There's also another way to find out fairly easily: the patent number. The gizmo looks of the right age to have a patent number engraved on it somewhere. Find that and call up the patent office and you'll be able find out what something is.

When I was in eighth grade, my history teacher had this broken bit of cast iron with a patent number still readable. The extra credit project was to find out what it was by calling up the patent office. About fifteen minutes of phone calls later, I discovered it was a baling-wire tightener.

Admittedly all the speculation is fun, but the patent number will give a definitive answer.

I think I've seen these behind the counter at jewelers and watchmakers. I'd go with it being a little stand to hold something in place while you work on it.

Posting costume patterns is a great idea except for one fact: Sometimes the fans are better costumers than the pros.

Example: The Stargate patches.

Stargate had a number of patches for different ranks. Fans, reproducing the costumes, also reproduced the patches, but got one detail wrong: they did them better. They made embroidered patches that were full military quality and looked good up close in an elevator, rather than the crap that had been thrown together for distance shots with a camera. The actors saw some of this at the conventions and asked the producers why the fans had better costumes than they did. The producers then went to the fans who'd made them and asked them to make the official patches for the show. Everyone is happy.

I also remember being at the San Francisco premiere of The Phantom Menace. One of the producers was there, as well as a fan who'd costumed himself as Darth Maul, reproducing the costume from what he'd seen from advance photos. Trouble was, he'd done a better and more convincing job on the make-up than they'd done for the actual production. The producer kept asking him how he'd got the various blending effects for the make-up. Answer: air brush. I think that fan also got a consulting job for the next two movies.

O "Jewels" of the annoyingly fake pseudonym and chirpy questions:

1. If these writers don't want their works published, why do they write them?

Answer: Because we also want to be credited and paid.

2. And why do they think they still own them after they have sold them?

Answer: Because our contracts and copyright law says that we own them. My first very first contract ever stipulated "first North American serial rights" which means printing in a North American magazine the first time. The author then gets to sell reprint rights. There was no mention of being pressed on little plastic disks for compilations and those subsequently sold, and in any case, I would be entitled by contract to author's copies of those as well. Which I never received.

3. And if they only want to rent them, why don't they get contracts that say so?

Answer: Our contracts often do say so. Explicitly. In words even idiots should understand. Unfortunately greedy megacorporations are in the habit of acquiring old publishers and squeezing as much cash as they can from them and can't be bothered to do things like review old contracts or even keep them on file properly. It's much cheaper to hire a lawyer to yell "Ha ha ha -- we own it all!" and poke and prod at the system until they find a judge who'll see it their way.

Excepting of course that library microfiche isn't/wasn't affordable/available to the general public, and libraries also generally have full bound collections of the periodicals.

The case was settled previously with Tasini vs. The New York Times. Hardly surprising that they've now come up with a new way to not pay authors but make money while doing it.

If the extent of the unhappiness was GRUMBLE GROWL "I'm very unhappy with this" and on to the next order of business, rather than charging the officers, then I seriously question the "diligence."

I think he sounds like a politician who does whatever's convenient at the moment, personally.

I suspect that Michael Capobianco told him to keep quiet while he dealt with cleaning up the mess.

The main trouble is that the laws are badly written and everyone is in the habit of claiming to own everything so they'll be covered when the law gets around to deciding what they do own.

This isn't the first time SFWA has overstepped itself. But it takes a particular sort of incompetence to think that doing a search for the name "Asimov" is only going to turn up works by one particular author.

Of course it could also be that Burt just didn't want to do the spadework himself, expecting the other guy to do it, and not bothering to think that a frightened business owner is going to pull everything and try to sort things out afterwards. And the promptness of the restoration of Cory's work is pretty obviously a case of the squeaky wheel, rather than any competence on anyone else's part.

Sigh....