Curtains for Mrs. Beasley

I admit it. I killed Mrs. Beasley. But we'll get back to that.

In my sophomore year in high school, I was selected to be the stage manager for our school's spring production of A Black Comedy. Being stage manager meant that it was my job to handle everything that went on backstage before, during, and after the production. I memorized the entire script. I oversaw the creation and placement of the sets, the recording of the actors' blocking, the lighting cues, the sound cues, and pretty much else that goes on behind the scenes during a production. It was great stuff and I loved every minute of it. Everything that is, except that I reported to the student director, Cindy, a frumpy senior with wad of black curly hair, thick black-rimmed glasses, and a Mrs. Beasley doll.

Part of my job was to oversee the flying of the backdrops between acts. The backdrops hung from long poles that stretched horizontally across the back of the stage. These poles were attached to rigging rising up to the top of the theater, then back down to counterweights, were one or two people could easily lift or lower (fly) the backdrops. We quickly discovered that with the proper weights removed, a person could stand on the counterweights and fly himself to the top of the theater as well. This we did to our endless delight, despite the danger, the vertigo, the pinched fingers and cable-burned hands. I spent a great deal of my time introducing my staff and the actors to the practice. Eventually somebody figured out thay you could lower the backdrops all the way to the ground, sit precariously on the pole, and have another person or two lift you up -- riding atop the backdrop pole -- to the upper reaches of the stage, some forty feet up. Heady stuff.

Cindy the student director would come backstage, Mrs. Beasley in tow, and chide us that what we were doing was very dangerous and Mrs. Beasley just might get very angry and make her tell a teacher what we were up to -- for our own good, of course. I'd respond by trying to get her to take a counterweight ride herself. She'd look at Mrs. Beasley, say a couple of words to the doll, then look at me and say, "Mrs. Beasley thinks you're dumb."

Cindy would never criticize anyone directly, not as long as Mrs. Beasley was around. It was always "Mrs. Beasley thinks you said that line too quickly" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks you sound like a dying moose when you say that" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks your accent is awful" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks you're dumb." Frankly, I was getting more than a little annoyed with Mrs. Beasley. She wasn't the director and she wasn't a student. Sure, she'd had a pretty good gig on TV for a while, but that was years before. That still didn't give her the right to criticize us.

You might be wondering why we accepted criticism from a doll at all. Well, I'll tell you. Drama students have an immense capacity for self-delusion. Usually this manifests itself in the damn, I'm a great actor or everybody loves me kinds of delusions, but self-delusion is essential for one to be an actor at all. If you can't delude yourself into thinking you're an early twentieth-century english aristocrat walking into his luxe manor, how can you expect to delude an audience? Thus, when Cindy spoke to Mrs. Beasley, and when Mrs. Beasley spoke back, we accepted it as perfectly natural and took Mrs. Beasley for a spiteful little bitch wanting to relive her moment in the spotlight through us.

By the week of the play, tempers were frayed. Some of my set crews' work had gotten behind schedule because we were playing with the rigging too much and painting too little. My friend Joey, an excellent artist who went on to Julliard on scholarship, was responsible for turning the canvas and cardboard set pieces into the walls of a posh country manor. Mrs. Beasley criticized him mercilessly and rather unfairly. Joey, who was a very sensitive artist, came to me in tears one afternoon.

"If that Mrs. Beasley says another thing about my color choices," he burbled at me, "I'll kill her."

Joey was one of my best friends and I loved him. I couldn't stand to see him cry.

"No, Joey," I said, "I have something better in mind for that little bitch."

...

On the day of our first dress rehersals, as Cindy was examining the costumes and sets before our first run-through, I came across Mrs. Beasley sitting quietly and alone in the empty theater. Sneaking up behind her, I threw a hand over her mouth and snatched her up under my arm. I ran backstage, hid the doll in a cardbox, and waited for Cindy to end her inspections and take her place in the seats. We lowered the curtains in preparation for the first act.

I quickly began giving orders. Strike the set. I want nothing but a black backdrop. Lower bar number three, the one we always play with. Lights, I need a single spot right here. Someone bring me some rope and duct tape.

From outside the the curtain, we heard Cindy shout, "Curtain!".

And the show went on.

The curtain parted not on a country manor, but a black void. A single white spot shot down from the center of the void onto the back curtain. I motioned with one hand to the boys manning the rigging to slowly lower bar number three.

At first, you could only see the shadow as the bar lowered into the spotlight but still remained out of sight. A shadow like that of a frumpy trapeze artist. Then the dangling booties came into view and then the blue frock, and finally, the know-it-all smile and square-rim glasses. Mrs. Beasley sat, perched upon a makeshift trapeze -- a loop of rope, tied to the bar overhead. She swayed back and forth slightly.

"Arrrrrrrrrr!" boomed the scream from the auditorium, "Let her down! You let Mrs. Beasley down!" Cindy was jumping up and down on her seat now hysterically. "What have you done?" she moaned, "You're torturing her. Arrrrrrrrr!"

We giggled. Frankly, we thought Mrs. Beasley might actually like being a trapeze artist. But alright then, we'd made our point. Cindy by now had mounted the stage and was circling frantically below Mrs. Beasley's swing. I motioned for the boys to let her down. Only, one boy pulled up and the other boy pulled down, jerking the bar suddenly.

Mrs. Beasley hopped up once, then slid off her rope trapeze. She fell about a foot then caught her chin on the bottom of the loop of rope. The rope snapped tight and her body jerked around, wrapping the rope tightly around her neck. Her little legs gave a kick. Then she went completely limp, hanging by her neck eight feet above us, twisting in the wind.

Cindy let out an anguished wail. "You killed Mrs. Beasley! You killed Mrs. Beasley!" She began trying to leap up into the air, clawing at the doll's dead feet. I turned to the boys managing the rigging and motioned violently for them to let the doll down which they hurredly did. Cindy caught up Mrs. Beasley's corpse as she came hurtling down, unwrapped the rope from around her neck, and clutched the body to her breast. She hunched forward and jutted her jaw out. She pounced across the stage at me. Her breath was ragged and her hair, having been wrenched a dozen times by her hands, was a wild, explosive mess. With her free hand, she was pointing at me.

"You! You killed her!" she hissed with poisonous malevolence, "You...you...you murderer. I hate you! I hate you!" Her last expression exploded in a scream from her throat. I stood there, like the rest of the students, slack-jawed and dumb-founded.

Screaming and crying, Cindy ran offstage and out of the auditorium, clutching the dead Mrs. Beasley tightly. We listened to her scream "I hate you! I hate you all!" for several seconds after the metal doors slammed shut behind her, her wails and screams trailing off into the distance of the parking lot. A car door slammed. Wheels screeched. Then all was silent.

Paula, the assistant student director, who hated Mrs. Beasley as much as if not more than anyone, having found her advice to Cindy repeatedly ignored in favor of the whisperings of a bitchy doll, clapped her hands together cheerfully.

"Puh-laces! Puh-laces, everyone!" she chirped. "Blubrik, will you make sure that the next time the curtain rises there's a set behind it?" She settled into the director's seat with the script and waited for the actors and crew to resume their positions. When the curtain came up again, it was on a manor's drawing room.

Word of Mrs. Beasley's untimely death spread through the Drama and Speech department like wildfire. I was an instant celebrity, and my position as a lead actor in following years' plays was assured. Mrs. Beasley had been the bane of the drama students for three years, and they were relieved that somebody finally had the guts to put an end to that little doll's plastic life and her unwelcome criticisms. That I had actually hung Mrs. Beasley, on stage, in a spotlight, as the first act of our first dress rehersal, only solidified my position as the drama alpha-male, wicked, intelligent and dangerously capable of impassively neutering my enemies in the most embarrassing and public ways possible.

Cindy returned to the play on opening night and resumed her position as director. By then, though, her power was broken and without Mrs. Beasley at her side to prompt her, Cindy was demure and polite to everyone, including myself. She had obviously heard through the grapevine of my political catapult through the ranks and, having tasted my power directly, wanted to get on my good side. Besides, once the play goes on, the director is essentially powerless anyway. But as the stage manager, the show was now entirely in my hands.

"Puh-laces. Puh-laces, everyone." I announced as I looked down at my clipboard of cues and tested my flashlight. On my walky-talky, I ordered the house lights down. I cued the music. My eyes gleamed in the darkness, and I smiled.

With the relish of a vampire biting a virgin neck, I whispered, "Curtain."

Armageddy

"John got it all wrong." I said. "Well, not exactly wrong, but not exactly right."

El Cigarro Grande nodded slowly, not in agreement, but in wary politeness. Whatever I was about to say would probably offend him. The John I was talking about was St. John the Divine, author of The Apocalypse, or by it's more popularly known title, The Book of Revelation. As a child, it was the one book of the Bible I could really sink my teeth into. Those were my pre-teen years before I could get excited by all the begating.

"Yeah," I continued, "but you can't really blame him. He was chemically imbalanced. And the future isn't as big as it looks."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, mass-time ratio dislocation causes expansion of the event stream as the moments travel backward, so that small things in the future are grotesquely inflated out of proportion to the perceiver in the past. Combine this with a chemically imbalanced brain without the benefit of a localized time-space perception refractoring device, for example your average crystal ball, and you'll get your prophecies all wrong, or at least wildly over-inflated."

"I see..."

"Take John the Divine, for example. After an all-night bender combined with a severe personality disorder and fervent religious belief -- that's a heady cocktail for one brain to handle, you know -- his awareness slip-jumps out of his temporal continuum and into the future. Not so uncommon, anyone can do it with a little effort. So, he's lying on his back, looking up into the future, and he gets it all wrong. First, it's not armageddon, but armageddy. But that's just the most minor of his mistakes."

"Just the first? Please," El Cigarro Grande mumbles, "do go on."

"Yeah," I go on, "he got the name wrong, but that's nothing. He was really bozo with regards to where it occurs. It's not the middle east, but East Middlesex, in Massachusetts. They have a mosquito control project that's very interesting, you know."

"No, I didn't. Fascinating."

"Yeah. Anyway, that's not even the worst of St. John's mistakes. The whole end of the world thing, everyone burning up, dying miserably, rampaging armies, ecetera. In reality, it's just a really large, unfortunate brushfire."

"A brushfire?"

"Yeah. Started by the unsupervised and illegal burning of a pile of leaves. Pretty sad." I sipped on my tea.

"But what," ECG mused, "about the part about the anti-christ. And the number of the beast."

"Oh, that. Pure mass-time ratio dislocation. The beast? No such thing. It's just a bat, a myotis lucifugus, named Booba Bat..."

"A what?"

"A my-oh-tis loo-ciff-a-guss. A Little Brown Bat. Of course, perceived across a couple of thousand years of space-time by a woozy hermit without the benefit of a perception refactoring device, little Booba Bat must have appeared absolutely fucking monstrous. And the whole numbering thing, 6-6-6. That's just a temporal echo. It was only one 6, and that referred to Booba Bat's weight in ounces."

I let ECG think about this for a moment then I plowed ahead.

"Yeah, a bat's not much to base an apocalyptic religion on." I said sympathetically. "I'd tell you about what rapture was really about, but it'd spoil your day." I felt sympathy for him because ECG was a card-carrying, admitted Bible-Thumper with his own replica of the Gutenberg Bible, diligently taking part in the death throes of a subculture trying its best to drag the rest of us back to the 50s or the Middle Ages, whichever came easiest. I don't hold this against him; in fact, it makes him quite endearing to me, one of the many entertaining and seemingly contradictory impulses that guided ECG's life.

"Yeah, the armageddy really isn't all that terrrible. It's just rather smoky for a few days. A few people get some really nasty headaches, and the smell sticks around for a couple of months, but not much else. Little Booba Bat escapes with his life, even."

"So," ECG replies, getting into the spirit of the discussion, "it's really more about the singes of the flesh?"

"Yeah," I nod vigorously, "that's it. And you can see why it'd be hard to get the faithful all pumped-up and frothing at the mouth over a startled bat and a brushfire, no matter how unfortunately large. No, you've got to add inexplicable monsters, extremely vague kabalistic references, gratuitous splashes of Freddy Krueger-like villains, and people dying in droves to make a religion work, to get those juicy faith-based passions whipped to a boil."

By this time, ECG was more than a little uncomfortable with the whole vaguely heretical discussion, so I decided to go over the edge.

"The real end of creation, though. That's very disappointing."

"Ah, now this sounds promising. Do tell."

"Well, I only over-heard the conversation, but it goes like this..."

GOD: Jesus! Turn off the goddamn lights when you leave the room!"

JESUS: Ah, dad! Quit riding my ass.

The lights snap off.

"That's it."

"That's it?" asked El Cigarro Grande, a modicum of disappointment inflecting his question. "What a comfort to know the end of the world appears to be handled by Pauls Jr. and Sr. of Orange County Choppers."

"Yeah. Pretty dull stuff. Like I said, hard to get all religious over it."

"And how exactly did you come to have all of this knowledge?" he asked.

"It came to me in a vision. Fortunately, I wasn't recovering from all-night whoop-ti-do down at the Prophet Bar at the time."

"Get away from me, you heathen." he finally said, kicking backward as hard as he could in the relentless tidal pool of progress.

I Lay About Me My Enemy

Chuck returns from the Vacation From Hell with the flu. The flu was given to him by his in-laws who decided that despite the fact that their sinus cavities were filled with an abundant supply of mucus, they would have no problem in driving cross-country with Chuck, Mrs. Chuck, Little Chucklette, Baby Chucklette, The Infamous J. (sister-in-law), and The Infamous J.'s daughter, J-Lite. I will leave you to imagine what a week with two flu-ridden, cranky, dyspeptic elderly in-laws and five other people in a somewhat dingy and cramped 800-square-foot beach-cabin must be like. Chuck still hasn't been able to cope with all the details himself since the return.

However, it should be unnecessary to point out that spending a week in tight-quarters with sick people is exactly the sort of thing Black Plagues start from. So not only did Chuck spend his week-long beach vacation with two sick, elderly in-laws, but within a very short amount of time, he had a sick wife, two sick children, a sick sister-in-law, and a sick niece to make him feel more comfortable with his own impinging infection.

And despite the evidence that you can spread the flu to another person with no real effort on your part -- evidence that Chuck himself witnessed first-hand -- he informs me of these details over lunch the following Monday while still obviously suffering from the plague.

"Um, shouldn't you be at home?", I inquire, shying away from him.

"No, no. I'm alright. It's nothing. Probably hay-fever.", he says jauntily blowing snot into a napkin.

The old adage says that shit flows downhill. If shit were virii, I would be the wastedump at the bottom of that hill. As a child, I was often sick with various colds, streps, nasal infections, stomach flus, and monos. If another child entered the room sneezing, I would be deliriously feverish by the end of the day. I was sick so often and so badly, that I underwent several week-long injection treatments. These I detested and I fought bravely against the nurses any time I was forced to undergo one. My struggles were apparently so memorable that as a freshman in college, when I caught a cold from a classmate in Russian class and ended up with a 21,000 white blood-cell count, the nurse who was attending me got a wondering look on her face.

"Blubrik...Blubrik..." she muttered, "Say, your pediatrician didn't happen to be Dr. Boles, was he?"

"Why yes," I slewed back through fever, "he was."

"Oh. My. God." she said, just like like, three entirely separate sentences for each word. "I remember you." She went on to tell me how, when I was three, I had punched and kicked her as she and six other nurses held me down for a series of penicillin shots. Then she stabbed a needle into my exposed butt with a little more job satisfaction than I am certain was necessary. When the blood left my face for more comfortable surroundings in my feet, she helped me limp to a gurney, cooing all the way in self-satisfied tones.

I think about that moment from time to time, times that always coincide with someone blowing snot into a napkin in front of me.

Two days later, my nose and throat begin the ache with the tell-tale signs of impending infection. Long years of first-hand experience inform my actions now. I immediately cease activity, consume vast quantities of vitamin C, some zinc, as much garlic as I can stomach, and drink copious amounts of fluid. The vitamin C and zinc help bolster the immune system. The excess fluid sends the kidneys into over-drive, literally washing the bug out of the body. And the garlic keeps other people a respectful distance away so that they do not infect me with an opportunistic tribe of streptococci or worse.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can easily work from home. Armed with a fast connection and a Virtual Private Network, I am possibly more efficient at home than I am at work in my cubical (not being distracted by people wanting to chit-chat or hold pointless meetings, for example). My house is quiet, and apart from the occasional demands for attention from Coda Dog or Obie Cat, free of distraction. So, on Thursday, while I sent my subconscience to war against the Evil Rhinovirus armed with freshly forged swords of purest vitamin C, zinc-tipped spears, garlic shields and gallons of water and hot tea, I worked from home. When I became too tired to work, I napped. When I awoke and had no more meaningful work to do, or at least work that I would grant meaning to, I played City of Heroes, one of those "massively multiplayer online" games you've probably heard about where you take on the role of a super-hero in a city beset by crime syndicates and super-villains, mad scientists, monsters, undead and aliens.

Enkidu, my super-heroic alter-ego in the game, is a lone-wolf vigilante-type of character, like the titular character in Lone Wolf and Cub, or, more directly, Grendel. He is eminently capable of swatting down vast numbers of villains and mooks by himself. In this, he appears to be somewhat in a minority in the game, which is designed to deliberately cripple your hero in certain ways so that you must rely on other heroes (i.e., players) to assist you. You (your hero) may, for example, be very, very good at capturing criminals, but very, very bad and keeping them from bashing your skull in. You would, therefore, find a player whose alter-ego was very good at protecting your skull, but not very good at taking down a mook. Thus, everyone is capable of finding a role to play, and so the multi-player part of the game works.

Except for characters like Enkidu, who fly against the expectations of the other players. Enkidu doesn't require another person to help him take down a villain. He can do that quite nicely by himself. He doesn't even require help to take down a horde of villains. He can handle them as easily as any comic-book hero could. He doesn't need to have force-fields or healing auras placed on him to help him survive a fight -- they're nice, but not necessary. He doesn't need another massive hero soaking up all the damage and attention of the villains so Enkidu can beat them up from behind. He doesn't need to rest after a fight or have someone bring him a cup of water to get his strength back. He likes a straight-ahead, toe-to-toe fight.

In other words, he is entirely self-sufficient in a game which tries to deliberately cripple self-sufficiency in the name of "balance".

Therefore, I find I prefer Enkidu to "go it alone", or at least "go it with one or two friends who won't get in the way." This works most of the time just fine, but means that I have missed out on some of the larger grouping aspects of the game. One of these aspects are "Task Force Missions", which are deliberately long and hard missions designed for a large group of heroes to tackle together. I'd never had the time (they take many hours to complete) or the inclination to find upwards of eight people to help me complete one.

But Thursday was different. I was sick and had plenty of time...

...

So, after visiting the tailors at Icon, Inc. and finally deciding on his new suit of armor and what colors to apply to it (blue and gold), he set out to Talos Island to see if anyone needed a hero to participate in the Task Force: Stone mission. He found one quickly enough, and waited while the other heroes gathered. Soon enough, eight heroes had come from across the city to defeat and capture the arch-villain Vandal, leader of the maniacal techno-fascists, the 5th Column.

The task force's leader, Captain Pyric, a bruiser with the ability to exude fire from his body, lead them to the first base where Vandal might hiding, building his robotic mek-men. Sneaking into the base, the heroes came upon the first group of neo-nazis, milling about a cavern-cum-high-tech-hide-out, looking for trouble. From the snippets of conversation the heroes of Task Force Stone could hear, somebody had tipped the 5th Column off.

Enkidu surveyed the opposition. They were numerous, but weak. He'd fought tougher, more dedicated criminals for breakfast. He'd fought bizarre transdimensional aliens, for Bablyon's Sake, and these pitiful pretend-soldiers in their black-and-red uniforms and jack-boots, no matter how many there might be, couldn't even put a scratch his ecto-chitin breastplate. But he held his tongue, and waited for Captain Pyric to give his orders.

These orders were of the most timid character. The heroes would sneak up on the fascists, attempting to place booby traps and smoke grenades to weaken them. Sneak up on them? Weaken them? thought Enkidu incredulously. But he held his tongue.

Slowly and timidly, the other heroes crept forward and planted the booby traps. Enkidu thumbed his sword impatiently. This is not heroic. This is cowardly. But he held his tongue. He was not the leader, after all.

The first explosions went off, and Enkidu's sword sprang from its scabbard. In a flash, Enkidu vanished and reappeared next to the largest, most threatening mek-man he could find and began hacking at the robot's metal armor. Sparks flew, armor fell away, wires disintegrated, and the robot crumpled to ground. Now, this is more like it.

Vandal is still a step ahead of them. Task Force Stone followed the clues to the next secret base, buried beneath the docks of Independence Port. Again, Captain Pyric demanded the timid approach, this while dealing with cell-phone calls from his agent. Magnoman begged off for a few minutes for dietary distress -- bad pizza or something. Enkidu fidgeted. He always turns his cell-phone off before taking a mission. Who wants to have a reporter or agent calling you are surrounded by acid-vomiting zombies in the sewers beneath the city?

Finally, Captain Pyric put away his cell-phone and Magnoman came out from behind the rocks looking somewhat relieved. Once again, they crept forward to another clutch of thugs. We slither like worms, grumbled Enkidu to himself.

Finally, he could take it no longer.

"You do realize," he said, "that I can arrest every 5th Columnist in this base by myself, don't you? I mean, we do not need to be so...circumspect. These thugs are wimps."

Captain Pyric immediately barked back, "If you don't like it, sir, then you are welcome to leave. This is a group effort."

I didn't realize cowardice required a group, thought Enkidu sourly, but he bit his tongue again. No reason to make things worse. He only hoped that Captain Pyric would realize that perhaps Enkidu was only trying to help, only trying to speed things along, only offering his abilities up to the group which here-to-for had pretty much ignored him. Instead, he knew, the Captain had decided Enkidu was a braggard and, worse, a dangerously half-cocked liability to the team. Enkidu resolved to not mention it again and hoped that the Captain paid attention in the next fight. Captain Pyric stormed off, fires blazing off his skin impressively. Enkidu watched him go, comparing the man's brilliant, blazing skin-fires to his own low-keyed glow of ki and wondering if the others would take him more seriously if he ran around setting things a-light. With a shrug, he ran off after the leader.

Captain Pyric rounded a corner into a large group of neo-nazis. Instead of engaging them, he fled, leading them back towards the other unprepared team members. Enkidu immediately engaged the Columnists to stop them. The metaplasmic katana did it's work.

Then cries for help began to come over the comm-link. "We're in trouble back here!" Somewhere, in another part of the cavern, some of the team had run into other 5th Columnists, too many for them to handle. Leaving his current work unfinished, Enkidu ran to find them. By the time he did, Captain Pyric laid upon the ground, unconscious, surrounded by a milling horde of twenty neo-nazis. Enkidu leapt upon them and slew them, standing above the Captain's body.

When the battle was finished and Captain Pyric groggily stood back up, he shot an angry glance at Enkidu. "We'll not have any more of that!" Enkidu shrugged and walked away.

Unforunately, Captain Pyric did not get his wish, and the now fully-alerted 5th Columnists set a more clever ambush of fully-armed mek-men in the next cavern. The heroes charged in and were quickly over-whelmed. Three went down in a matter of seconds, including again Captain Pyric. Enkidu himself found himself surrounded by dozens upon dozens of mek-men and iron valkyries, seized by doubt and wondering if he might have been bragging a little bit after all.

The remaing heroes fled the scene. Enkidu stepped back a few paces so that he could block the entrance to the cave his companions had fled down, setting himself alone between them and the rampaging robots. Suddenly, his read-out began to show that three of the team members were abandoning the mission. Captain Pyric lead the charge out of the dangerous underground base and to the nearest Starbucks, leaving Enkidu, the mentalist Marzz, and the empath Jim Bean to face down thirty enraged, gleaming metal neo-nazi robots.

"Get back!" shouted Marzz over the comm-link, "Enkidu! Get back here before you get yourself killed! There's too many of them. You can't do it alone!"

Enkidu gritted his teeth. Those are fighting words. Building up his power, he leapt into the air. His katana turned into a solid sphere of whirling death around him.

"It's..."

Ten mek-men exploded into pieces as Enkidu's katana connected with their bodies.

"...O..."

Like a peeling a bloody onion, a dozen neo-nazi soldiers fell away, clutching at their opened guts spilling on the floor.

"....K!!"

With one final flurry of silvery, shining death, the remaining horde of evil-doers gasped, exploded, died, fled, or begged for mercy befrore Enkidu and his metaplasic blade. And it was over.

Enkidu ran the back of his bloody hand across his forehead and smiled as he glanced at his armor. It was dripping gore, but he was happy anyway. See? Not a scratch.

As he wiped the katana off on the body of one of the thugs, Marzz and Jim Bean came running up.

"The others fled." Marzz gasped. "They fled. Can you believe it? Heroes that flee?"

"Wusses.", mumbled Jim Bean angrily. The mentalist and the empath looked over the silent room, at the pile of bodies, at Enkidu as he slid the katana into its sheath.

The two younger heroes glanced at each other uncomfortably for a long, silent moment. Then, Marzz spoke up. "I have something I must say to you, Enkidu."

"What's that?"

"When you said you could handle all these guys by yourself. I...well, I thought very badly of you."

Enkidu nodded. "I know."

"But now I know what you're about, what you can do. I know what you were trying to say."

Enkidu realized the young hero was trying to apologize for thinking Enkidu had been a lousy braggard, a self-important newbie. He shrugged.

"That's OK." he said, "But right now, there's an arch-villain threatening the city and its up to us, just us, to bring him to justice. Are you with me?"

Jim Bean and Marzz said, as one, "Hell, ya!" and the three heroes ran off into the depths of the cavernous base to find their destiny. By the end of the day, the nefarious Vandal was resting uncomfortably in his own private cell in Ziggursky Prison.

Sometimes, it's good to be able to lay one's enemy out, viral or imaginary.

Capes for Everyone!

Capes Return to Paragon City!

While I doubt I will see Enkidu wearing a cape -- he would look as inappropriate in a cape as, well, a neo-samurai warrior in a cape -- there are some people who cannot imagine a superhero without a cape. I am certain the Flaming Q will get one -- a long chartreuse taffeta Versace number, probably.

Enkidu is undergoing a fashion crisis of sorts, in any case. He recently opted to remove his helmet, adopting a more casual David Carradine-in-blue-body-armor look. The Pauli Effect complains that the lack of a helmet makes Enkidu look less threatening, to which Enkidu replies simply by drawing the Metaplasmic Katana and assuming the Unyielding Stance: Is that threatening enough for you?

Still, Enkidu has also toyed with some new body armor (red and gold leaf), but is less happy with the results. The tailors keep assuring him the colors will grow on him. True enough, the ecto-chitin breastplate does grow on him, but it is also very itchy. However, the colors (red and gold) don't look as good on the newscasts as his traditional and very recognizable blue and white. He has his fans to consider, after all. No need to squander his influence on a fit a poor fashion sense.

See more on: City of Heroes

The Salt Mine

I work for a large company. Not large in the sense of Exxon/Mobil large or US Government large, but large nonetheless. It is a technology company. You are probably using a dozen or so of our products right this very instant, and you don't even know it. You may even use the product I helped design and build as you go about your average work-day -- a few million people do, so the likelihood is rather high. Our products are, in fact, quite ubiquitous and yet invisible to the modern user, even the one I work on, which might sit on your desk right next to you.

Despite the satisfaction that I could derive from knowing these facts -- a job well done, a successful product in the marketplace, etc. -- in truth I glean only a small amount of pleasure from them. Work is generally referred to me and my closest associates as the Salt Mine, a moniker which stems from the fact we work for a large company. My job satisfaction comes from the micro-activities I perform at work -- coming up with an elegant algorithm, or constructing a practical technical solution, or divining the correct answer to a question on the barest sliver of evidence -- rather than the knowledge that my micro-activities (theoretically) advance the macro-activity of the company as it meanders ponderously toward the next product release.

From my position within the Salt Mine, I can see the company lurch and wobble towards these destinations. It never moves fast. It cannot, the institutional inertia is far too great. Sometimes it breaks free of the coefficient of organizational friction and careens out of control briefly. But most of the time it plods along, like a blind giant lead by a thousand lilliputians with quite contrary opinions about exactly where this unseeing monster is supposed to go and who, from time to time, get trod on when they forget to hold the ropes restraining the giant and begin arguing among themselves about whether the beach or the mountains is a better place to put a blind, stumbling, rather unintelligent colossus.

Still, these facts, in and of themselves, do not bother me. I fully realize that I work for a large, ponderous company. While the reader might glean that I think this is a bad thing, I will state for the record it is not. Rather, it's just a dull and pedantic thing. A small company, while rife with the flush of excitement a nimble-footing and the day-to-day goals of a hand-to-mouth existence provide, is also, in my experience, a very stressful place.

The Salt Mine is not a very stressful place. The same institutional inertia which forces it to plod its course with snail-like sluggishness, also makes it relatively immune to the storms of the marketplace. So while it might cross the technology ocean at the same speed as a loaded brick, the riders upon it are rather immune to sea-sickness. Instead, they tend to play cut-throat games of Capture the Manager or Pin the Blame on Marketing to alleviate the almost impenetrable dullness of the ride, lest they throw themselves overboard and drown.

Still, my diatribe does not come unbidden to these pages. It was not that I awoke this morning and said to myself, "Time to complain about the Salt Mine." On the contrary, another event occured, one that birthed a kind of epiphany in me, a small bite from the fruit of knowledge that maybe, just maybe, my job was rather dull.

At the Salt Mine, we produce patch notes. Our patch notes read like most patch notes -- Fixed a divide-by-zero error in the message passing structure -- stuff like that. The epiphany came when reading another company's patch notes. In most patch notes, you can see the same kind of errors and patches and statements of how the errors were patched. From most of these, you can assume that life for the engineer over there is just about as dull for him as it is for you.

However, once in a while, and this morning was one of those onces, you read a patch note which makes you cringe with self-realization, a dribble of text which makes you wonder if you can even drag yourself into work today.

This morning, it was...

Fixed a bug when in certain situations a summoned pet could turn evil. [sic]

So, while I am dealing today with handling unhandled exceptions and finding memory leaks, I now have the unwelcome knowledge that at least one engineer sat down at work last week and dealt with the monumental issues of good and evil.

Electing the Vegetarian

When Jurgen Philips announced that he was running for President, we didn't give him a chance. It wasn't his party affiliation -- he was a moderate, and he identified himself as a Republican. It wasn't his lack of funding -- he had made millions during the Internet Bubble and, unlike the rest of us, had known when to get out. Neither was it his platform -- populist, pro-family, pro-business, with a strong Federalist and individualist undercurrent that played well in the Red States. He's a stand-up guy and a Gulf War veteran with a purple heart. He went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine on a scholarship. He's handsome, with a wife and two lovely children.

We still didn't give him a chance, and, no, not because his father (a german immigrant who fled Nazi Germany and so he could enlist with the American Army) had given him that god-awful name.

No, Jurgen Philips didn't have a chance in hell of being elected President of these United States, despite his wealth, his good-lucks, his perfect family, and his "mainstream" right-leaning politics.

Jurgen Philips was a vegetarian.

"Jay," I told him, since all his friends called him Jay, "you don't believe in eating meat. Who'll vote for you?"

Jurgen seemed perplexed. "What should that matter? I don't believe in eating meat, true. That is my belief. Have you ever known me to insult or ridicule those who believe in eating meat?"

"No," I agreed, "I've never known you to do that."

"And yet," he continued, "you maintain that because I do not believe in eating meat, people will see me as somehow unfit to be President? Explain, please." Jurgen was like this, a crackingly sharp mind always prepared to hear all-sides of a debate openly.

"Well," I began, "yes. Apparently, 90-some-odd percent of the American public say they believe in eating meat. It stands to reason that they would want to vote for someone who also believes in eating meat, someone who shares their beliefs."

He stared at me for a moment, thinking about this. Then, he said, "I am fully capable of being President. I have the experience, I have the education, my politics are sound. I have great ideas for leading the country."

All these things were true. Jurgen had been active in local, state, and national politics for most of his adult life. He had, as a successful businessman, traveled abroad and met with world leaders in business, religion, and statecraft. Everybody liked him. I'd heard some of his ideas for leading the country, and they were great. They were ideas that forced you to slap yourself on the head and say, "It's so simple! Why didn't I think of that?" before you realized who'd told it to you -- Jurgen Philips, the man who always had the best ideas first.

He leaned over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. "Have faith in the American People. Once they meet me, hear me, get to know me, the fact I am a vegetarian won't matter. It's a little thing, what I believe, compared to what I know and what I can do." He smiled, and I believed him.

...

We all joined the Jurgen Philips Campaign for President. I was assigned the task of press secretary. We all worked for free, because we knew Jurgen was the one man fit to be President. He campaigned tirelessly, pressing palms in Littlevilles all over the country, driving himself to cook-outs and barbecues, where he'd stump for hours. His speeches were electrifying. Not in the way a Buchanan or Reagan would electrify with passages of strident nationalism, but in an intellectual way. He knew what he wanted to say to the people, and he knew how to say it so that they could understand it. He never lied, he never fled from the difficult questions. He'd look his questioner in the eye and, without even pausing to reflect, give his honest opinion.

To my great surprise and delight, the campaign took off like a rocket, fueled by Jurgen's ceaseless energy, verve, and dedication. The crowds grew larger and larger. The press took notice, and soon he was making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows.

And The Question always came up, on every talk show, in every interview, so often you'd think people would get tired of it.

"Mr. Philips," the interviewer would say, as if reading from a script (as often they were), "do you really think the American people will vote for a vegetarian to be President?"

Jurgen would always smile and reply, "Although I do not have a belief that encompasses the eating of meat, my belief does encompass something very dear to me: the American people and this country of ours. Yes, I think -- no, I have faith -- that they'll vote for me. My abilities and qualifications speak for themselves."

A few interviewers would press the issue. "Aren't you just insulting those who believe in eating meat?" or "Shouldn't the beliefs of the President match the beliefs of the people he serves?"

When asked questions like this, Jurgen would reply, "This is a country founded on freedom, physical, religious, and dietary freedom. We recognize that each person has the right to choose his beliefs and to live with his choices. I make no apologies for my beliefs nor would I expect any citizen, vegetarian or not, to apologize for their beliefs."

Not everyone was delighted with Jurgen, however. The far-right wing of the Republican party despised him, as he was a threat to their idealogical meat-eating core. The Democrats feared him, for here was the truly liberal candidate, liberal in the real sense of the word, a man free of pretention, dogma, and vice who spoke with clarity and vision.

When Jurgen proved his mettle and rolled over the other Republican candidates in the first debates, we knew he was as good-as-President. One candidate, a Midwestern Atkins-Friendly senator, had gone so far to carelessly compare Jurgen to Hitler incarnate (who was a vegetarian) before an open microphone. Jurgen simply said, "Senator, I don't believe in eating him, either." and drew a round of laughter and applause from the audience. He winked at me from the dias then, as if saying "See, have faith in the people. They'll never let you down." I nearly cried.

...

The first primaries were rough. Despite a ground-swell of popularity, the far-right wing of the party came out in force. The Midwestern Senator stumped almost exclusively in meat-packing plants, railing against the "immoral voices in the party, voices that do not believe in eating meat." It amused and frightened me that Jurgen could be painted as immoral simply because he didn't believe in eating meat.

The questions and arguments against him became tougher and shriller. "Since you don't believe in eating meat, is it true that you don't believe in the Six Basic Food Groups of the Food Pyramid?" was a common one in the Southern Atkins-Friendly States. Jurgen would tackle this one with, "While I obviously do not believe that meat belongs on the Food Pyramid, since I do not believe in eating meat, this does not mean that I dismiss the fundamental eating guidelines expressed in the Food Pyramid. I equate the Food Pyramid with other progressive documents in the history of humankind, like Hammurabi's Code or the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights."

The Midwestern Senator would declaim these remarks as wishy-washy "Hitler-esque" nonsense, going on to call for the erection of large Food Pyramids in every school lunchroom in the country, "to protect and instruct the diets of our children."

The inevitable questions about meat in school and eating eggs would come up. Jurgen didn't care for meat in school, but he didn't care if a child chose to eat meat in school privately, either. Private meat-eating stemmed from belief, and enforcing belief was not the business of the public schools or the state. Eating eggs proved more difficult for him and required him to refine a tricky message -- he supported eating eggs when there was no other choice (for example, in a cake), but strongly disapproved of it first-choice food for breakfast, especially when other choices, like cereals and fruits, existed.

He vigorously debated any argument that included "healthy", "Atkins-friendly" or "Southbeach-approved" as an adjective. Thus, he found himself constantly debating the "high-protein, low carbs" or the "evils of pasta", subjects on which his opponents (and I) felt he was vulnerable. Jurgen would plunge into these debates wide-eyed and eager, certain that his message of reason would come through. His opponents would try to get Jurgen to utter "Pasta is not evil..." or "High protein, meat-centric diets are not healthy..." as a preamble to his rebuttal, forcing Jurgen to carefully weave his statements lest he offend outright the many Atkins and Southbeach dieters that populated the right-wing of the party.

Finally, he struck gold with "First, as a courtesy, would you please define the word 'healthy'?", momentarily backing his opponents into a corner. Some would, of course, link healthiness with cleanliness, giving Jurgen the out he needed: "As a vegetarian, it's obvious that I can agree that something, like cleanliness, has meaning and import without necessarily being linked to a belief in eating meat. I wash my vegetables, after all." Some would not make the healthy-equals-clean link, excusing the word as a euphemism for "tasty" or just "really, really good for you." Again, Jurgen had the out he needed, since no one could deny that vegetables are both "tasty" and "really, really good" for you.

...

The pictures surfaced late in the campaign and proved the most damaging. The Midwestern Senator quickly jumped on them. They showed a young man, clearly identifiable as Jurgen Philips, eating at a fast-food burger joint with some friends. He was wearing a paper-crown and looked a little bleary-eyed. It was a picture from college, when he was a poor student.

"Do you deny, Mr. Philips, that you are in this photo, clearly shown eating meat?", the Senator railed at one of the debates.

"Yes, that is me, eating a burger with friends." admitted Jurgen stoically.

"I suppose you're going to tell us that you didn't swallow." teased the Senator.

"No, Senator, I definitely swallowed that burger." replied Jurgen.

"Then you admit that you are a hypocrit?" pressed the Senator.

"No," answered Jurgen, "I only admit that this photo shows me eating a burger when I was a student in college. That was over twenty years ago. I believe the phrase youthful indiscretion comes to mind." Laughs and applause went up.

Unfortunately, our numbers went down after the debate. Polls showed that the voters were beginning to doubt Jurgen's sincerity and consistency. Despite his eloquence, editorials began to question the source and strength of Jurgen's vegetarian beliefs. The Midwestern Senator hammered at the same question on the Sunday Talk shows. Rush Limbaugh, who shilled for steak houses, went on the attack and called Jurgen a Veganazi. That was the death-knell for the campaign.

...

Jurgen lost the nomination to the Atkins-friendly Senator. In his concession speech, Jurgen said, "We fought the good fight, but in the end, the American people have spoken and they have selected another man to lead the party to the Presidency. Now I, too, throw my support behind my former opponent. However, for myself, tonight represents the end of my political career."

The next day, with his characteristc lack of rancor, he shook the Midwestern Seantor's hand, wished him the best of luck, and made the round of the TV talk-shows to dissect why his campaign had imploded over the what became called the "Burger Bust". Jurgen was all smiles and grace. I was miserable for him.

We haven't talked much since then. Jurgen, good to his word, left politics and took up a general practice in one of the quaint Littlevilles he had visited during the campaign. He left the Republican party soon thereafter, which he felt had become too beholden to the far-right meat-eaters after the selection of the Midwestern Senator, who had no inclination for dietary tolerance. He's still a vegetarian, and I'm told he keeps a framed copy of the Burger Bust photo on his desk.

Scientists are Cool

Salon.com Technology | Stephen Hawking changes mind on black holes

also

Black Holes are “Fuzzballs”

The cool thing about scientists, unlike the rest of us plebes, is that real ones can change their minds and admit their mistakes. The articles above describe the imminent loss of a famous (in cosmological circles) bet Stephen Hawking made with John Preskill regarding blackholes:

In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it (source).

The terms of the bet were that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden and can never be revealed." Dr. Hawking has data that contradicts his original beliefs. Not only will he lose the bet, but Dr. Hawking will present the new data to a conference of scientists in Dublin himself.

While I have only a layperson's interest in and knowledge of blackholes, I appreciate this story for other reasons. I admire persons who choose to engage in difficult discourse, who form opinions from their knowledge and experience, and who, when presented with data that contradict and outweigh their own beliefs, accept their own fallability and alter their thinking. In other words, I admire persons who engage in scientific thinking, whether they are solving the riddle of cancer or choosing a new shampoo to buy.

Dr. Hawking will, with grace and humor, provide an example for the rest of us on how to live as thinking, reasonable people capable of not only holding to strong beliefs, but changing them.

Dr. Preskill will win an encyclopedia from Dr. Hawking, from which he may recover information at will.

Interestingly enough, this is second bet Dr. Hawking has lost to Dr. Preskill (information on the first bet).

Patrick Stewart's Love Shack

Presented on eBay...

eBay item 2397756436 (Ends 28-Jul-04 16:39:42 BST) - STAR TREK APARTMENT

...and so that we are very clear, I do not lurk through eBay, scrounging for Star Trek memorabilia, I was directed there by my news crawler from The Register. Star Trek Apartment $1M crawled across the top of my screen, buried between Bush to Sign Anti-Phishing Bill and Toshiba to Unveil TV-Capable Laptop.

Of course, my immediate reaction was, Wha' canna' this be, cap'n? I read the article, mildly amused. The article went on for a few hundred words, describing the details of the apartment in as newsworthy-terms as possible. I paused at the phrase convicted science fiction fan to consider the penal implications. Slow day at The Register, I thought. Then, idly I clicked the embedded link to eBay.

I stared at the screen, stunned. A Conradian voice in my mind began to murmur, "The horror. The horror."

My lips pursed. I glanced at the calendar to see if it was, in fact, April Fool's Day. Nope, Bastille Day, and the French, as far as I know, are not big on practical jokes, nor - if they were big on practical jokes - would they seem prone to execute elaborate ones in Leicestershire. As far as I know, the French prefer to pretend that Leicestershire doesn't exist at all. This is not to say that the French have anything against Leicestershire personally or that Leicestershire has, accidently or on purpose, offended the French in the past. It's just that the French prefer to pretend that anyplace outside of France doesn't exist. It's nothing personal.

Once the little Joseph Conrad stopped murmuring, or at least decided to wander off to the mental teapot for a refreshing jolt of really hot tea, the other parts of my brain began scrambling up to my eyes to take a peek.

The lower brain functions, who are quite small and scaly, had to continuously hop up and down to peep outside. They began to wonder if any crew would come with the flat. The hungrier parts of the brain, much larger than the others, nudged the lower functions out of the way. They began to wonder about the kitchen and if the tea would be really hot. Finally, some of the imaginary neurons kicked in, standing as is their wont at the back of the mind and shouting their comments forward. They began to amuse themselves, and anyone else who was within earshot, which, inside a skull is really just about everyone anyway, with the idea of what it would be like to have this flat on Changing Rooms. "This transporter pad has got to go.", they minced speculatively.

Finally, Little Joseph returned with cognitive portions of my brain and his cup of really hot tea. He shooed the other thoughts and processes back to their places, pulled up a very comfortable chair, and stared out the windows of my eyes for a long moment.

Yup, we thought to ourselves, seeing is believing.

I began to wonder who would actually buy it. First, the person must be able, obviously, to afford it. At $1M, this easily removed the majority of prospective buyers from the market. Second, they would have to really like Star Trek. No, strike that, they might be very rich with a obsessive, destructive hatred of all things Trek. Such a person might desire to buy it and destroy it, piece by piece, inch by inch, as if exorcising the very existence of Star Trek from his own and our collective racial memory. Someone like Wil Wheaton, for example. Or maybe Patrick Stewart.

An interesting thing about this whole subject is that I, despite all appearances to the contrary, I am deeply ambivalent about Star Trek and all things Star Trek-y. True, as a young boy, I spent an inordinate amount of time watching original the Star Trek series. True, William Shatner comes to me in visions. True, I have been taken to one Star Trek convention, but I did that out of pure curiosity, the same curiosity that drives one to visit the zoo. And, true, when I was in Las Vegas with a large group of friends and family, I visited the Star Trek Experience, where I seriously debated the purchase of an orignal show communicator prop used (and signed) by William Shatner. I did so not because of the Trek-ness of the thing, but because of my deep and abiding love of theater props. So, despite such evidence to the contrary, I do not, have not, and will not ever consider myself a trekkie, trekker, or whatever such devotees call themselves.

But the truly fascinating thing is the Brain and his trick. Though he has some fondness for the campiness of the original series, the Brain despises all Star Trek after that. He loathes the Next Generation and its Love Boat in Space themes. Captain Janeway renders him comatose and Captain Archer sends him into apoplexy. Still the Brain, despite all of his well-tuned disrelish of all modern Trekdom, can, unerringly and before the opening credits roll, describe the entire plot on any Next Generation episode.

The fact that he can do this bewilders and deeply disturbs the Brain. He is not sure how he gained the ability, as he has never willingly sought to view Next Generation episodes himself. But, during the late eighties, the Brain and I, along with other friends, gathered each Sunday night for dinner and a little television or movie watching. I generally cooked for the group, which placed me in the kitchen from the hours of 6-8 P.M. While I cooked, the rest of the gathering would watch whatever was on TV at that moment. This was almost always, as you probably have now guessed, the Next Generation. As we met every Sunday night for years, the Brain managed to capture through osmosis every episode of the series while I, busy and distracted with preparing dinner, merely snatched a minute or two here and there from the shows.

After considering this, I decided I'd never tell the Brain about the Star Trek apartment on eBay. He couldn't afford it and I'd hate to disappoint him.

Edumacate You Self

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I present the above website as a public service announcement. Wikipedia is in close competition with Salon for the honor of my homepage.

OK, the truth. Wikipedia beat Salon for the honor. Why did Salon lose?

It's depressing and it's expensive - two words I hate. I like the words peppy and cheap. Peppy and cheap.

I decided it would be exciting, thrilling, and refereshing to read an encyclopedia for change, especially an encyclopedia that goes out of its way to give topics such as the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everthing (read at your own peril)¹ equal footing to the Life of Pope Clement V (even more perilous to read than the other one).

My current home page is set to select a random Wikipedia page every time I return to it. This is easy enough to setup yourself, simply set your homepage to the following URL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage.

¹ Note also that Google's calculator has an answer, too.

What Side is Your Bread Bloody On?

After herding my mother and her friend, Madge, on to the train in Bruges, with directions on how to switch trains in Brussels and a pre-arranged hotel reservation awaiting them in Amsterdam, I turned the Brain and said, "I'll bet that's the last time I see my mother alive."

I was certain that she would forget to get off the train in Amsterdam and would end up in Poland or Belarus.

The Brain patted me on my shoulder sympathetically and said, "It's for the best."

We, too, had a train to catch for Brussels, and then on to the TGV for Paris. I shouldered my backpack and marched off to our train.

...

After about a week in France, we arrived in Arles, a small city in Provence about 90 km north of Marseilles. Arles is a delightful town of old buildings and older still Roman ruins, the most impressive of which is not a ruin at all, but a still functioning Roman coliseum. We had only intended to stay in Arles for two nights, but my body had other plans. While lifting a pair of pants to hang them up in the closet one morning, my back spasmed.

Spasm is not a precise enough word to describe what happened to me. A better description would be a large, invisible man stepped up behind me and punched me just under my left shoulder blade. As hard as he could. With a four foot piece of rebar. Heated. Twice.

With a cry, I collapsed to the ground, where I lay immobilized, barely able to breath. A normal person might, at this moment, think "Well, gosh, this isn't right. Perhaps I should call a doctor." I, on the other hand having never laid claim to normality in any form, found myself on my back, looking up through the open window at a perfectly blue sky, thinking "What a pretty blue sky. It really is stunningly blue. My, my back hurts. That sky sure is blue." Tears filled my eyes at the sight of that blue sky and the sudden knowledge that I, now infirmed by a traitorous back, would not get to see much of it.

I crawled, literally inch by painful inch, to the bed. It took me 10 minutes to go from the window of my room to the bed. When I finally had to go to the bathroom, it took me another 10 minutes to go from the bed to the toilet, which I had to heave myself up on to, wincing and moaning with each breath. The Brain tried to help as best he could, but often his pulling and lifting just somehow made it worse and I had to wave him away.

Lying in bed, itself, was not painful, though it was humiliating. Here I was, on a trip I had planned for years, in a beautiful town in Southern France, on a perfect day, and I was lying in a bed. And I wasn't going anywhere.

Our two day stay extended to five as I recuperated. By the next day, I could stroll slowly and solemny about the town, as long as I didn't lift my arms. By the day after that, I could drive, and we visited the Pont du Gard and Avignon. It was in Avignon, in the Palace of the Popes, that we encountered The Ugly American.

She was old, but not elderly, a woman in the prime of her sixties. She had a wispy blue scarf tied around her huge bowl of white-grey-blonde-blue hair, as if trying to hide her embarassment. Of course, the woman had no shame, being as she was The Ugly American.

The Palace of the Popes is a medieval castle, perfectly intact and impressively large, set atop a steep cliff above the Rhone. It's a museum now, of course, and when you enter it, you are given a black wand that looks very much like a foot-long cellular telephone. As you stroll through the palace, you punch in numbers displayed on cards in each room to hear a pleasant voice tell you about what you are seeing. It's all very simple, clear to anyone capable of dialing a telephone and holding it to a ear. Yet, its use completely baffled The Ugly American.

In the middle of a cavernous room, with remarkable accoustics, she began waving her black wand back and forth in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs, "Helllloooo! How do I get this thing to work? Helllloooo!?"

Unfortunately, I was quite near her when she began her tirade. The Brain was up a flight of stairs, intent on the details the pope's garderobe.

"Helllloooo?! Does anyone here speak English?!"

In all truth, had she not said the last bit, I very well may have stepped up and helped her myself. But she had managed in five-little words to convey everything that is absolutely wrong with Americans.

Does anyone here speak English?

"Of course they do, you embarrassing idiot," I thought, "just not to you."

A pretty young french girl wearing a t-shirt that identified her as an employee of the museum came over, and in perfect, polite English, asked the woman what was the matter.

"This thing," she shouted at the girl, shaking the handset in her face, "doesn't work."

The french girl held out her hand, and the Ugly American gave up the handset.

"Madam," she said, "you just need to press the 'Play' button, see? Here, let me show you." She young girl pressed the large bright green, clearly-labeled PLAY button on the black handset and handed it back to the woman, who held it to her ear. She eyed the girl suspisciously.

"It wasn't working before." she said.

"Madam," replied the girl, "if you want, I'll get you another handset."

The woman declined the offer and without thanking the girl, turned and walked away. A moment later, she began shouting again, this time for her husband. I'd seen him about when the whole fracas began, crouching and slinking away into the treasury hall, no doubt wondering how he might explain their grandmother's sudden disappearance in France to his grandchildren when he got back home.

The young girl watched the woman walk away, and the practiced smile melted from her face to something not angry, not reproachful, but placid and serene. I was about to step up to her and apologize. I wanted to say something like, "Je suis très désolé, nous ne sommes pas tout comme elle." (I am very sorry, we are not all like her.). However, two things about her serene, placid expression stopped me.

First, I knew she'd dealt with Ugly Americans before.

Second, I knew no matter what I said, it would not change her expression: she knew Americans were assholes and my apology wouldn't change that. Her expression derived from the perfect contentment of one absolutely certain of the veracity of her beliefs.

...

The next day, the Brain and I wandered the narrow streets Arles, doing some errands and enjoying the town for one last day. My back was on the mend and we had promised to meet my mother and Madge in Florence the next morning. We intended to take a night train into Italy, arriving in Florence in the early morning. But the train was hours away and at the moment we wanted something to eat. We avoided the touristy-looking spots and crawled up and down the town, looking for something interesting.

At the intersection of three alleys, we found it, a little brasserie named Saveur de Provence, the Flavor of Provence. It was absolutely empty of tourists, and that suited us fine.

As we passed into the brasserie, an unshaven man - obviously the chef - looked up from his cigarette, coffee, and paper to glance at us. His white apron was stained with kitchen colors, browns and reds, so much so that he looked a bit like a color-blind painter. A large woman - obviously the chef's wife - hustled over to us from behind the bar.

"Bonjour! Bonjour!" she greeted us. "Two for lunch? Or coffee, perhaps?"

"Bonjour, madam. Yes, lunch, please, madam." we replied in our very polite, very stilted French.

The Brain describes French as "just like English, only specific and polite." He goes on to add that the way you translate an English sentence into a French sentence and get your pronouns right and your syntax in the correct order is to place an imaginary "sire" at the end of each phrase. Thus, to figure out how to ask for a room in French, you start with your basic English question, "Do you have a room?", make it specific, as in "Is it that you have a room available for renting this night?" toss in the polite words "Sir" and "please" and then for good measure, so you get the tone just right, add an imaginary "sire" at the end.

Thus, "Do you have a room?" becomes in your brain, "Sir, please, is it that you have a room available for renting this night, sire?" Voila, perfect French.

The reverse is true going back the other way, of course, and is a great aid to the traveler reading a french newspaper or short-story.

Remembering this is quite simply the key to a pleasant stay in France. As long as you keep your sentences short, precise, polite, and remember to hum "sire" at the end of it in your mind, the French will jump through hoops for you and exclaim, quite honestly, that "You speak French really well. Are you English?"

Much to his chagrin, the Brain learned the hard way that the French are exceedingly prickly when liberties are taken with respect to the polite beginning, middle, and end of a conversation. This is lesson number two for surviving in France. Start every conversation with "hello". Sprinkle the conversation liberally with "sir", "madam", "miss", "please", and "thank you". And, finally, always always always end your conversation with a cheery "goodbye". Once, while we were driving through the countryside, the Brain needed something to drink and we stopped at a convenience store in some small village. He walked into the store, and without thinking simply asked, "Où est les bouteilles d'eau?" to the young lady behind the counter. She looked at him not with anger or displeasure, but with a stark and utterly confused look on her face. The Brain had spoken the sentence quite clearly and she'd plainly understood it. She was confused because he had simply not followed the rules of polite conversation. The Brain calculated his error at once, and a little voice in his head peeped, "Congratulations! You're an Ugly American!" The girl finally recovered from her confusion and directed him to the bottled water. The Brain attempted to repair the situation, switching to his stilted and exceedingly polite French, but it was simply too late, she knew him for exactly who and what he was. He heaved himself heavily into the car and was inconsolable until we reached the hotel.

The matron at the Flavor of Provence sat us at a window table and asked us what we wanted.

"A pastis, please, madam." I replied, "And my friend would like a kir, please." Kir and pastis were brought in due order, along with the carte so we could decide what to eat.

"Pardon me, madam." I said, "but what are the specials of the house today?"

"Ah," she said, smiling, "today have chicken rolls with potatoes and chicken gizzards, fried, with salad."

"I would like the gizzards, please, madam." said the Brain with pep. He knew I'd not eat them, and it would be rude for him to order the special I would eat.

"And I would like the chicken roll, please, madam. And may we have a pitcher of wine, too, please?"

"Of course." She was really quite nice. Like many people in Southern France, she was dark, Italianesque. She was matronly and fit. She spoke quickly and we had to listen carefully to understand her. Everyone in Arles spoke very quickly, we decided since arriving. We had no trouble understanding people in Paris or Burgundy. The Parisians spoke with an accent familiar to our ears and the Burgundians, being mostly farmers, spoke like farmers anywhere, very slowly. But here in Arles, perhaps because of the proximity of the Mediterranean, the people spoke in clippingly fast French, and we struggled daily to understand them.

A few minutes later, she returned with the pitcher of red wine and a sliced baguette. Her husband, the chef, stubbed out his cigarette and shambled into the kitchen. We sat and chatted, sipping the wine and nibbling the bread.

It was at this moment that I noticed a peculiar tinge on the bottom of my piece of baguette. Just a splotch of brilliant red. I shrugged, figuring it to be some red ink that had obviously rubbed off of the plastic bag she carried the bread back from the market in. It never occurred to me that it was what it was. I munged away at more pieces of baguette, flipping them over to inspect the splotches of crimson on their bottoms. I even pointed out the odd color to the Brain, and expressed my ink-rubbing theory to him.

Finally, the matron returned with our entrees. I noticed her left hand was wrapped in a profusely bloody kitchen towel. I pursed my lips in thought. An idea was germinating in my mind. No, I shook my head, too horrible to contemplate.

As she lifted the now empty plate that had held the half-dozen hunks of baguette, the full horror of the situation was there to see on the table, a thick oozy circle of congealing blood that had pooled beneath the plate.

"Oh, my lord!" the matron exclaimed upon seeing the blood on the table. She grabbed another towel from the bar and quickly began to wipe it up, explaining, "Oh, my lord! I am so sorry. See, I cut myself on a knife in the kitchen when I was slicing the bread. Oh, my lord!"

It occured to me that based on the amount of blood extant on the table, the woman had not only cut herself, but had stabbed herself repeatedly. I asked if she was alright, to which she replied that she was fine, just fine. The table now cleaned of the blood, she offered us a cheerful if somewhat strained "bon apetit" and left us to our chicken rolls and gizzards.

I calculated for a moment. Would I die from ingesting this woman's blood? What strange disease was I now in danger of getting? Should I purge? Am I still hungry?

I remembered once, when I was a child, going the refrigerator after play. My mother kept a jar of Ovaltine for me and my brothers to use out on the counter. With the efficiency of a child expert in the making and consumption of Ovaltine, I poured a glass of milk, dumped a ludicrous amount a Ovaltine into it, and stirred. When the drink had turned a rusty brown, I lifted it my mouth and began to inhale the cold ambrosia.

After the three or four impatient gulps, my face twisted into disgusted confusion. What was that flavor? Then it hit me: Oh god, the milk is spoiled and I'm going to die! How much did I swallow? What should I do? Should I throw-up? No, they always say don't throw up if you drink poison! Oh god, I'm going to die!

I gagged and coughed, pouring the rest of the tainted Ovaltine down the drain, then sat on the couch and waited to die. My mother came into the room three or four times, doing motherly things about the house. Finally, she paused and asked, "Honey, why are you just sitting on the couch?"

"I'm waiting to die." I replied.

She looked at me, perplexed. "You'll have to wait a long time, I think. Why don't you go outside and play."

I obeyed her and dragged myself outside to play and wait to die.

This memory flooded back to me as I stared down at my chicken roll and potatoes. I'd hadn't died from the spoiled milk, even though I drank nearly half the glass. I hadn't even gotten sick. Sure, the bread was a little bloody, but it wasn't that much blood. Just a little drop or two on each slice. Nothing to worry about. It was nothing. You probably get more germs just talking to her. Nope, nothing to worry about.

"Was that a load of blood or what?" burst out the Brain, "How much of that shit did you eat, anyway?"

Stabbing my chicken roll with my fork, I glared at him, trying to decide what painful revenge I could exact.

"These gizzards are tee-rific!" he prattled on. "What's the matter? Feel sick? Want a gizzard?"

"No." I mumbled, as I sliced into my chicken roll, taking a bite and thinking to myself, "Technically, I already qualify as a cannibal. Might as well kill him, too. He'd probably taste like this chicken roll."

When we finished and paid, we passed the matron and the chef at the table. They were both reading the paper, sipping coffee, and smoking cigarettes. The chef glanced up at us, then returned to his paper. The matron stood and bowed slightly.

"Was everything fine?" she asked.

"Absolutely," said the Brain. "Let me tell you. We've eaten at many places in France. In Paris. In Burgundy. But this food was the best we've had."

The matron hooted with delight. With surprising visciousness, as if we had suddenly stepped into a long-running domestic fight, she turned to her morose husband-chef saying, "You see! You see! The best in France, they say! They've eaten in Paris and they say your food is better. Your food! You see! What do I keep telling you?"

The chef grumbled and chewed on his cigarette, barely raising his eyes over the paper to look at us or his wife. When we paid our respects to them both and left, she was still yelling at him about how good his food was.

Yes, I admitted to myself, it really was that good.

As we walked back to the hotel, the Brain couldn't help himself. "Was that a lot of blood, or what?"

The Trick of Flying

As I am a busy person, or at least person who tries very hard to appear like a busy person when anyone is looking, I rarely have time to actually sit down and read a book these days. Furthermore, I am a picky book reader and I consider a poorly plotted or overly bombastically worded book to be a personal affront from the author to myself. Since most authors are bombastic hacks who couldn't plot their way out of an open paper sack with a map, two different and wholly trustworthy guidebooks, a cooperative mule to carry their supplies, and a backlit nuclear-powered auto-compass that infalliably points to the exit, I find most books somewhat lacking.

This is not to say I do not like to read. It's just to say I do not like to read poorly.

The same thing could be said for movies, my taste in which veers widely and wildly across the landscape of cinema, though finding a reasonably plotted movie is even harder than finding a good book. Thus, you can imagine, I've become amazingly bitter and frustrated with regards to my entertainment choices, if one presumes that I want books and movies to form a large part of those choices.

Well, I don't. Nonetheless, I am bitter and frustrated because it seems amazingly hard to find a cuddly book or intelligent movie these days anyway, and I am feeling particularly prickly about this subject right now. I am certain these things exist, in so much as I am certain people live in China though I have never been there. That is to say, I am certain that people have told me that other people live in China, something most of them, no doubt, learned second-hand themselves. Life, one concludes, is mostly hearsay. The lives of other people, therefore, are essentially nothing but meaningless gossip and would never hold up in court.

Then, an interesting synchronicity of events occured at the same time, which, when you think about it, is precisely the meaning synchronicity. To wit:

1. Super Daddyman advises me to look at Audible.com.


2. I see a live performance by Ira Glass, who mentions Audible.


3. I purchase a Palm T3, a device supported by Audible for audio playback.


4. The Ambiguous Heterosexual tells me the next George R. R. Martin book is just about to come out.

Let's take those events separately.

One: Super Daddyman has dyslexia and reads very slowly. For years, he's been listening to books by downloading them from Audible. For almost as long, he has been telling me how much he enjoys downloading books from Audible and listening to them. For almost as long as that, I have been ignoring him.

Two: Ira Glass is the host/producer of This American Life, a radio program I enjoy but have difficulty making time to listen to. It so happened that he was speaking in Dallas, that I learned he was speaking in Dallas, and that I managed to get two tickets to go see him speak in Dallas. During the engagement, he mentioned Audible as well, which reminded me of all those years of I'd been ignoring Super Daddyman.

Three: I once had a Palm V, which I took to Europe with me. It saved me from many headaches in London and Paris when dealing with the metro systems in those cities. It recorded all the fiddly bits of information that got me from point A to point B safely. After returning from Europe, I lost it. I found it a year later in the garage, at the bottom of a box of unused bicycling gear that had become home to a lovely chameleon. How the Palm had smuggled itself out of the house, into the garage, and to the bottom of this box I have left unplumbed and unquestioned as one of the great mysteries of the universe. Beneath the rotting brilliant yellow jerseys and filthy lycra socks, it had died, with only a lizard for company. Now, as another trip to Europe approached, I resolved to get a new Palm.

Four: The Ambiguous Heterosexual, after not communicating with me or anyone I know for almost a year, sends me a messenge that simply says "NEW MARTIN BOOK JUNE 16" before logging off and vanishing again into the internet ether. He is, of course, referring to A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in Martin's Song of Fire and Ice cycle.

Armed with a new Palm, two recommendations for Audible, and the impending release of the one book I knew I was looking forward to, I downloaded the first three books of the cycle from Audible and listened to them, boning up for the new book. The Song of Fire and Ice Cycle is writing of high-calibre, fantasy novels drenched in ambience and historical attention to detail and lovingly bereft of all the trite, Tolkien-ripped conventions that plague the genre today. I wore the earphones constantly, and counted down the days until the new book was released. I finished the books just in time, on June 14th, and bit my lip.

It is at this time that the narrator will reveal to the reader that the Ambiguous Heterosexual can not be trusted with the facts, though the narrator himself forgot this in the excitement of the moment. June 16th came and went, and no new book appeared. Visits to Martin's website confirmed that the book was not released, was not expected to be released soon, and that Mr. Martin, though he would not say so, was having one hell of a case of writer's cramp.

In sad desperation, I made a dire miscalculation. I selected another book to listen to from Audible's collection, a bulky tome that had high recommendations on Audible's site, and one that I had seen weighing heavily on the bookshelves at every bookstore in the country. I downloaded it thinking, "Well, it'll give me something to do while I wait for Mr. Martin to find a good chiropractor."

I downloaded Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just the first few chapters, it'll get better." It didn't. I persisted. It got worse. I gritted my teeth. Something couldn't be this bad, could it? It was.

Finally, I sought help. I asked Miss Em if she'd read any Jordan.

"Oh, sure." she said. "I think I've read all of them. They filled me with so much hope."

"Really? Hope?" I asked, stunned.

"Yeah. Hope that they would get better."

I asked the Brain if he'd read any Jordan. He only sputtered contemptuously and demanded, with all due care, that I delete the recordings from my archive.

"How far did you listen?" he asked.

"Till about chapter 25. Nothing had happened."

Miss Em, who was sitting at the table as well, said, "Nothing ever happens. They just go on and on..."

"Delete it." demanded the Brain again. "Save yourself the pain and just delete it."

"Well..." I said cautiously, "I was kind of hoping that a stray photon might strike one of the bits in the file, causing a cascading nuclear chain-reaction that would rearrange the audio data into something more interesting."

The Brain looked at me increduously, "And you expect this to happen?"

"No, not really, but you have to admit it is a possibility." I replied.

"But not a probability." he said, self-assured.

"No, but it would be really keen if it happened. So, I thought I would give it a chance."

In fact, I give the universe a lot of chances like this. The Brain knows this about me and accepts it. What other people define as procrastination or laziness, I define as faith in butterfly effects. A danaus plexippus takes off for a holiday in Mexico and my dishes get done, for example.

The Brain, however, stood firm. "But, you've stopped listening to it, right?"

"Oh yes, I've moved on to something else. Douglas Adams."

Which brings the narrator and the reader to the Trick of Flying. I learned it today while sitting at a table, gazing at a laptop-screen-full of numbers and digits that represent "work" to me, sipping a freshly brewed cup of slightly sweetened Earl Grey iced tea, my earphones on, my Palm T3 in my pocket, and a dead English author nattering on and on in my head about this improbability or that one.

"The trick of flying," Mr. Adams says, "is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Talk to the Lobster

Erstwhile called me up and wanted sushi. A close friend of hers had returned from her Peace Corps duty in Africa and had a birthday coming up. Erstwhile wanted to take her out to someplace special and different. Sushi came to mind. She called me to ask if the Brain and I wouldn't mind taking them out to celebrate.

"Sure, of course." I said. "I know just the place."

"Great! By the way, she's vegan."

"Vegan? Are you sure?"

"Oh, absolutely. One-hundred percent vegan."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "sushi wouldn't be the best idea, if she's vegan. I could cook something..."

"Oh, no!" replied Erstwhile in all earnestness. "She wants to try sushi."

"You do realize," I said carefully, "that according to my understanding of veganism, the practice does not involve the consumption of usually raw slices of fish whereas, on the other hand, the consumption of sushi does, in fact, normally involve said slices of raw fish?"

"Oh, yes, absolutely!" replied Erstwhile cheerfully. "She wants to try it."

We met at Chaya Sushi at 7 P.M. Yama-san, the owner, had recently returned from a trip to Japan where he had gained another rank in sushi-do. Yama-san was a cheerful Japanese man who ruled over his tiny sushi bar like an emperor and would greet you with a boisterous ohayo gozaimasu when you entered his miniscule restaurant. He knew the Brain and I on sight, and bowed deeply when we came in with friends.

Erstwhile's friend, Angie, was a vegan, but she had learned in the Peace Corps in Africa that veganism is an affectatious conceit of a ludicrously fat and wealthy society, where a person can actually not only decide what he will eat each day, but can pay a person to prepare it for him. Such civilized conceits are as pratical in poverty-riddled countries, such as exist in many parts of Africa, as a Rolls-Royce would be on the goat-choked dirt tracks they use for roads there. Angie had spent two years in the poorest of parts of Africa, building wells for villages and digging irrigation ditches. The Africans could feed her goat meat, goat milk, and mullet. Angie quickly realized she could no longer hold to her conceited veganism and expect to survive. As far as sushi goes, she said, once you've seen a live goat killed at the table, cooked, and served to you, watching a man carve little squares of fish off a bigger square of fish so you can eat it is no big deal.

We ordered carefully. I'd tread this path before, initiating a curious neophyte into sushi and sashimi. Once the person grasps that raw fish does, in fact, taste just like cooked fish only "fresher" and that not all sushi involves exotic, raw, scary sea creatures but has many safe havens like vegetables and fried shrimp to harbor in before taking another sally at eels or urchins, he or she relaxes into the experience. Angie was no different, and we carefully threaded our way from "easy" sushi like California rolls to slightly harder morsels like toro sashimi. Angie took everything in stride, tasting and enjoying all the food Yama-san slid before us.

We were sitting at the bar before the glass case that displayed Yama-san's edibles. Prominently perched atop a pile of ice in the center of the bar was a live lobster.

"Yama-san," I inquired, "are you serving lobster tonight?"

Yama-san got a huge grin on his face. "Oh, yes!" he replied, bobbing his head, "Tonight we have, ah, lobster sashimi!"

"Lobster sashimi?" I asked, intriqued, having never heard of lobster sashimi before. "Is it good?"

"Oh, yes! Lobster sashimi! Very suh-weet-uh, very suh-weet-uh!"

I glanced at the Brain, who's eyes were already glittering. "Very well," I said, "could we please have one?"

"Oh, yes!" said Yama-san with a deep bow. He ducked under the noren into the kitchen. A few minutes later, he returned with a huge lobster, twice the size of the one sitting on the pile of ice in the case before us. The lobster was dripping wet and struggling vigorously, snapping its claws at him, at us, and at the whole world in general. He held the lobster up to us for inspection, and we nodded approvingly and exchanged glances.

"Lobster sashimi!" shouted Yama-san proudly as he slammed the lobster done on the cutting board. His display had attracted the attention of the other diners in the restaurant, who all turned as one to watch the chef go about his butchery.

With a single deft, crunching stroke of his knife, he sliced off the whole tail from the lobster. He pushed the squirming lobster body to the side and began to struggle with the tail, flipping it over as it twitched and curled beneath his knife. In two quick cuts, he had removed the meat from the shell, splaying it flat between the thumb and fore-finger of his left hand while his right hand used the knife to dice the still quivering flesh into cubes. Once the tail was cubed, he scooped the meat up with his knife and slid it into the tail-shell. By now, the lobster itself had crawled about a foot away, no doubt wondering where the hell its tail had gotten off to. He picked it up, tsk-ing, and proceeded to stuff a handful of shredded daikon radish into the hole in the back of its body where the tail had been attached. He remarried the tail-cum-bowl of lobster meat and the still furiously squirming and snapping body together on a large glass platter. Then with a huge smile, he gracefully lifted the platter over the bar and set it down in front of us.

"Lobster sashimi! Very suh-weet-uh!" he said again enthusiastically.

The entire restaurant was absolutely, deathly quiet. Everyone was watching us. The patrons were watching us. The staff was watching us. Yama-san was watching us. The lobsters were watching us, one of them clack-clack-clicking his claws at us. He looked like the spunky little guy in old movies who, despite being beat to a pulp by the bully, throws up his fists shouting "Put up yer dukes! Come on! Put 'em up!"

"Domo!" I sputtered. I looked at the Brain, who was looking at me. Angie and Erstwhile were pale as sheets. The lobster was beginning to crawl off the platter toward Erstwhile. The other lobster, sitting on the pile of ice, turned its body to get a better look. Yama-san stood there, smiling, waiting.

I picked up my chopsticks and lifted a piece of the pale white-pink flesh to my mouth and chewed.

It was the best meat I have ever tasted. My eyes widened in surprise. The Brain, seeing my expression, seized up his chopsticks and took a bite. His eyes closed as he chewed orgasmically. Erstwhile and Angie exchanged glances, then took up their chopsticks and dug in. With my left hand, I held the lobster down on the plate while it and its companion in the case watched us. The Brain pointed out that the lobster on the plate was giving him reproachful glances from its eyestalks.

Let me explain the taste of nearly-still-quivering raw lobster meat. It is sweet. Very sweet. It is toothsome. It tastes like clean, fresh water. It tastes electric. The flavor drives through your tongue directly to your medula oblongata, where it bounces off some long-dormant reptilian pleasure center. It conjures up images of chasing down your prey and biting into it. It is suh-weet-uh.

Yama-san smiled happily to himself at our obvious enjoyment. He returned to making other orders of sushi while we finished the lobster.

"All done?" he inquired. The lobster tail was empty and I was still struggling with my left hand to hold the lobster's squirming, snapping body on the platter. Yama-san lifted the platter away, and we relaxed a bit. The trial by fire was over, we thought.

We thought.

Yama-san took the lobster's body and hacked it, length-wise, into two. A lady sitting at a table behind us stifled a shriek. Casually, he flung the now wildly squirming lobster halves onto the hibachi grill, where they independently tried to crawl away. Yama-san calmly returned to preparing other sushi while the lobster halves crawled and crawled and, finally, stopped crawling. After another minute, he lifted the halves away, cracked the claws, re-arranged them on clean platter, and presented the remainders of the lobster to us.

"Look!" he said cheerfully, "It's a girl. Lots of roe! Very good!" He was pointing a long noodle of brilliant red eggs in the cooked body halves. The Brain ate the roe (I am not fond of fish eggs with the exception of Caspian beluga), while the rest of us picked meat out of the claws and legs. Eventually, the lobster was completely reduced to a charred, broken husk.

We'd done it. We'd overcome lobster sashimi. With a vegan. Only Everest remained.

Angie patted her lips with her napkin, setting it on the bar before her. "That was really good." she said brightly.

As we got up to leave, I leaned over to the sushi case and in a low whisper spoke to the luckier, smaller lobster still perched atop his pile of ice, "Gomen-nasai. Odaijini, lobster-san."