Election times, hopefully, will be available for the next issue.

THE NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY
OK, so we all know this really isn't the start of the new millennium. It's just the beginning of the last year of this one. But it's still a good excuse for a party, right?

Deb Hunt reports that we have conquered the first floor of the Best Western South. If you haven't got your room yet be sure to mention you are with the CoJ. Bring champagne, bring swim suits, bring soda pop. Let's party!

Here are the candidates that are known so far. Since nominations remain open this should be considered an incomplete list:

For President:	Vicki Merriman
For Vice-president:	Susan Rati Chris Canary Vicki Merriman
For Treasurer:	Kathie Thompson Deb Hunt
For Secretary:	Lynnette Cowper Kathie Thompson
For Sergeant at Arms:	Chris Canary Andy Andrews Andrew Happli
For Con Chair 2002:	Kathie Thompson Mike Cowper Roseann Packer

Back in the early seventies Harlan Ellison was approached by a Canadian television company to create an SF series. He came up with The Starlost and wrote the pilot script, Phoenix Without Ashes. In Ellison's treatment, later published as a novelization by his friend Stephan Barnes (I think. It's been a few years since I read this and I can't locate the book), the main character is a wandering hero searching for the truth and trying to save his people in spite of themselves. The hero lives in an Amish like agrarian society. He discovers that his world isn't a world at all. Like the traveler in the classic medieval wood cut he has discovered a door leading to the mechanisms that drive his universe. He, and all of surviving humanity, are passengers on a gigantic spaceship. It is a conglomeration of spheres, each 50 miles across. Each sphere contains a population sampling from somewhere on Earth. One sphere, for example, contains the entire city of San Francisco. Then he discovers two more critical factors. First, the flight crew is dead. Second, the ship is off course and headed directly for a star. He has to explore the ship and find the control room to change it's course, meanwhile enlisting the help of anyone who will believe him. The entire population believes they are still on Earth.

Almost none of this made it onto the TV screen.

Apparently the company knew nothing about science and didn't care to learn. Ellison recounts his tribulations in his forward to Barnes novelization in glowing, angry detail. One exchange he related went something like this:

Ellison: You can't have the hero find the controls in the first episode. That's like having Richard Kimball catching the One Armed Man in the first show!

TV Executive: It's OK. We're only going to have him find the back up controls.

Ellison: Do you know what the back up controls do?!!

TV Executive: They make the ship back up, don't they?

Some of The Starlost survived as a movie made from spliced together episodes. It shows up occasionally on the late, late show. It's worse than awful. I remember a segment about a sphere containing a society of men. These guys didn't know what a woman was. I couldn't bear to watch long enough to discover how they reproduced or what they did at night when they were lonely.

Ben Bova took Harlan's experience and created a hilarious satirical novel called The Starcrossed. Bova's novel is about the making of a TV show. He has changed all of the names and has the company filming Romeo and Juliet in space but the things that happen on the set are reportedly all straight from The Starlost.

The new film is attributed to a company called Angry Films, David Goyer (Screenwriter); Don Murphy (Producer). So far it's still just an idea so there's no way of telling whether they want to film Ellison's story as written or drive off a cliff like The Starlost.