an hour ago or so) posted another and even lengthier entry identifying the “other” sf story on the them as “The Last Prophet” by Mildred Clingerman, and citing references to the phenomenan as “the Harvard pause,” and said post also got immediately tossed into moderation.
Having it take day(s) for postings to show up, if they ever do, reduces the interest in visiting the site. Presumably, that was intended.
I think we’ve discussed before that James Nicoll is still active on rec.arts.sf.written.
Even when I was in Europe, I don’t think a comment ever remained in Moderation for more than 24 hours.
@ Bill – Do your moderation notifications for the Arlo Page go into the same queue as for the main site?
Thanks for the SF research. Anyone ready to write a short story speculating on occasional 4-hour pauses on a busy website? And quite OT: Can anyone identify a story, also from the SF Golden Age, in which a fighting ship is piloted by a human male and feline female?
Maybe by Cordwainer Smith? Or maybe not. But I think I remember the story. The rationale is that the cat’s claw-fighting nerve network is unmediated and thus faster, compared to the human’s. They would have to be wired directly into the ship’s controls.
Heinlein used a similar gimmick in “Starship Troopers“: the infantry was an entirely male outfit, but the pilots of the starships were all female.
Game of Rat And Dragon by Cordwainer Smith may be the one Bob Ball is looking for.
Kilby, they’re completely separate sites.
“Heinlein used a similar gimmick in “Starship Troopers“: the infantry was an entirely male outfit”
The MOBILE infantry was in Starship Troopers. (Rico was what today we’d call a “marine”.)
“Game of Rat and Dragon” is the story, Wikipedia confirms. The cats, telepathically linked to their human colleagues, looked at the enemy, called dragons, as if they were rats.
Smith’s SF stories largely (maybe completely) fit into his Instrumentality of Mankind future history. I read the NEFSA collection of these (minus the novel Norstrilla) when it came out some years back. Given the time that he wrote these, the 1950s and 1960s, the stories hold up very well. There were some interesting themes including the treatment of the “underpeople”, which were intelligent beings created from animals that were used as slaves by humans and very poorly treated.
@Brian in STL: “Smith’s SF stories largely (maybe completely) fit into his Instrumentality of Mankind future history.”
Very largely — as I recall, there are one or two like “Angerhelm” which do not obviously fit, but maybe he just didn’t get around to writing connecting stories.
But I don’t think the three novels he published under other names — ATOMSK; CAROLA; or RIA — have any connection to the future history, or (aside from the minor stfnal element of an underground secret city in ATOMSK) any sf/f content. I think CAROLA (a totally mainstream novel) would tickle the CordwainerSmithIan elements in his fans if they read it, though — it’s a reader-identifiable 20th century sheltered American protagonist in a strange other world story — immediately pre-revolutionary deep mainland China — with a strong alien world feel to it. (And a wonderful jokey last line.) And ATOMSK is a pretty good spy thriller. (I haven’t read RIA.)