Life Goes On

Well it's been an annoying month here in Deer Park

For one thing, it keeps bloody raining. Understand that as an Englishman I'm used to a bit of rain, even a lot of rain. I've spent time in Wales, after all. It's just that the rain ought to go somewhere after it's dropped from on high, and on Long Island it doesn't.

The reasons for this are many and complex, but basically boil down to stupid bloody Americans not getting their fingers out and doing the job properly. I mean, this country once put a man on the Moon for Azathoth's sake! How in the name of creation is is therefore impossible to get the water to go from the land to the sea, only about 20 miles away at the thickest bit of the island? I'd suggest sequestering it in reservoirs, but that would take monumental planning and a bit of acumen.

Aren't I being just a tad jingoistic and maybe a smidgeon hard on the civic engineers of my adopted country, state, county and town I hear you ask?

Well, traditional hydraulic engineering typically gives a nod of the head to the notion that water generally flows downhill, gravity being what it is, and that therefore one should ensure that drains are placed at the bottom of hills or other inclined areas of ground. The design in general use on Long Island could, in light of this principle, be held to be either startlingly innovative, an attempt to push back the outmoded preconceptions of a field sterile of new thinking, or the work of a bunch of idiots. Irrespective of which viewpoint you cleave to, the net result is the same: the junction outside Wyandanch station is still underwater three days after a rainstorm despite having a brand new drain network installed only two years ago and despite having the roads resurfaced and regraded at the same time.

About that.

Over the 100 or so years roadbuilders have been accommodating themselves to the need for everyone and his dog to own and drive their own automobile on a resilient surface, a number of basic principles have evolved. One of these is that the camber of a newly laid road surface should carry the water to the edges of the roadway, and thence to drains set slightly below the road's datum. It should therefore come as no surprise that on Long Island this thinking is held to be archaic, needless nitpicking by those ignorant of the broader aesthetic ideals of the roadbuilder.

And on the off-chance that someone, somewhere actually got a fbleeping clue and did the job right, all it takes is a couple of passes with Mr Snowplow to tear five gallon chunks of the road up and either throw them at the cars parked in the LIRR carpark or leave them lying on unlit streets as a collision hazard. The holes get repaired around the end of October, which is to say someone shovels low-grade asphalt into them and, if we're lucky, attempts to roll them so the result is a bump only a few inches high, ensuring that next winter the snowplow will tear it right back up again. There's a side road in Wyandanch which resembles the site Messrs Armstrong & Aldrin puttered around in. It happens to be the one that has the only available parking after 7:30 am these days. I can only assume that the suspension parts business a few yards down the main street from the site in question also runs the snowplow concession. I digress.

Surely, you ask, not every drain on Long Island can be so badly placed? Statistics alone mean that some of them should be in the right place to funnel gallons of wet inconvenience to part or parts unknown just by chance. You're right, but you are forgetting the idiot factor again.

For drains to continue working they have to be kept clean. Ours seem to be constantly clogged by leaves in the autumn, sand (from the road grit) in the spring and discarded crap all year round. Considering the buckets of tax money New York collects from us Long Islanders, there seems to be precious little of it spent to clean out the bleeding drains. An occasional roadsweeper would be a nifty idea too, but we only seem to see one or two a year and they mostly serve to collect all the gutter-born crap and dump it over the properly installed drain outside my house¹.

Reader of this blog² will be aware of the natural beauty of Lake Mineola at this time of year. By some miracle they managed to get the new roadway that goes under the tracks to stay dry in the rainy season, but the rest of the place floods just like it always does. This is a feat that would challenge even the Disney Imagineers (who've managed all sorts of neat tricks with water over the years) and I have to wonder how they managed it. Logic would call for the underpass to become a thirty-foot ³ deep sump. I imaging that some fancy footwork involving pumps and massive amounts of electricity are involved, but I don't know for sure. It should be interesting in the rainy part of the summer, around the end of July, when LIPA typically begins not rising to the challenge of getting everyone their electricity in a timely manner ⁴.

And don't get me started on those pig-useless, waste-of-space idiots in the weather prediction trade. They can't even get the weather right over the next three days. Never mind the satellites and doppler radar, I reckon they could do with a new bit of seaweed, or maybe an office with a window in it.

Oh well.

1. The original drain had crap jammed in the grill. I spent hours every year cleaning it out with a sidewalk-scraper only to have it jammed up again a month later. I begged the town council to replace it but they ignored me. Then a truck backed over it and broke the grill. Once again I petitioned the town to do its duty, to no avail. Then one day I came home to find a police officer outside my house. She was not happy. A cyclist had ridden over the cracked, buckled drain - another victory for the IQ brigade there - and had been injured. She lectured me for some time about the state of the drain. Once she had wound down it was my turn. I pointed out that the drain was not my responsibility, buut the town's, and that if she felt the drain was dangerous she should tell the town to fix it. I wished her good luck and explained that I had already aprehended the danger to cyclists some years before and had periodically asked the town to behave in a sensible and responsible manner and spend some taxpayer dollars to avoid paying many times more in an inevitable lawsuit. The officer backed away from me as I was delivering my peroration, possibly because of the foam coming out of my mouth. A week later there was a nice new drain installed. Three weeks after that a roadsweeper filled it with crap↑
2. I think we're down to one now, including me↑
3. five fathoms↑
4. People still seem to be fighting the intolerable humidity by running air conditioners despite the fact that LIPA, a body invented to make up excuses why they can't deliver the electricity they are in charge of, tells them not to↑

Domestic Bliss, Chateau Stevie-Style

It finally stopped raining long enough for me to get the cover off the swimming pool

I normally aim to have the pool up and wasting my time by late May or Early June, but it is a practical impossibility to remove the pool cover without draining the water out of it first, and this year each time I had siphoned off the wet more had fallen from the sky to replace it. I was beginning to believe that I wouldn't ever get a chance to open the bloody thing to be honest, because once we get into mid July the heavens will open on a semi-regular basis in a series of tropical downpours. This is generally followed by an even wetter August through to September, at which point the weather veers into the brass-monkey version of Fall we've been getting of late.

First job was to remove the lock that secures the little windlass on which is wound the ends of the cable that is stitched through the eyelets on the cover to pull it tightly around the walls of the pool in the manner of a drumskin, albeit a particularly loose and floppy drumskin. None of the keys on the ring would fit the lock and turn (though one jammed inside it nicely for several jiggling, swearing minutes) but it turned out that once I had gone through every key on the (large) ring, the lock turned out to be unlocked anyway. I dimly remembered that I couldn't find the key at the end of the previous swimming season and had to rush the normally precise pool shut-down procedures on account of the gale force winds that had sprung up the moment I had wrestled the cover into place, and had elected to leave the lock unfastened until I could instigate a search for it.

The cable then could be unwound from the windlass by a process of walking away from the pool to keep the wire taught¹ until I hit the big hook used to hang the vacuum on with the small of my back, at which point an alternate method was employed in which I stood on the twirgly mass of cable with both feet and stretched upward so that lengths of cable were pulled off the spool, and then I gathered up the slack, stood on the coils of cable and did it all again. After that it was a matter of only an hour or so to pull the twirgly cable through the eyelets until I had a tangled mass of knotted steel-reinforced cable wound round the fence, my feet and my ankles. It was all very trying.

I pulled off the pool cover, wetting myself down with the last remnants of the stinking goo that forms from rainwater, old leaves, twigs, algae and mosquito larvae, and made my first direct observation of the pool water, which this year was clear, I think. I say "think" because it was hard to tell the colour of the water when the bottom of the pool was a thick mat of verdant growth. A mat of algae of truly staggering proportions had taken root on the floor of the pool, and was busy working on its first flint axe-head.

How? How had this stuff grown when there was no light? It was green, which meant it was photosynthetic. It needed light the way I need bacon sandwiches, but the pool cover is several microns of jet black material through which no light passes. I fearfully peered again into the water as the ugly thought presented itself that some higher, bioluminescent life-form had evolved in the pool and was even then plotting to take over the unsuspecting world. This was terrible! What if I had loosed some pool-incubated alien horror on the pacifistic Americans? They were so child-like they would be killed for food or used as hosts in some sickening parasitic way before they realised their danger. Clearly, Action was called for.

I long ago² figured out that it is cheaper, quicker and less mentally debilitating to drain the pool of such polluted water and to clean it, then refill it with fresh, clear water than to attempt to mitigate the problem with filters, vacuums chemicals and imprecations. Not only that, draining it means I actually get to swim in the thing rather than just look at it as the temperatures soar past 95 degrees Fahrenheit, so I grabbed my trusty submersible pump and one of the hosepipes and began the process of getting the water, algae and PBLTAs³ out of the pool and onto the driveway, where this liquid challenge to Mom and Apple Pie would end up in the drains where it belonged. I was so overcome with emotion at the thought of how I had just saved democracy that I went for a lie down.

When I awoke, about an hour later, it was to find that the threat to democracy was now forming a pool in the middle of the sidewalk, which it seems has sunk owing to all the bad weather of late. Cursing liberally, I relocated the hose so that Mrs Stevie would walk in the stream when she got back from whatever she and the Stevieling were off doing while I was busy saving the Free World. This proved to be the key to removing the threat for good.

Powerful as my submersible pump was, it couldn't shift a full pool of water in the eight hours it had before I went to bed. Not wanting to burn out the pump by running it dry, I turned it off until the next day, leaving the pool to siphon by gravity overnight. The next day I resumed pumping operations, and began breaking up the algal mat with a scrubbing brush on a very long stick (a standard piece of pool maintenance gear rather than a Stevie-improvisation, in case you were wondering). I saw no evidence of PBLTAs, which meant that my quick thinking had probably saved the day. Of course, I would remain an unsung hero in this action, since no reporters for major news outlets read this blog (nor any reporters for the minor news outlets, even those UFO-ridden free papers you get at supermarkets come to that) but that was okay. I knew whose heroic measures saved the country, never once thinking of the danger to his own life while doing so, and that was enough. I'm not one to bang my own trumpet.

The once proud civilisation of green goo broke into pieces and was sucked up the pump and flushed away with the last of the water. Or almost the last of it. I could see that the water was deeper on the other side of the pool, where the tangle of cable had been abandoned, than on the side I had deployed the pump. In order to finish the job, I would have to move the pump. Then I could wash the little pools of algae in towards the still-submerged pump and get the liner clean.

I should explain that when we⁴ put in the pool, we were persuaded that we should use this rubber cat-litter-like product as a cushioning layer between the pool liner and the pounded earth it rested on. We were supplied with four bags of same as part of the installation package. We were then informed it would take about sixteen bags to do the job on a pool our size, and we, like mugs, bought it. The instructions showed how to rake the rubber granules into a flat, cushioning surface on which the liner would lay. What the instructions carefully avoided saying was how every step taken on this stuff would leave a deep hole in it, or that dragging the liner into place would inevitable scoop the stuff up and redeploy it all on one side of the pool, meaning it would all have to be re-raked. It was all extremely tiresome. Once the liner was attached and the water added, the stuff gradually crept around forming small pot-holes in the liner in which dirt collected. I recommend that no-one use this product. There must be a mat-style rubber padding one can use instead of this granulated rubber rage-inducer. if not, improvise one or just put the damned thing down on dirt like everyone used to do. Anyway, it was into these pot-holes that the algae was collecting, and why I came up with the submerged pump/hose-pipe method of cleaning the pool liner.

I relocated the pump, and it promptly quit on me.

I field-stripped it to see if something was jamming the impeller, but I couldn't see anything jamming it. I eventually discovered by a lengthy process of elimination that the pump was now tripping the GFCI. Somehow, it had developed a spontaneous Ground Fault.

This is, of course, the very bane of any job: the breakdown of an essential piece of equipment, adding hours to the original job while whatever it is gets fixed or replaced. In this case, replaced, because I've spent enough hours of my life on piddling side-quests fate has shoved onto my plate. I was mad because I have come to rely on that pump for all sorts of water shifting jobs and now it wasn't there when I needed it. It was particularly galling that it had gone nails-up at the very end of the job. I was within thirty minutes of refilling the pool when the pump failed, and I had no alternate way of doing the job.

So it was off to Home Despot where I went through the usual displays of stuff in beaten up boxes in the hope of finding a unit that a) did not look like someone had used it and then returned it⁵ and 2) had all the pieces it was supposed to have. In this I was unsuccessful.

Some day someone will explain to me why the managers of Home Despot franchises think anyone wants to buy stuff that comes in a beaten-up box or that has been given a damned good thrashing by the forklift's tines while being "stocked". Someone will also explain why people treat other people's stuff so cavalierly. I have no doubt that many of the boxes were ripped apart by "customers" investigating the contents. Idiots catering to animals. Man, I'm growing to hate New York.

I zoomed over to a nearby Blowes where I discovered a nice little unit (not as nice as my original, but that sort of goes without saying in these days of "just so good an no better" thinking) that only cost %150 of what I wanted to pay, so it was grab one, and a big bottle of bleach and head off for The Steviemanse.

The new pump proved up to the task and in no time at all I had the pool bottom clear of water and was ready to scrub the bottom with a short-handled scrubbing brush (better control and more oomph than the longer handled one). It was at this point that my sandal strap tore out of its mounting and almost pitched me onto my face. I discarded both beach shoes and walked round the pool so I could pull out the pump. The twirgly cable caused me to have a slight delay as I freed my toes and ankles from its vampyric embrace, then I was able to skin the sole of my right foot on an obliging raised paver, forcing dirt and grit into the wound and some class four swear words out of my mouth. I hopped around the garden on my left foot while attempting to suck out the poison until the almost unbearable agony subsided to a sharp, stabbing pain, then got the old pool ladder (which is a step-ladder design) and climbed into the now almost clean pool.

I say "almost clean" because the first thing I did was to step into a shallow pond of something that looked like water but felt like concentrated sulphuric acid in the slash on the sole of my right foot, eliciting more howls of manly anguish, swearing, pleas for death and so forth. Once the moment had passed, about ten minutes later, I was able to finish the task, climb out, remove the steps from the pool, rig a hose and begin the task of filling the wretched tub all over again. Only then was I free to seek medical attention for my poor foot.

I limped into the bathroom, past the sniggering Mrs Stevie, and applied a field dressing, then returned to the scene of action and threw in half a bottle of bleach. It was getting late, what with slashing of feet, twirgling of cables and malfunctioning of pumps, and I realised that the task of filling the thing was going to take more than a day. Since I wasn't going to risk the pool overflowing by running the hose overnight, there would be more time for the insidious green goo to regain a foothold. This I offset by making the water highly chlorinated from the get-go. A few hours later, when the pool was about half-full, I added a sachet of shock powder with algaecide to seal the deal.

When I left home this morning there was still about three hours worth of water filling to go. I left this in the capable hands of the Stevieling, with vivid descriptions of the vengeance I would wreak on her tiny self should she disappear into Stevieling Land for a few hours and allow the ruddy pool to overflow.

So I expect I shall find an inch of water in the basement when I get home tonight.

1. It goes very twirgly after six months being wound on the spool and will tangle at the drop of a hat if it is let go slack, adding hours to the job while you disengage it from itself, the scenery, your tools and appendages↑
2. Last year↑
3. Postulated Bioluminescent Threat to America↑
4. i.e. I↑
5. A common Home Despot problem despite their introduction of a rental program to alleviate that very practice↑

I-Cons of SF On Parade

I attended I-Con 27, advertised somewhat optimistically¹ as "The East Coast's Biggest SF Convention", in the first weekend of April.

The convention runs from Friday night through late Sunday afternoon and takes place on the campus of the University of New York State at Stonybrook, about a half-hour from Chateau Stevie by Steviemobile. Mrs Stevie and I have been attending sporadically since we married. In fact, we used to attend every other year, when the guest list included one guest who also used that two-year cycle to put in an appearance, Harlan Ellison.

I-Con used to be a reasonably big author magnet. People I've seen in years past include names any SF reader would instantly recognise: Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, George Zebrowski, Barry Malzberg. And Harlan Ellison. In recent years the money use to lure authors into making the trip into darkest Long Island from wherever they come from Niven and Ellison came all the way from California, Malzberg came from NYC and so the "big names" began staying away in droves, leading to fewer writers with established bodies of work on campus during the con.

Around the time the Stevieling became self ambulant we began attending the con every year, come Ellison or not. Also, we began to go our separate ways as our individual focus shifted from a mainly media-guest oriented agenda to, for me, a more panel-intensive one while Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling followed the SCA² route and got dressed up and hung out at Celtic folk concerts.

Four years ago Harlan Ellison attended I-Con and was very entertaining. The man is a witty raconteur and has a lifetime of stories to tell. Truth to tell I avoided his signing sessions because the man is an aggressive and shameless shill for the piles of books he sells, many of which are repackagings of stories I already bought and read before I came to the USA, and I find that a bit tedious when I'm standing on a line that can take hours to get me to the man himself. On the Sunday, after listening to his extremely entertaining presentation, I went to his last signing where I bought a copy of the first two volumes of "Edgeworks", a retrospective put out by White Wolf and which spanned four volumes originally. As he was signing my copies I couldn't help but notice that he looked tired. Little wonder, given the usual partying and so on that goes on at these things, but he didn't look happy. I asked him if he would be coming back and he quietly said he didn't think so.

I couldn't blame him. He lives in sunny California and is advancing in years. Who in his position would want to undertake a hours-long flight from the sun to the rain and cold that is the standard Saturday weather at I-Con? I was deeply saddened, for selfish reasons. This man had provided me with some of the most enjoyable stories I had read and had amused me with his tales of his life and friends any time I chose to get off my rear and find where he was speaking. Harlan Ellison is so much larger than life that not having him in it any more would make the world very much smaller. He was as good as his word, and I-Con was Ellisonless two years later.

I was going to I-Con anyway, but the news that Ellison would actually be there this year was an added incentive to free up some cash for purchasing and to dig out my copies of Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions, comprising five volumes I went without food to obtain back in nineteen seventy mumble. Not only that, but Norman Spinrad, now living in France and hence well out of Steviereach, would also be attending, which inspired an expedition to the deepest levels of the Basement of Crap to unearth whatever I could find of his. A once in a lifetime chance, as it were. I dug out The Iron Dream, The Men In The Jungle, The Solarians and Bug Jack Baron, all battered paperbacks, all bought secondhand in Coventry Market years ago. I also found a copy of Ellison's Shatterday, which contains my favourite Ellison story Jefty is Five. I was well-larded with signables and now had a mission.

I-Con, Friday

Friday night Mrs Stevie, The Stevieling and I made an early start for Stonybrook and as a result found ourselves not standing on line for hours as we had at so many previous I-Cons. We made our way first to the I-Con T-Shirt counter and bought that year's I-Con shirt, then went down to the Dealer's Room.

This is basically a gymnasium³ that has been converted to a bazaar of crap. Want to pay three times the going rate for some action figure somehow related to some out-of-production Sci-Fi show? Head for the Dealer's Room. Want a resin replica of the gun Harrison Deckard used in Blade Runner and that you won't be allowed to wave about anywhere in the con? Head for the Dealer's Room.

This is also where I would find the guy I made the Revolving Jewelry Case of Extreme Inconvenience for, and I was honour bound to find him and make my excuses. It turned out that he was waiting in ambush with his two helpers. They had bets on my not having it with me and were not swayed from some pretty churlish mocking at my expense by my tearful tale of router death. Philistines. I have sacrificed my most favouritest tool to the never-ending saga of this wretched Twirling Folly and what thanks do I get? Public Humiliation, that's what. Bah.

That took all of ten minutes, leaving us able to attend the Harlan Ellison/Peter David presentation in the Javits Lecture Theater complex⁴ at 8 pm, which was wonderful and ran 50% over time by popular acclaim. Ellison was cranky, pissed off and in great form.

He told us how he had been pulled off the line to board his plane because he had demanded that a noisy, abusive, cell-phone using woman had accused him of assaulting her when he had tapped her on the shoulder to ask her to SHUT UP! A man after my own heart. Luckily the cops had witnessed the entire affair. I say luckily because, although the entire line had apparently applauded when Ellison demanded this woman accord the people around her some courtesy, not one of them offered to be a witness as to his not assaulting this idiot. What a world.

He then went on to berate all the kids who were (still) on line for tickets, dressed up in their anime character suits. Ellison does not tolerate the cosplayers well. Or at all, to be honest. They seem to bring out the worst in him, mostly, I think, because they don't know who the hell Harlan Ellison is. He referred to the assembled, costumed masses as "freaks" and opined as to their general worthlessness with much heat.

More anecdotes, jokes and opinion pieces followed in typical Ellison fashion. If you have never seen him in action I urge you to do so if you get the chance. It is really impossible to properly describe the experience of an Ellison rant. All I will say is "Pray it is not you he is ranting about", because, as Asimov so adroitly pointed out, Harlan Ellison doesn't "do" tact. After this 90 minute standup show, it was time for the first Harlan Ellison signing of the con.

We all trooped upstairs to a balcony area where his wife and a crew of helpers had set up a Little Shop O' Ellison and a table for the Great Man to sit at and sign. I Dug out my Ellison books, all six of 'em and planned to add a few more volumes to the stack once I got to the Ellison Travelling Book Store.

The line, as usual, moved slowly.

Look, I'm not stupid and I'm not complaining, really. I expected it to take forever. People who Ellison hadn't seen in years but who he knew from years of conventioneering were on line and he wanted to schmooze. Some people had large collections of books for him to sign and he, though kvetchingThis is SOP for Harlan Ellison, and only a neophyte autograph hunter would be put off by it, always signed each one. Sometimes these collections contained rare editions of personal interest to him, and he would converse with the owner and others, telling them the history involved and socialising with the proud owner a little. One older lady had brought a wheeled airline carry on packed full of such rare first editions. She alone caused a halt on the progress of the line of over 15 minutes. Nobody in the know minded. All we cared about was that the great man wouldn't get tired and need to call a halt to the signing early. For all that he is an energetic and witty man, he is not young and we could all see the strain that flying 3500 miles and performing for an hour and a half had had on him.

In the first half hour, a young woman with an arm full of books and Babylon 5 DVDs was begging her way up the line by acting as sweet as could be and telling each would-be place ceder that she needed to be somewhere else in ten minutes. She made her way up the queue until she got to my area, where she attempted the time honoured "cleavage glimpse" maneuver. You know it. The young woman scrunches down a little, hugging her luggage to her chest while leaning forward, during which she makes her pitch in the most wheedling tones possible. This had worked on many people further back but I was feeling mean on several counts. Namely:

Count One: I was so far back in the line that Ten Minutes was a dream.

Count B: I've been on these lines before and had no wish to lengthen my wait or leave the line without my autographs short of one of my vital organs failing, and possibly not even then.

Count þ: She was carrying oodles of signable crap and would be adding at least five minutes to my wait, probably more since I imagine this "ten minutes" thing would evapourate once she was in contact with the great man hisself and finally, most importantly,

Count Σ: She was wearing a sweatshirt and so showed no actual cleavage at all during her pleas.

What a gyp! I naturally refused point blank to let her queue jump, and after I took a stand, so did everyone else. The young lady was most uncharitable towards me as a result, but I remained resolute, saying only that she had two more guaranteed times to get her stuff signed this weekend according to the printed schedule so she had a clear choice - ditch the party or ditch the signing. I admit I was grumpy but I had been forced to explain to another young college-age individual involved with I-Con that my time was as valuable and in as short supply as his own already⁵ and wasn't feeling expansive towards the younger set that night as a result.

The line advanced, slowly.

Some two hours after getting on line I was finally at the book table, where I spent like money was going out of fashion⁶. There were only two people in front of me!

At that point, the person at the signing table pulled out a book of pictures of groups of famous authors and Ellison was entranced. There followed a seeming eternity while Ellison identified this and that author, then called over various people in his entourage to appreciate the book. It was a superb thing, I admit. Then something happened that made me glad that I had not given up my place, not been further forward in the line, truly a once in a lifetime event.

The guy with the book plonked down a yellow manuscript in a clear plastic binder in front of Ellison. Ellison picked it up and looked at it. He removed the pages and carefully examined the first few. The paper was very brittle with age and acidosis, but Ellison was gentle and not one flake broke off. He looked up and asked "Do you know what this is?"

The owner said all he knew was that it was a Harlan Ellison Manuscript.

Ellison explained that throughout his writing life he had enforced a contractual clause in which the publishers had to return all his manuscripts to him when they were finished typesetting or whatever, but that during the mid fifties⁷ he had been in the army, serving out of Fort Knox, Tennessee and had sold a number of stories to Ziff-Davies, who hadn't returned the manuscripts he sent them. They had claimed the manuscripts in question had been destroyed when Ellison had pressed them⁸. What was now sitting in front of him was the carbon copy of one of those stories. He knew it by the cheap paper he'd had to use for such purposes in those days. The top copy was, he explained, high quality paper but expenses had to be kept low when writing for cents on the word. He explained that he had all his manuscripts in storage. All of them except the Ziff-Davies ones, which until that moment he believed were all destroyed. What he had in front of him, he said, was the only copy of that story in the world. The implication that it was probably the only Ellison story "in the wild" was not lost on anyone.

"I will give you anything you ask for this, now" said Ellison, looking the owner straight in the eye.

The owner explained that Ellison had given him so much pleasure over the years that it would be his pleasure if Ellison would accept the manuscript as a gift.

You hear about these kinds of things happening, but if you are like me and have had a little cynicism sandblasted into your hide by the bastards that you come into contact with on a daily basis, you don't really believe they happen in the real world. I was agog to see what would happen next.

Ellison insisted on paying for the document. The owner insisted it was a gift. Ellison asked for the man's name and address, and the guy refused to give it. I mean, how can reality TV compare with this stuff?

Ellison turned up the insistence to number 11 and finally, genuinely reluctantly, the former manuscript owner gave it. I can only speculate as to what Ellison had in mind, but it is immaterial. The moment itself was everything and I'm glad I was there to see it firsthand. I've never seen Harlan Ellison at a loss for words before. At a loss for the appropriate rude words, sure, but for a few seconds after the manuscript was given to him he just sat there. Not outwardly astonished, shocked, happy or any of the other expressions you might paint on someone's face in a story about this happening. Just frozen, for a few seconds, and silent. Once in a lifetime.

I presented my stack of books, now numbering about a dozen items with the six I'd brought and the six I'd bought. I asked him if he wouldn't mind annotating them with "I-Con 27". I didn't explain that without that piece of data Mr Brain will simply misfile the signing in the next few months and I will lose the significance of it when I next see his name in Again Dangerous Visions. I didn't say that a book with just his name on it was probably destined for eBay, but mine were prized possessions that would never be sold in my lifetime. I should have. I didn't.

"You are such a pain in the ass" he said, and called down the line "This guy is the reason you're all still here!" The girl with the armload of crap led the chorus of catcalls and death threats. I guess she decided to blow off the party after all.

It was during this period that a call went up for Mrs Stevie to go down to the ladies room where the Stevieling was being violently ill. Ellison looked at me with concern and asked what I thought was wrong. I told him I had no idea since I had no control over the kid when she was out of my line of sight and precious little when she wasn't. For some reason Ellison approved greatly of this response. I thanked him and went downstairs to recover the womenfolk for the homeward trip. It was about eleven o'clock by then and everyone was ready for bed. I dunno how Ellison was keeping it together. I was done in.

I-Con, Saturday

We picked up a friend of the Stevieling and made our way to Stonybrook for the main event. Saturday is really the convention's best day, in which most of the events are scheduled to take place and it has the heaviest attendance partly as a result of this, but also because of people coming just to see the students dressed up as anime or video game characters. Bizarre is not the word (but it will do).

Mrs Stevie was in full regalia. Vicky was dressed as some inexplicable⁹ Japanese character from some incomprehensible show. Only I and the Stevieling's friend were in any way normally attired, and the Stevieling's friend was only waiting to get to the Dealer's Room so she could acquire some appurtenances and transmogrify herself into some inexplicable Japanese character from some other incomprehensible show.

We parked and made our way to the building where the passes are issued, where I took my leave of everyone for a concerted program of panels, each one featuring Norman Spinrad. For once the weather was nice and so I eschewed my usual I-Con uniform of waders, oilskins and SCUBA tanks for jeans and the latest I-Con T-shirt. It was all very satisfying and cerebral and I was relieved to be able to pass almost the entire day without encountering Celtic Bards, Wizards, Pokemon or inexplicable Japanese characters.

Spinrad was interesting too, though for different reasons. With books in his stable like The Iron Dream he has become unpublishable in the USA, which is a great shame. He has so much publishing time under his belt that he also has some startling insights as to why the American SF market is the way it is, his take being that the large chains now employ software in a particularly destructive way to dictate what and how much they will buy from a publisher, wich in turn drives what the publisher will buy and how many copies he will print.

Spinrad authored one of the better Star Trek¹⁰ episodes, the one that features the planet eating robot death machine. He told us how that had come about, Roddenberry preferring to use a stable of "house" writers for his scripts normally. Apparently there was a need for an episode that was needed yesterday, on a very small budget with no exterior shots. Spinrad had already earned himself a reputation for not only being able to write screenplays for television, but of being able to write them to budget, an apparently rare talent.

The story of how that episode grew into being and how a second Spinrad script withered on the vine was some of the best, most interesting anecdotal material I have witnessed. I have an abiding interest on how the stuff I read and watch on TV get to become real, and a genuine admiration for those who try and get the stuff there unmolested. Their tales from the trenches are always interesting and sometimes a real eye-opener.

I was so busy racing from one panel to the next that I didn't get any "slack time" to visit the Dealer Room or the Game Rooms. In fact, I only got lunch because I screwed up when I made up my schedule and overlapped two events, making one of them not-get-to-able and freeing up thirty minutes for nosebagging.

The period straight after lunch was scheduled as a teleconference between John Coker and Ray Bradbury, who was being presented with the Gallun Award, a yearly award made at I-Con to those deemed worthy. I got there early and found John outside the lecture theater (which was currently hosting yet another Harlan Ellison thing, a showing of the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth) selling his latest book, a limited edition Bradbury retrospective/photo interview that has four previously unpublished stories in it, called Surround Yourself With Your Loves and Live Forever. I bought a copy, chewed the fat for a couple of minutes then went in to catch the end of the movie and the discussion about it afterwards

I rendezvoused with Mrs Stevie for the Ellison presentation of this documentary movie someone made over twenty seven years, years in which Ellison loaned the man (a prominent History Channel and Discovery Channel documentarian I might add) footage from his home movie collection and granted him interview after interview with cameras prominently rolling throughout, without Ellison noticing anything untoward. During the Q&A session afterwards I asked Ellison: "As someone who has regarded himself as a keen observer of human nature and behaviour throughout his life, how did you feel in that moment you realised that someone had made, over the course of 27 years, a feature-length movie in which you were the star without your noticing?". He cracked up, pointed out that I was not the first to have asked that, then skillfully dodged the question with a lengthy anecdote. It was extremely entertaining, and I didn't mind the evasive action at all. As I said before, Ellison is a great raconteur and (provided you aren't in his sights) highly entertaining when he raconts.

The Stevieling put in an appearance later on, wearing some sort of Japanese trenchcoat that covered her from just under her nose to just above her feet. One of the Dealers was selling them and all the younger teens were buying them like hot cakes. The Stevieling attempted to explain the reason, function and character involved but I lost the thread after the first two minutes of dense backstory. To me, they all looked like "Clunk" from Dastardly and Mutley in Their Flying Machines. Around six pm all the panels finished so that the people involved could get to the awards banquet. Mrs Stevie and I never bother with these as the one we attended back in the 80s was very disappointingly attended and the food was awful. I rendezvoused with Mrs Stevie and we swung by the Dealer Room to pick up the kids and, their protests ringing in our ears, we made our way home. The Stevieling made me smile. She told me that she had been in the Javits Building and Ellison was signing again. She went upstairs, in her full regalia and made her way to the signing table.

"Excuse me Mr Ellison" she said, probably through the collar of that ridiculous greatcoat.

"What is it, Kid?" He reportedly said. "I'm kinda busy here".

"I know. I just wanted to say 'thank you' for your concern over my health last night."

I would have given a lot to see his reaction to that. "I don't think he realised that your daughter was one of the freaks" she said as we drove onto the expressway.

I-Con, Sunday

Sunday dawned, and we were all so cream-crackered that we got a very late start. We picked up the Stevieling's friend. drove about a mile, turned around and went back for her ticket, drove back to our house so I could take a handful of aspirin, and then made our way back to the convention. Mrs Stevie was so annoyed by all this driving she insisted I drop of the women at the gate to the Dealer's Room, and I was so fed up to the back teeth with the women that I only put up a token resistance before burning rubber through the twisty road to the ISC, ignoring the various Jedi Knights, Puffy Shirted Pirates, Women in Wimples and Kids in Nose-To-Feet Japanese Greatcoats who leaped screaming from my path, stopping briefly to push out Mrs Stevie and urge the teenagers in the back to get out while the getting was good.

Then it was off to park the Steviemobile and locate Spinrad, supposedly appearing in a panel with Peter S. Beagle that morning in the SAC, a mere half campus sprint away. The weather today was more like th traditional I-Con weather, with a stiff breeze blowing off the light coating of hoarfrost that had formed on every surface overnight, so the sprinting was sprightly.

Spinrad didn't show, which put me in a foul mood since today was supposedly his one and only official signing. Had the wily author given us the slip or merely over-indulged in the wines, viands and sundry pleasures of the con last night/this morning? Only time would tell.

Meanwhile, Peter S. Beagle proved to be highly entertaining himself, as only someone with a lifetime in the writing trade could be. If you don't recognise the name, probably the most prominent thing he was involved with was the animated Lord of the Rings in the 1970s (and boy did he have some stories about that). He is an extremely soft-spoken man, with a voice one of the women present described as "molten chocolate", whatever that means. I found myself wishing I could have spent more time listening to the things this man had had to say over the last two days, but this year, for the first time in years, there was so much happening of interest to me that I was in a quandry sometimes as to what to pick from the conflicting timetables. The last time this happened was back when the convention was housed entirely in the Javits complex.

I wandered back to the Dealer's Room and nipped over to a particular book dealer I seek out each I-Con. He comes from Georgia and offers a small but eclectic collection of second-hand books for the discerning buyer, many of them first editions, many of them signed. This time he had a couple of nice things on offer: A first edition hardback of Spinrad's collection Songs from the Stars, which I bought, and first edition hardbacks of both Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions which I didn't. The Dangerous Visions was in good condition, a little stained on the page edges, but was missing the dust jacket. The copy of Again, Dangerous Visions was in very good condition and had the dust jacket to boot. Both books were reasonably priced and I find myself regretting today that I exercised some fiscal restraint on that Sunday on the grounds I already had signed early edition paperbacks of both¹¹. I knew Ellison visits to I-Con were becoming rare and should have thought in terms of the investment value of the books. The problem is that I don't do that, ever, really. I buy books to read and to have so I can read them again¹².

Anyway

I made my way over to the Author Signing Table and got on line with the other hopefuls, and only a few minutes after the posted time Spinrad wheeled in and got down to brass tacks. He signed everything and anything people had brought for him and had no little bookshop set up to generate extra revenue from the affair. I had asked him on Saturday if he would be selling because I would rather buy directly from the author in the same way I buy CDs directly from Fairport Convention when I can. This way the generator of the work gets the maximum return on their sweat investment. Spinrad assured me that he would not be selling and I cursed inwardly at the time because I had not spotted the Georgian bookseller (some booths were in different spots to their usual location) and thought I might have to deal with a couple of less desirable book merchants on-site¹³.

I pulled out my nice "new" hardback and rather more shamefacedly my obviously secondhand paperbacks, but Spinrad didn't care. I explained how I had become enamored of his work at a time when I was fresh out of college and fresh out of work, and that each of these beaten-up books had been snatched up and cherished at the cost of missing lunch or walking three miles instead of taking the bus.

Spinrad waved me off, being more interested that all but two of my books were UK editions, including the controversial The Iron Dream , which had bolstered the shock-appeal of the story itself with a provocative cover depicting Adolf Hitler astride a large motorcycle riding out of the cover at the reader, a red swastika at his back along with a towering rocket vaguely suggestive of a huge hypodermic syringe. The cover got Spinrad animated. He grabbed his companion (I assume his wife though we were not introduced) and excitedly explained that this cover had all the design elements he had wanted on the American edition, elements the publisher had flatly refused to countenance. The Hypodermic imagery was deliberate and Spinrad's own idea, he claimed. The red Swastika tied in with some topical (at the time) stuff going on with the Ku Klux Klan (don't ask me, I have no idea what those nut-jobs were up to in the mid 70s and no desire to find out), and was again a Spinrad suggestion. He was very pleased to be surprised by this beaten-up old book.

I mentioned that his episode idea for the original Star Trek had been the only identifiable thing carried over into the Task Force game Star Fleet Battles under the scenario title "The Planet Killer". He scowled at me, growled "Oh yeah? This thing still in print?" which leads me to believe another failure to fully license has taken place. I explained that the people who made the game tore out each other's throats in an implosion of acrimonious acrimony twenty years ago, which mollified him, some.

The last order of business was to go see Ellison again. Once again he was in good, if grumpy, form, but he was obviously ready to go home. He complained that he had been put up in a fleabag hotel in which parties had kept him awake. He complained that when he asked some guy screaming into a cell phone outside his door at three am to keep it down, the idiot responded by sneering "Who the fbleep do you think you are?", a monumentally stupid thing to do because his years notwithstanding, Ellison is still perfectly willing to explain that datum to people with extreme prejudice. His litany of complaints set up a bad feeling amongst his most ardent fans and eventually one asked if he would be returning to I-Con. Ellison reiterated his complaints, made some comments about his home and his desire not to be out of it very often and, to no-one's real surprise said he wouldn't.

It must have been a tough call. On the one hand you want the man, the guest of honour, to feel at the center of the activities. On the other, he needs his sleep. Someone should have asked him if he wanted to be put up at the official I-Con hotel (a Holiday Inn with all that implies) or would rather be somewhere a little more secluded. I'm sure that a private house wouldn't have been too hard to sort out, given the fan base on Long Island. I dunno. I just think the same thing I did four years ago: It's understandable, but a great shame that the biggest draw for the convention has such a bad time of it that he doesn't look forward to the next one.

Ellison did one final signing, which gave me the chance to get a colleague's book signed (said colleague had planned to attend but had to cancel out at the last minute).

We left the Con around six and drove home, the kids dozing in the back, Mrs Stevie dozing in the front and me dozing behind the wheel.

1. The fact is that the SF content of this convention is debatable since it has more media, anime, "cosplay", gamers and LARP content these days than trad Author-centric content. This is clearly What They Want and will only get more so as time goes on, but it rankles in this SF readers heart. Also, Dragoncon is bigger and Boskone has more trad SF in it↑
2. The Society for Creative Anachronism, people who like to dress up and pretend they live in the middle ages. The middle ages as envisioned by various fantasy writers, at any rate. This is why your average Renaissance Fayre has wizards and ladies in impractical armour wandering around it. I digress↑
3. Technically, the ISC↑
4. Years ago, the entire convention was held in this octagonal building. People who attended in those years often remark wistfully how handy it was when everything was a few seconds walk from everything else. These days one is often confronted with the need to spring half the width of the campus to get from one event to the next, only to have to reverse the process for the following event. Since it rains during most I-Cons and is cold too, this is not a popular option for many people. I, of course, am made of Sterner Stuff™↑
5. A long story involving me volunteering my requested services to the I-Con team eight months before and my being told the reason they were only getting back to me the week before the event was because of time constraints on the student body and that I should remember that a student has little free time when dealing with them↑
6. A truism these days, sadly. At least, when it comes to American money, now almost worthless↑
7. The date I remember him giving was 1954↑
8. Something I imagine was not enjoyable for the Ziff-Davies representative. You don't want to be at the focus of Harlan Ellison's ire↑
9. Not that the Stevieling didn't try. At length. Several times↑
10. Original, Shatner-Nimoy-Kelly-Doohan-Nicholls Trek↑
11. Sphere second printings of DV in three volumes which have nice covers and are in super fine condition despite being front and center in Domestic Flood Xena and good condition Pan first editions of the ADV collection in two fat volumes with what I think ar Chris Foss covers↑
12. Excepting the New English Library books like my Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom books that were glued up with Virtual Adhesive™, which disintegrates over time. In the case of Heinlein's Time Enough For Love the time in question was about a week after purchasing it; I was racing the book to reach the end before all the pages were loose-leaf↑
13. Long story, not worth going into↑

New LIRR Timetables For My (In)Convenience

My friend Ralph the Teacher paid us a flying visit from his new home in Atlanta, Georgia¹, so I decided to cut my working day short and take the earlier 5:01 from Brooklyn which is one of the two direct, no change at Jamaica (not the good one) trains offered.

Since a change at Jamaica usually involves transferring to a train from Manhattan, already filled to indecent assault levels before it leaves Penn Station, if I can't make either this or (more usually) the 6:04 I just travel into Manhattan and take a train out of Penn. So I would just like to take a minute to thank the fbleeping moron who decided to drop the 5:01 from the schedule and replace it with the all-but-useless 4:30-something. Had I known before I set out that I would be experiencing the creative talent of the LIRR traffic flow and passenger logistics staff I would have left earlier and gone to Penn². Well done that wuckfit.

I finally got home and rendezvoused with Ralph, and a high time of manly goings on was had for a couple of hours. Ralph is not aclimating to life in Georgia well. For one thing, he is not enjoying The Joke.

You don't know it? They only have the one, it seems. It goes like this: What's the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee? The Yankee eventually goes home. Ralph, possibly the least translocatable New Yorker I know, has tired of it after a mere 1100 tellings (estimated), and has begun to respond in "kind"³. Truth be told, Ralph probably took to replying before anyone broke out the joke. He is radically unsuited to life off Long Island. Oh well. I told him to head off the joke next time with a witty replacement punchline⁴ but he wasn't receptive.

In point of fact there are indeed an awful lot of people still fighting what is known south of the Mason-Dixon line as "The War Of Northern Agression" (or sometimes, in polite society, as "The Recent Unpleasantness") depite the fact that it was all over and done with more than four generations ago. Who won the civil war? Truth is, no-one did, really. All that happened was that the nation as a whole lost.

It is true that individuals prospered at the expense of their fellow citizens, just as they do today⁵ but niether side "won" that particular war as is obvious by the fact that The Joke is still being told (it dates back to before the Burning of Atlanta I should think).

I became profoundly aware of just how devastating the civil war was to the emerging nation of the USA when I first visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, an experience still as vivid today as it was on that afternoon in 1985 when the ramifications of the conflict in terms of world politics hit me like a physical blow as I stood at Lincoln's feet. It must have filled the country's leaders with despair at the time. Oh well.

This morning I was again out in good time to catch the Brooklyn train even if I couldn't get a parking space due to flocks of Rich Gits descending on Wyandanch again. If only that low-loader carrying some sort of gigantic machine hadn't decided to take the same route, albeit at a top speed of twenty miles an hour.

Having missed the Brooklyn train I was forced into a Jamaica change, whereupon I was fortunate enough to share my commute with one of the rudest people I've met in a long time.

He was sitting in one of the three abreast, facing, six-seater seats. When occupying these, etiquette is for two people to sit on the same side separated by one seat, with a third seated in the middle on the opposite side. This way everyone gets legroom, and there is plenty of manouveuring room should a fourth wish to join the group (in which case pairs sit facing each other). This individual had decided to spread his legs out so he occupied the space in front of him and that I wished to sit in (the lady in the other position was rather large and sitting opposite her was not optimal).

I asked him to move over and he just glared at me. I glared back and asked loudly how much room he needed. He ceded about three inches of space, but still tried to put the squeeze on with his legs, making for an uncomfortable trip.

As I got off the train at Brooklyn I found myself wishing for the hex-powers of The Scarlet Witch. I pictured myself handing the Ignoramus a card with a 'phone number on it and muttering "when you want it to stop, call this number", then leaving the fool to a string of increasingly annoying yet inexplicable petty strokes of bad luck as my hex-powers had their way with him, culminating in a tearful begging one night via a rapidly failing cell phone.

I swear that as I walked down the platform I heard a crash as the stiches mysteriously vanished from his leather briefcase and the contents spread themselves around his feet to be trodden on by people as polite as he was.

I totally should have these powers.

1. Rainy nights optional, I'm told ↑
2. a train at 4:3x pm is too damned early to be of use to anyone who works normal office hours: I suspect the influence of recently arrived in-theater Rich Gits who never work regular office hours ↑
3. A curious construction I've always felt, since the way it is done is rarely perceived as "kind" by anyone involved ↑
4. "A Yankee always thanks the Georgia Peach after he has burned down her home and ravished her in retaliation for her ancestors' secession". Ralph frowned, but I don't think he spotted the fact I was insulting both sides of "the recent unpleasantness" in retaliation for their ancestors' foul and mutinous behaviour in the mid to late 1700s when they cast off Benevolent British Rule ↑
5. The myth that is the economy of hiring civilian contractors to fill traditionally military roles in Iraq is the biggest whopper waiting in the wings to bring down a government from where I am sitting. In almost all the cases I've seen examined, it seems to be costing several times as much to have these contractors in place. One might think the whole sorry business was contrived for a select few rich people to get even richer, if one was a cynic ↑

Blade Running

Mrs Stevie gave me the Bladrunner Suitcase O' Ents for Xmas.

It has provided endless entertainment since I breached the security seal on the nifty Voight-Kampff briefcase it came in. I've marvelled at the artwork. I've spent hours watching Harrison Deckard draw a bead on someone out of shot with my tilt-to-animate framed scene. I've fondled the origami unicorn while uttering convincing LA street gibberish and wearing a trilby. I've flown several times around the living room with the 1/48^th scale Spinner while making realistic LA ambient sounds that caused Mrs Stevie to go thin lipped. I think she disapproves of the West Coast, even dystopic visions of future versions of it. Either that or she is fundamentally opposed to the flying car. No matter. I pay her little attention when I'm having fun, and I'm having lots of fun with the bits in this kit.

And that's not the best part.

Since Boxing Day I've seen Bladerunner: The Definitive Cut.

And three hours of Documentary "Making of Bladerunner" stuff.

And the US theatrical release of Bladerunner.

And three hours of documentary "Behind the scenes of Bladerunner" and "Bladerunner: Actor and Crew Retrospectives on the Iconic Film of the 80s"

And the theatrical trailers.

And Bladerunner: The Director's Cut

And the fun's just starting! We still have the UK theatrical release of Bladerunner and the Bladerunner workprint to view.

This movie has everything: Harrison Ford, mind-staggering scenery, eardrum-endangering low frequency enhanced soundtrack (the sub-woofer finally has its day), nude nakedness, Daryl Hannah when she was young and supple starring as a raccoon, Sean Young's¹ shoulders: the list goes on and on.

And no-one says the fun has to stop there, as I pointed out to Mrs Stevie when she expressed concern over how much more material was in the set. We can simply load disc one back into the player and start all over again once we're done. She obviously hadn't considered this, and was immediately overcome with emotion, crying and cursing with pleasure at the prospect.

It doesn't get any better than this.

1. Yes, that Sean Young, the one that recently made a fuss at the Director's Guild Award after imbibing twice her own weight in strong drink, only to disappear into rehab. Apparently she heckled a Mr Julian Schnabel who was accepting is award for directing somethong called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Well, not to be judgemental, but let's face it: I doubt The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will ever be classed as "an Iconic film of the 80s" or be issued in five different versions in a suitcase along with a plastic origami butterfly and a 1/48^th scale diving bell. You heckle Ridley Scott, Director of Bladerunner and you've crossed the line, but The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Sounds as interesting as tax instructions to me and I can only imagine the nature of a speech from the maker of such a movie. Not only that. I think one must cut Sean Young some slack here. How would you behave if you had found out you were manufactured, born sometime in early adulthood, imprinted with someone else's memories and given a five year life span? I submit that the strain of living with that for 27 years would tell on anyone. I mean, look what it did for Arnold Schwartzeneggar who rampaged all over the place killing people and stealing vehicles before someone dropped a steam hammer on him.↑

Progress (Of Sorts) On The Reconstruction Of Bog

Technical Advisery Adversity Aarvarkery Stuff

I am experimenting in this entry with the idea of having hyperlinks under the superscripts linking them to their respective footnotes, and an uppy (↑) at the end of each footnote with a link under it back to the superscripted reference that the footnote refers to. If this feature proves useful to you, let me know. If it doesn't work, let me know. It may or may not be a feature of new postings, depending on whether or not I can devise an editor to make the links automagically for me as the "ideas" they link to spring from Mr Brain's fevered lobes. I also uploaded the pictures I took of the fantastic sights that greet anyone making pilgrmage to Bog (though they cannot as yet avail themselves of the promised facilities once they get there, and must make a rapid pilgramage to the downstairs bathroom instead).

Mrs Stevie made several pointed remarks on Friday evening about how near Christmas was and the desirability of having two bathrooms when it loomed over the horizon. I took this to be a subtle hint on the lack of progress on rebuilding Bog. Not being one for subtlety, I settled down in the recliner and snoozed for a bit while I thought about working on the floor some more.

Fortunately, over the years I have developed, well, I don't know what to call it; a sort of second sense that warns of impending cookware so I was actually rolling under the coffee table before I was awake enough to physically register Mrs Stevie's cowardly assault with her large skillet.

My having foiled the vile harridan's main assault by the old "duck and cover" method taught in the sixties to schoolchildren¹, she was reduced to "putting the boot in" while screaming her trademark warcry². I intuitively knew she was disturbed about something. Perhaps her new job was proving more stressful than expected, perhaps it was simply one or three too many Hi-Test Espressos. In any event, I thought it might be best to calm her with an olive branch and so I decided to offer to install the bathroom floor over the weekend.

And so it came to pass:

I had previously varnished both sides of two of the three 4x8 sheets of plywood, but had run out of varnish after finishing only the underside of the third sheet. This wouldn't be such a problem as might be expected, since I actually had more varnish. I simply didn't have the same sort of varnish as I had applied to the one side. In any event, I would end up not needing to varnish more than a 1x4 strip of wood as things turned out.

The Plan

Recall that The Floor of Bog is 5x4 in size, with an area in one corner about 8 inches on a side completely unsupported by the hardwood timbers that form the floor you can see in the previously published photographs. By using 4x4 foot sheets of plywood, I would end up having a strip 1x4 to cover when two of the sheets had been deployed. I would make that strip from pieces of the third 4x4 sheet. Recall also that this is already "Plan B", "Plan A" having been consigned to the scrap heap by Mrs Stevie's DIY center nagging. "Plan C" doesn't at this point exist.

Installing the plywood was challenging, especially the bit that overhung the large square gap the plumbers had to cut in the hardwood sub-sub floor to reach the pipes of water delivery and waste water removal. The two 4x4 panels I had varnished on both sides were designated to do most of the work, and I would deal with the bit with the hole in it as part of the problem of the foot-wide strip the too-small plywood boards would leave once fitted.

The first challenge that was undercome was to map the contour of the bath, complicated by a sort of double-ogee at each end, to the plywood. This I chose to solve as a two-stage process. I would transfer the contour to a cardboard template, then use the template to cut the wood. I would use the nice new contour guide to transfer the curve at each end of the bath to the paper. Simple.

A contour guide looks like a ruler with a bunch of pins laid across it and held by a backing plate. You push the pins against the curve and they retract to form a copy of it, then you trace the line using a pencil on paper and the contour guide as a stencil. Magic. I had wanted to try one of these for yonks³.

It was a foolproof plan and would have worked if the manufacturer of said guide hadn't cheaped out by not setting the pins in grooves restricting their movement to up and down.

As it was, the pins began to walk sideways and distort the curve as soon as I was stupid enough to actually try using the piece of junk. This is a non-tool. It will not perform the single job it was presumably designed to do⁴. I have accordingly made plans for it. Watch this space. What is even more galling is that  Home Despot  has the manufacturers label some of their stuff as "good", "better" and "best". I would have bought their "best" contour guide but for the fact they didn't have one on their shelves. They only had the "better" one. Azathoth help the poor sods who ever bought the "good" one.

I decided to use this sudden and unexpected tool failure as an opportunity to allow Mr Brain some room for innovation. A trip to the basement of crap provided a scrap of pine, my Japanese saw, my table-mounted router and a pencil. In a trice I had cut a length of pine, sawed two V-shaped notches in it and milled a rounded trough along its length for the pencil to sit in. By utilising two of the rubber bands from ammo stash⁵ wound around the pine block, one in each of the V-notches-of-keeping-the-bands-back-from-the-bearing-surface, I could lash an ordinary pencil into the groove-of-not-letting-the-pencil-slip-around-and-thereby-screw-up-the-tracing. Then it was a simple matter of puting down a cardboard sheet and running the Improvised Contour Tracing Machine Of Spiffy Excellence over the length of the bath to trace it's shape. Job done.

Then I took a short break to run Mrs Stevie to the doctor (she had somehow badly twisted her ankles and bruised both her big toes sometime the previous evening). That translated into three hours of wait-for-the-quack-to-appear and taking Mrs Stevie to lunch afterwards.

The cut-out-the-template-and-transfer-the-contour-to-the-wood phase of operations went surprisingly well, leaving only the actual cutting of the wood to be done. This was accomplished using Mr Scrollsaw for the bath contour and Mr Dremel (appearing as Mr Spiral Saw) for the hole for the flange. Then the wood panels were simply dropped into place ready for nailing.

As for the one-foot gap, that required some extra thought. Not only was there the huge hole of plumber convenience complicating matters, part of the bath contour was in that section too. The 1/4 inch plywood was simply too thin to support the floor over the hole, which was most of the width of the board and more worryingly, left no support for the corner. The 1/4 inch laminations would slide over one another and flex as if they were half their combined thickness unless they were somehow fixed together . Which was what I did in the end. I took two sections of wood and cut them to shape, then glued them together to make one 1/2 inch piece. The gluing would take all night to set up, giving me a great excuse to stop work (remember, it was Mrs Stevie's idea to use these pieces of wood; She had no defense against this logic and was forced to grimace and bear it).

On Sunday morning, with the women gone to do whatever they do do on a Sunday, I was free to apply a quick-drying varnish to the board, carve out the back of it to accommodate a pipe fitting that protruded about 1/32 of an inch above the floor datum, aply some varnish to the carved-out bit and grab a cuppa while it dried. The strip it was supposed to fit in was very slightly tapered, ending up 1/8th of an inch narrower at one end. I dealt with that by cutting the board down by 1/8th of an inch in Mr Tablesaw, which for wonder didn't add its own undesigned-for taper to the wood as it did when I made the jewelry display case of never being finished. It fit very nicely, and I nailed everything down.

The corner was still quite springy though. This was a problem because although I don't plan on putting anything heavy on that part of the floor (like my own manly weight) the floor must be rigid to support the backer-board layer that goes on top of the wood. Fortunately, my heritage as a former inhabitant of Coventry, a town with a long history of mining, came to the fore and I was able to fabricate a pit-prop from underneath to support the floor against the wall of the downstairs bathroom⁶. Job done.

Then came the attempt to cow the backerboard into submission. In this I was less than successful.

Backerboard is made from cement, with a significant silica component that is highly dangerous to aspirate in powdered form⁷. Cutting the board is perforce a tedious business, since it must be done outside while wearing breathing apparatus. I deployed my workmate on the back patio and wrestled one of the boards onto it. These boards are quite heavy, with a 3x5 sheet weighing in at between "cor blimey" and "****ing hell!". My plan called for the sheet to have the hole for the toilet flange cut in it. Since it was exactly the right width, I would simply drop it into place when I had the hole cut. No Problem.

I traced out the hole using dividers and a pencil and attempted to plunge Mr Spiralsaw through the sheet the saw penetrated about half the depth, then came to a halt. Puzzled I pulled it out of the hole, only to see the end of the bit glowing bright red. This was a first. I have misused tools to the point they lost temper before, but this represented the first time I can remember actually melting a tool. The end of the spiral saw actually melted. The board was undamaged, other than a half-drilled hole. I looked at the backerboard with new appreciation. Why the manufacturers forgot to mention its use in heat shields and bank safes is beyond me. I decided to utilise another method, and drilled round the circumference of the circle with Mr Drill. Then I tried to "join the dots" with Mr Spiralsaw.

To no avail.

The middle of the blade now had the tell-tale scorch marks that indicate a loss of temper on the part of the bit⁸. I decided on another new plan, the ill-fated and short-lived "Plan C", and deployed Mr Scrollsaw which did the job. Unfortunately, the hole proved to be slightly misaligned and the sheet proved too big to drop into place anyway. Not only that, the taps on the old pipes were in the ****ing way. Thus was born "Plan D".

I cut the board into a much narrower 5 foot long segment using the "score and break" method suggested by the manufacturer, and tried that. After deploying a reserve cache of swear words the damn thing finally dropped into place, leaving me to contemplate the new requirements for the remaining backerboard layer. The score and break method works, but tends to undercut the scoreline. This cannot be tolerated on the next pieces to be cut, so we may be looking at the ultra-dangerous-dust producing saw. Which means doing it all outside again. Heydeho.

By then it was about 4:30pm, so I decided to break for the day and connect up the Christmas Lights that had been hung⁹ but not wired. This was done, and such was the ease of it that I went ahead and deployed two "light-pipes" on the deck banisters. That was when I discovered that the long-thought-to-be-indestructible light pipes were subject to failure. As I bent one to the contour of the bannister (as I straightened it actually) a secton went out. Then came back on. And went out. Then came back on again. Closer examination revealed a devastating truth: I had arcing in my light-pipe. I was able to arrange things so that the arcing stopped and the lights stayed on, but now I am terrified that this Fizzing Light-Pipe of Death will burn down the deck.

Not terrified enough to open up the light-pipe and resolder the broken joint, mind.

1. Presumably in those less-complex days the Soviet menace was armed primarily with Le Cruset enamelware and was envisaged as deploying it in hand-to-hand techniques rather than the intercontinental ballistic missile delivery and MIRV fusion warheads they threatened us with in the seventies. ↑
A five minute exposition on the accuracy of the UK Registrar's office vis-à-vis my parentage along with a catalogue of my perceived shortcomings beginning with my drawing breath ↑
Defined in this case as about eighteen years for the precisionists out there ↑
I've never before had a tool fail so spectacularly that it couldn't be used for something. This thing literally has no place in the universe. I would take it back but then someone else might end up with it ↑
For my Guzi 100-shot rubber band gattling gun if you must know ↑
Since I was the only one in the house and since the bathroom was at this time not in use, I judged the danger of firedamp to be minimal. I possess neither a canary nor a Davy Safety Lamp and so couldn't be sure that I wasn't operating in a cloud of methane at any time. One spark from Mr Drill would ignite any pockets of the deadly gas and blow me arse over tip. It's a manly life in the drop ceiling, I can tell you ↑
Though there are no explicit warnings about it, I can't imagine that aspirating solid chunks of board would do you much good either ↑
Followed in short order by the loss of temper of the bit's owner ↑
9. Last Christmas, if you want to be technically accurate ↑

Alone At Last, Part 1

Thursday happened.

I rose to the tintinnabulation of the Women de Famile Stevie making ready to cast off for the shores of the Magic Kingdom with the usual good grace, punctuated by vile epithets and threats on the one hand and strident claims of innocence/hurrying/whatever would shut down the vile epithets and threats quickest on the other.

Ah, the joys of family life. It only seems like yesterday that I was witness to that most wondrous of life's mysteries: the simultaneous onset of puberty and menopause, the lot of those who start families later in life and stick around to see how it all works out. Oh how I looked forward to coming home after a day of being screamed at by co-workers.

I tried to remain above it all by burrowing into the bed and stuffing pillows into my ears, but Mrs Stevie became aware that someone wasn't getting into the holiday spirit and demanded I rise and shine with the rest of the world (as typified by the contents of the timeshare villa).

I took a quick inventory. Two women, bright red from anaerobic shrieking: check. Boyfriend somewhere under the busby that passes for his hairstyle, nimbly managing to stay out of either of their zones of control: Check. Something was missing. A second brief inventory of personnel was no more help in dispelling the feeling that I was missing someone.

"Stop standing around like a great useless lummox and help!" yelled my darling.

There it was: the punchbag-cum-money-fountain formerly known as "You idiot". All present and correct then.

Now a newcomer to the business of marital bliss might have made a classic mistake at this point by saying something like "What would you like me to do?" or the even worse "How can I help?"

Of course everyone with more than two years service under their belts will recognize the first as the bait for the "Anything would be better than standing round doing nothing, I don't know why I bother sometimes you insensitive bastard, my mother was right about you" rant that never goes anywhere good. The second is a more subtle trap, one designed to play on any feelings of guilt the spouse may have left in them, and inevitably ends up leaving the baited one feeling angry and hostile for hours afterwards.

I have managed over the years to expunge all feelings of guilt from my body, even those left by the most egregious "transgressions¹" enacted against the interests of Mrs Stevie over the two hundred years or so that we've been married. Even the time I inadvertently dropped a forty year-old Norwegian Maple on her is now, in the light of passing years, remembered simply as the unavoidable and entirely accidental result of insect perfidy and unobservable wood rot rather than a deliberate attempt to jump directly to the "us do part" clause in our contract of bondage as she would have it at the time.

Besides, I had intended for the tree to fall the other way and by doing so remove a small flower bed that we were in dispute over. Had I been trying to drop the bloody thing into the driveway I would a) have arranged a better plan that didn't involve split second synchronization with her parking in the driveway² and 2) removed the new-ish chainlink fence from the path of mutinous arboreal destruction.

In any case, it missed both her and the car.

Where was I? Oh right.

Sadly for Mrs Stevie I have trained my ears to recognize the start of both phrases and was thus able to make myself unavailable by ducking into the bathroom until they had left and gone away. I adopted my usual garb when on my own by removing every stitch of clothing, there being no good reason to make more laundry for myself when all I planned was sleeping, lounging and sleeping, and walked out into the living room.

"Good morning sir!"

I had forgotten about The Boyfriend, who had waited until I had walked past and was therefore behind me when he spoke.

"Argh!" I agreed, leaping several feet into the air in a display of improvised British athleticism designed to confound and amaze the colonial eye, and returned to the bedroom to put back on my clothes.

"That is an interesting tattoo you have on your right buttock, sir" the lad opined through the door as I hopped about madly trying to get my trouser legs to match my actual legs.

"Not a tattoo" I replied. "More of an embossing, really"

"Really? Radical! Who is the woman?" he said in tones of wonder

"The Queen" I replied

"I didn't know they had any women in the band. I'm not really a fan of their stuff myself"

"Not Queen, The Queen. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Great Britain, defender of the faith, et cetera et cetera."

"Wow! You must be a really loyal fan! But isn't it treason of the most mutinous stripe to depict the sovereign on one's buttock? Where did you get it done? I've never heard of embossing human flesh before. How do they do it?" His excitement was palpable.

"Not really. Yes, it probably is. A field in Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire. You do it by ... look, I'll tell you over breakfast if you'll drive us to a diner and you promise not to talk about my buttocks to anyone. Ever."

"Deal!"

And so, once we had ensconced ourselves in a diner made quiet by everyone else having gone to Disney, and once breakfast had been served and I had coffee and eggs and bacon and sausage and hash browns and all the other things I like but have forgotten to mention in front of me, I told the tale of The Parachuting Fiasco.

continued in the next entry

1. Per Mrs Stevie↑
2. Why she believes this is beyond me. She knows from the two years we had a mountain of topsoil in the driveway that I can barely manage simple solid geometry. The calculus required to enact the ambush she believes I had arranged for her return from Starbux was, even then, beyond me without serious application of strong drink, and that would have precluded the use of the chain saw. Q.E.2.↑

The New Steviemobile

I sulked for a week or so after the insurance company handed me a check for the defunct-over-a-piddling-issue Steviemobile, then Mrs Stevie got cross and told me I had to do something about getting a new car because she was fed up with collecting me at the station and driving me around in Chauffeured Luxury™.

Mrs Stevie had a co-worker who had suggested we look at what might be obtained from Hertz used car sales, giving their used cars a thumbs up and explaining that although they typically had high usage they had been well-looked-after for their entire life with Hertz.

So, on the next Sunday I took a look on their website and discovered a Nissan Altima of this year's vintage with only 14,400 miles on its clock.

This looked too good to be true so when Mrs Stevie returned from Defensive Lutheran-Fu classes I swung over to Smithtown, about twenty minutes away from Chateau Stevie, and asked for a test drive. The nice man brought out the car, which was listed as "Storm Blue" but was charcoal to my eyes. He swore it was the right car so I climbed in, with Mrs Stevie in the back seat for comparative experience reporting and back seat driving tests and prepared for driving.

I think the nice man was waiting for me to ask how to start the car, but I had driven this very model while in Florida in the summer¹ so knew about pressing the brake and pushing the button. I did, however, spend about five minutes checking all the controls to ensure I knew where such things as door locks, window winders, mirror adjusters, headlight and so forth were located. Not doing this in Florida had brought on fiasco when we were rear-ended seconds after leaving the hire car lot, and I couldn't open the door to jump out and be properly outraged.

The engine burst into life and we hurled out of the carpark on what proved to be a convincingly nice test drive.

In about ten minutes I parked in front of the showroom and we went inside to say that yes, we'd like to buy the vehicle.

When I bought the Steviemobile 15 years ago I clearly remember that the process involved a three day wait so that plates and paperwork could be completed. We bought the car on a Saturday and picked it up on a Wednesday night after work.

So you can imagine I was quite impressed that although it was Sunday, the nice man could not only get the financing sorted out but could register the car to me and fit the plates, even as we insured it over the phone with Geico.

Mrs Stevie went out at one point and searched the other Altimas in the lot to see if she could locate a handbook, the one for this particular car being AWOL, and she found one². I hadn't even thought to look for it. It took less than two hours from walking into the place to driving out to get lunch in our new car, which was clearly charcoal-colored even though both Mrs Stevie and the nice man swore blind they could see the blue in it.

And what a happiness-inducing car it is.

The engine is 25% larger than the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned SULEV unit fitted in the Steviemobile, so it goes rather more like my old TR6 than the Steviemobile (which was speedy and quick off the mark when needed). The new car seems to be accelerating slower than the old Steviemobile but is in fact very nippy. I think it is the difference in the transmissions that is the deceptive thing, along with the added comfort of the ride. The Nissan shifts at much higher RPM than the Steviemobile did. Should that shifting be too conservative for the driver, I discovered after three days driving that there was a "sport" position for the gear shift that caused the transmission to linger in lower gears during acceleration for a more racy, trouser-ruining experience.

Inside it is a quantum leap above the basic fixtures of the old Steviemobile. The (leather) seats are heated. The steering wheel is heated. There is a rear-view back-up camera that comes on when reverse is selected. There is a bluetooth gubbins that alllows me to sync my phone with the radio and play music or make calls. Calls can reliably be made by just speaking the name of the stored contact. Touch the button on the steering wheel, say "Call Mrs Stevie" and in seconds you too can be harangued vituperatively as you drive.

The car has a remote start so it can be fired up from the living room of Chateau Stevie while I make my coffee and be all defrosted and warm when I am ready to leave for my train. It is like driving a starship, and I can pop the trunk either with the remote or manually if I have the remote in my pocket. In fact, I can operate the entire vehicle if I have the remote in my pocket, since all the locks and controls work when the fob is nearby.

Downsides? Well there are some. The heater has a habit of selecting "fresh air" instead of "recirculated air" when the demister button is pressed, which is okay sometimes but totally pants when passing an odoriferous recycling station or driving home during one of the neighbors' heavy weed intake sessions³.

The curve of the hood is such that I can't see the front of the car as clearly as I'd like and I've scraped the front spoiler a couple of times as a result. I am looking into a forward view camera, and have to make an appointment with a bodyshop to touch-up he minor damage.

There were a couple of very minor dings in the trim, and the nice wheels had been curbed several times to judge by the scrapes, but that just means they won't get lifted by the Wyandanch Wheel Gnomes while I am at work.

That's about it.

The only problem, such as it was, was that because the car was a rental there was only one key-fob, the other being gosh knows where in the Hertz network. The missing one also had the all-important tag that held the serial number needed by a locksmith to re-engineer a new fob should both go missing somehow. I shrugged and made a mental note to obtain a fob from a third party supplier ASAP. Before I got round to that the nice man called me just before Christmas and said the other fob had turned up so I have them both now, along with the number tag.

So it is all good, car wise.

1. The Mrs Stevie surprise Trip↑
2. She is good at thinking of these things and achieving them↑
3. A downside of legalization – the whole place reeks of weed at certain times of day Can't abide the stench of Special Smoking Mixture these days↑

The Road Goes Ever On And On

I have recently¹ returned from a week's vacation in Florida, where Mrs Stevie and I own a timeshare we haven't visited in years.

The plan was a good 'un. We'd avoid all that faffing about with no shoes on and being yelled at for having the nerve to take baggage on holiday by eschewing air travel² and driving the 1100-ish miles by Mrs Steviebus.

We've done this trip many times in the past, breaking the journey in South Carolina after about 8½ hours transiting I95, that three-then-two-then-three-then-why-can't-they-make-up-their-fbleeping-minds-how-many-lanes-it-takes-to-truck-a-fbleeping-intercontinental-ballistic-missile⁴-from-place-to-place-for-fbleep's sake lane Highway To The Fun That Is Florida⁵. No big deal, as they say.

This time the plan called for a different strategy.

We had three drivers now, what with the Stevieling finally deciding that she needed to move about in a 21st century manner⁶, so we could make the trip driving four hours on and eight hours off, with Mrs Stevie and I doing the hard bits. The trip would be about 17-18 hours long making for four shift changes or so, so if I worked it right I would drive only four of those hours. Now that's what I call a damn fine plan!

We loaded what turned out to be the second worst radio play ever committed to tape⁷ into the CD player and set off a little after noon on the last Friday of July. The first inkling that things were not proceeding according to the damn fine plan arrived after the obligatory traffic jam on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge was followed by the somewhat less obligatory traffic snarl across Staten Island and the mostly unnecessary traffic tail-back on the Goethals Bridge. This allowed us to filter onto the New Jersey Turnpike⁸ and enter the Great New Jersey Turnpike Stimulus Dollars Upgrade and Traffic Stoppage⁹.

This in turn fed into the mighty Delaware Bridge Rubbernecking Line Of Not Moving (there being a five mile long tailback on the other carriageway of the bridge and everyone needing to find out why by stopping so they could get a good look), which enabled us in a matter of hours to join the Maryland Rush Hour Confusion ¹⁰.

Thank Azathoth we no longer require a bloke with a red flag to walk in front of the vehicle¹¹, because the poor sod would have got shin splints from all the standing around doing zero.

Finally the roads cleared and we were able to triumphantly enter the beltway around Washington DC, mostly because it was midnight and all the rubberneckers and fellow holiday-makers clogging up the roads had decided to call it a day and go to bed. A quick calculation showed we were only seven hours behind schedule (the LI/DC journey is normally a 5½ affair for me if I time the Staten Island part properly and don't arrive in rush hour). We pressed on, barreling through the Carolinas, eventually stopping for gas and asking the Stevieling to have a turn at the wheel, it being dark and the roads all big and empty.

She then showed an until now unsuspected genius for getting out of unnecessary work by pulling out of the gas station without turning the headlights on¹² and, when asked to correct the situation at once, driving into the middle of the road so as to present a significant risk of being struck by oncoming traffic¹⁴ and stopping dead.

By this clever ploy she avoided her shift at the wheel entirely and woke her parents up enough that they could substitute for her once they had nipped back to the gas station so they could change their underwear. I fulminated a bit as I drove us onto the freeway, secretly annoyed that I hadn't thought of that first.

The sun began to rise while we were in Georgia, so I decided to make a brief stop at a McDonalds for coffee¹⁵ and we continued on, finally stopping for breakfast in a northern Florida "Denny's".

A sad mistake.

Easily the worst attempt at breakfast since my first self-incinerated one at university, from the food to the, well, I think it was supposed to be coffee. Sadly, the decline of the once fine diner franchise we had come to rely on as a watchword for quality was to be endemic. Each time we used a diner of the same name, even ones we had noted previously as being exceptional, we were each treated to a big plate of mostly cold meh.

We arrived at Orange Lake Country Club at around noon, to be told when we tried to check in that we couldn't check in until 4 pm. So we did the pre-check-in paperwork, then buggered around in what used to be called the Disney Village but is now Downtown Disney (like it matters) where all I remember is the most stunning life-sized Lego sculptures (pretty much the whole point of going if I'm honest) and the intolerable heat boiling every organ I possessed to screaming point.

Then it rained.

Rain in this area at this time of year is a thoroughly professional affair, with gallons of warm wet sluicing down and soaking everything until it is completely waterlogged, at which point it stops and the sun comes out to turn it all to steam.

Eventually it was 3:30 and we drove back to the timeshare in time to get a phone call telling us we could pick up our key and move in.

Pulling up to the front door of the reception area we noted that the car park was full, but that cars were pulled up and parked in the drop-off point so Mrs Stevie did the same, only to be moved on by a Spanish guy in an Orange Lake uniform. She pulled forward after a token complaint about all the other cars that were parked without their drivers being hassled and parked in front of another vehicle parked in the drop-off area, the only available space and one out of the way of anyone needing to drive through, and jumped out to get our key.

I dozed off but was woken by the Spanish guy tapping on the window; he wanted to explain to me (snoozing in the back seat of the vehicle) that he had called his supervisor and told him to call security. I asked what about all the other vehicles parked without any problem all around us. He just went on about supervisors and security. I shrugged and said "fine". Then a space opened up in an official parking spot so I climbed up front and moved the Mrs Steviebus, then I left the Stevieling in charge, walked back to the reception area, told the Spanish Annoyance where we were parked so he could send his supervisor c/w security person over to us if and when they arrived in theater¹⁶, and went inside to find Mrs Stevie and pass on the good news that we were wanted criminals.

We picked up our key after a spectacular amount of faffing around, given that we had already done the paperwork, and returned to our vehicle, passing the Spanish Annoyance and a hefty guy I took to be either his supervisor or the Security Guy he was supposed to set on us. "We're right over there" I said. "If you've got something to say, better get it said before we drive off", but Mrs Stevie was also speaking, and speaking with some feeling on the subject of being an owner at Orange Lake for 25 years and never being so shabbily treated etc etc so the Heavy Mob went into strategic withdrawal and we left for the villa uncuffed and decidedly unrepentant.

Thus did the holiday get off to a great start.

to be continued

1. As in: Sunday, around noon↑
2. It is my hope that many more people do the same, so that the airlines and DHS³ get a clue and start streamlining the process of making air travel "secure". I digress↑
3. The Department of Homeland Security, 'natch↑
4. The reason the United States has such a vast network of superhighways is that they were conceived as a way to make the Russians' job harder by moving the Minuteman missiles they would be aiming for around on trucks. This scheme is also why we have the Internet↑
5. cf The Hell That Is New York↑
6. Took her long enough. Mrs Stevie put the frighteners on her so bad she refused to get behind the wheel until she was 19. So That Worked™↑
7. The very worst one was on the companion disc, played in the forlorn hope it might be entertaining during the attempt to traverse the Verrazano Narrows Bridge↑
8. Eight Billion Cars. I counted 'em while we were desperately looking for America↑
9. To the sound of the BBC radio production of The Hobbit↑
10. And switch to Stewart Copeland reading his autobiographical Strange Things Happen. An interesting way of filling one's ears for seven hours. Recommended↑
11. Though state laws in fact varied on the need for this. Some contented themselves with requiring the driver to stop at intersections and fire warning rockets, others required that tools and a scenic tarpaulin be carried so that if you frightened a horse you could throw the tarp over the vehicle, and if that failed to calm the animal you had to dismantle your car and hide the parts in a nearby field. I am not making this up↑
12. Mistake I was to make myself more than once I might add, due to some peculiarity of the quality of vision in the Mrs Steviebus persuading me they were already on, quickly corrected when the warning claxon¹³ alerted me to the situation with its strident shrieking↑
13. Mrs Stevie↑
14. Bewideringly, there was suddenly lots of it racing toward us in a blizzard of headlights↑
15. It is fashionable to pull a face at this point, but in fact McDonalds coffee can be excellent and this was to be the best cup of coffee I got all week↑
16. As a demonstration of the utter contempt I felt for him and all he stood for at that moment in time↑