Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 33

The Last Days of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute
 

110 Portland Road, Highlands, N.J., one-time site of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. View larger map. (Thanks to Bill Higgins for geographical research.)
 
Back in Highlands, New Jersey, William Lindsay Gresham was soon forgotten. At least he was not spoken of. Around then, the Mannings became less likely to drop [...]

By the third or fourth year of the Ipsy, the great house in Highlands had pupped a fair-sized litter of clones. There was me and my family in Red Bank, the del Reys a quarter of a mile away, George and Dona Smith in Rumson and, at least briefly, the Kornbluths in Long Branch [...]

 
"For every complex human problem there is a solution which is simple, straightforward and wrong."
—H.L. Mencken

 

Say, don't you remember Toti Dal Monte?
No, of course you don't. Not unless you're Italian, and a long-time opera goer, and getting pretty elderly by now — about as old as I am, for example, which is quite a lot so. Anyway, she was a soprano, and dearly beloved by Italian [...]

 

This video has nothing whatever to do with the Futurians or their games, but it's a great ghostly animation from 1933. (Sorry, it was the best we could do. —the blog team)
 
As mentioned earlier, when the Futurians held a party they were limited in program. There was music sometimes, borrowed from somebody's record collection, [...]

In Montpelier, Vermont, the factory of the company called National Clothespin closed its doors for good in 2009. This is a pity, because it was the last of its kind. Now no one in America makes wooden-spring clothespins. So Americans must buy imported ones (if they can find them) or, alternatively, go [...]

It's hard to list the Ipsy's guests in any sensible order, perhaps because they were not an orderly bunch. It does make sense for me to divide the guests into two classes. To begin with, there was the New York science-fiction crowd, all of whom I had known for some time.
In [...]

Let me tell you about the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, which is the name that Fletcher and Inga Pratt gave to their enormous old house in Highlands, on the New Jersey shore. The house had something over thirty rooms. The ground floor, which was embraced by a wide, 360-degree veranda, comprised a kitchen, a [...]

 
"First you're young, then you're middle-aged, then you're wonderful."
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth

(And the Poor Get Children)

Remember that old song? Of course it was just meant as a joke, wasn't it?
Well, let's check it out. What the Republican Party* has been telling us for some years is that when anybody's income goes up, most likely everyone else's does at the same time. As they [...]