Tag Archives: humor

225. Somewhere in America

Leave a reply

Leap Alan Hed has been around all summer. If you want to look up the rest of his story, go to the tag cloud and hit Leap.

From Leap Alan Hed, somewhere in America, to a favorite cousin,
(I can’t tell you exactly where he is. Someone might find this.)

Dear Anne,

I’m still on the run from the news media and from those who would write me in as President.  I’ve been on the road now for about six weeks. I’ve lost weight and grown a beard, but anyone who looks closely could still recognize me, so I stay hidden most of the time. That was almost a blessing at first. The high Rockies were beautiful when I could stay there. It has been getting colder every day for a while now, and I have had to come down, so I am once again hiding too close to people.

I thought the desert would be open and empty enough for me to go unnoticed, but it isn’t. I stumbled onto a deserted shack and made myself comfortable last night. Then I had midnight visitors. Five Mexicans: two young men, one young woman, a child, and an old man. They must have been a family. You could tell they were just over the border and on their way north looking for work.

Donald would have crapped himself to be caught by a bunch of “rapists and murderers”, but, of course, they were just frightened people, looking for a little peace. And hungry. Both hungry in the long term sense that had sent them looking for work, and hungry right now. I don’t speak enough Spanish to matter, but sometimes smiles and gestures are enough. I shared my food with them. I cooked up all I had, but it wasn’t enough. Tomorrow I’ll have to take a chance and find a place to buy more.

They left this morning before the sun came up. They were very quiet as they went, but the child’s voice woke me. The old man was last to leave. He is probably my age but he looks a hundred years old. He saw that I was awake, so I said, “VIa con Dios,” and he made a little wave as he slipped out the door. I wish them well, but I fear for them. I fear that they will be caught, or die in the desert as so many do. And I fear for what will happen to them after November.

Damn these people who chose Hillary and Donald, and now they hound me to run as a joke President. I’ll bet they thought it was funny, when it all started. Well, very little of this seems funny to me now.

I’d better quit so I can mail this when I go looking to buy food. Anyway, if I get any angrier, I’ll set the paper on fire just touching it. Soon November will have come and gone, and I can come out of hiding, and see you and Ted again. Bake me an apple pie, say November 15th, and I’ll be there to eat it.

I wonder what will become of my new Mexican friends in November?

      Love,
      Leap

217. Interview, by G, part 2

Leave a reply

There must be a thousand Democrats that would make a better president than Hillary, and a hundred thousand Republicans who would make a better president than Trump. That line is from yesterday’s post. Since this is part 2, you really should read part 1 before continuing.

G.: “If the choices are so unpalatable, would you choose one anyway?”

Leap: “Choice isn’t really the word. I would vote for Hillary if I could, but since I’m on the run from the media, there is no way I can get within miles of my polling place.”

G.: “You wouldn’t vote for a write-in, or a registered third party?”

Leap: “Third parties never win. Third party candidates don’t expect to win, they are just using the election to make a statement about their beliefs. If a third party candidate won, it would scare hell out of him. Just like me.”

G.: “So you don’t really like Hillary, you think third parties are throwing away your vote, and you don’t want the job. So why not Donald Trump?”

Leap: “The wall. A million reasons, but most of all, the wall.”

Leap continues: “Let me tell you a story. I worked as an engineer all my life. The company I worked for built farm equipment. Once, they sent me to California for a few years, to a plant near Salinas.

“There weren’t any undocumenteds in our facility, although more than half the staff were Mexican American. Several of them became my close friends, and they are the ones who opened my eyes to the facts.

“I spent a lot of time in the field, watching the equipment we built being used. Everywhere I went I saw swarms of migrant farm workers. Mexicans – that’s what everybody called them. Whether they were Mexican American, legal immigrants, or illegal immigrants didn’t matter. Mexicans. I saw how hard they worked and under what terrible conditions. I saw the shacks they lived in, and it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem American.

“I asked my Mexican American friends back at the plant and they explained. Farm workers live in fear of immigration officers. Even the ones who are here legally know a whole community of those who aren’t, or at least are on the borderline of legality. Children who were born here, American citizens, live in fear that their parents will be deported.

“It makes them pliable. Deportation is a whip in the hands of their employers.

“A wall – what a joke. We have a wall. It doesn’t stop the hungry, because it isn’t supposed to stop the hungry. It exists to let workers through, and then remind them that if they step out of line, they will find themselves back on the other side.

“America couldn’t survive without a wall that lets through workers who will be silent and docile and work for slave wages under slave conditions.”

*****

Foolish Leap. He set up the interview to show how much he didn’t want to be a write-in candidate, the made the mistake of letting his passion show. He made the mistake of making sense, in a world that is hungry for sense, so of course he made his own life worse.

The interview galvanized the nation. Leap’s anti-candidacy went from being a curiosity to being a real alternative. New websites sprang up everywhere, along with tweets by the hundreds of thousand, and even a dozen fake Facebook accounts.

The biggest of them all was hashtag #Leapthewall. Commentators were forced to search for a new term to replace “went viral”. Viral didn’t do it justice.

And Leap went back on the run.

216. Interview, by G, part 1

Leave a reply

If you are new to Leap’s plight, you can catch up at 178. Leap Boy, back in the news, 192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap, 200. The Last Sane Man and 203. Leap on the Bandwagon.

Leap Alan Hed is on the run, not from any crime, not from angry criminals, but from the insatiable news media. When Billy Joe Barker proposed him as a write-in candidate for President, they descended on his house and he fled. Now a couple of weeks have passed.

He went north at first, toward the Canadian border, but he couldn’t find a way to pass over without being spotted. He turned south-west and tried to lose himself in the Rockies, but things have changed there, too. Where every cirque and valley used to be filled with old-time prospectors, broken down cowboys, and overly hopeful hippies, now every mountaintop is capped by a mansion with a movie star living inside.

I’m not sure where he went after that. He didn’t confide much to me, and after the paranoia set in, I don’t know how much of what he said was true. Being on the run will do that to you.

The media was hot on his trail and they have almost infinite resources. They would have found him in no time if they had cooperated. Instead, they guarded their sources, set misinformational rumor afoot, and generally got in each other’s way.

Leap stayed one step ahead of them, but it wasn’t a life worth living. He finally decided to give an interview to satisfy the world’s curiosity, and get everyone off his back. Poor fool. Giving one interview was like the old story of the man who reached for a bucket of water to put out a fire, and found out too late that it was gasoline. But Leap was an innocent, and innocents are doomed.

He wrote a letter to G. at —BC news, proposed a time and place. They met in the home of a distant relative (who was himself harassed for the next three weeks).

*****

G. spoke to the camera, briefly outlining events to date, then asked, “Why did you run and why have you agreed to this interview?”

Leap described the siege of Dannebrog, and some of the things that had happened since, then said, “I’m hoping that telling my story will convince the American people that I am not someone they want to write in for President, and that I can just go home and get my life back. That would be a miracle.”

G.: “I’m not sure that is a miracle we can provide, but go ahead, tell us why you think Americans have become so fascinated by your candidacy.”

Leap: “I’m not a candidate. I’m not running for President. I’m running from President.”

Foolish Leap. He still didn’t understand the phenomenon he had become. Those three words – Running From President – which his farmer friend had said in Grand Island, became the stuff of a thousand headlines and a million tweets.

G.: “Why do you think America has embraced your non-candidacy, then?”

Leap: “Look at the alternatives. We have three hundred million people in America, and this is the best we can put up for President? There must be a thousand Democrats that would make a better president than Hillary, and a hundred thousand Republicans who would make a better president than Trump. But I am not one of them.” The interview continues tomorrow.

204. Running From President

Leave a reply

If you missed how this all started, Leap Alan Hed was tagged, against his will, as a write-in candidate for President. He fled in the middle of the night from the media circus that ensued. See 178. Leap Boy, back in the news, 192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap, 200. The Last Sane Man and 203. Leap on the Bandwagon.

Leap was born in 1952, on Leap Day, which was the start of all his troubles. He made his run from the media in his 64th year. That isn’t an age to start running.

Leap didn’t drink much, had never smoked, and had never had a wife, so he wasn’t too broken down. Still, 64 is 64.

Leap followed the genetic pattern of the American species. He headed west. That wasn’t hard in Nebraska where all county roads are routed by compass. He was in the middle of nowhere, half way to Rockville, when a pickup ground to a stop beside him and the driver motioned him to get in. The manure crusted on the wheels and fenders was reassuring; this was not a TV person. Besides, the sun was coming up, Leap was tired, and an old man walking down an empty road would be easy to spot from the air. Paranoia, or whatever you call it when they are really after you, had set in, and Leap had no problem imagining a horde of drones fanning out across the landscape, looking for him.

True to form, all Leap got from the driver was a nod and a grunt until they were back up to speed and a mile had passed under the tires. Then he said, “You’re Hed.” Leap admitted that he was. “Saw your picture in the newspaper. Heard about the ruckus in Dannebrog.” Then he called the newsmen a word that two men in a truck might use, but would never like to see written down. Leap agreed with him.

Another mile passed. The driver said, “How did you get into this mess, anyhow?”

“How does a guy get struck by lightning? Bad luck. Real bad luck.”

“How come you’re running for President?”

“I’m not! Some (and he used that word again) from Tulsa called me up and tried to get me to run as a joke. I said no, and he didn’t take no for an answer. Now the whole country wants me to run, or pretend to run, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

At Rockville, the driver turned left, crossed the Platte River and followed highway 68 toward Ravenna. He said, “You got any money? If you’re gonna run, you’ll need money.”

“Some. I took the rainy day money out of the sock drawer before I left.”

“I could loan you forty.”

“No, you keep it. But thanks.”

They drove on in silence. Fifteen miles later, as they were coming into Grand Island, the driver said, “I’ll drop you at the bus station.” Leap nodded. He didn’t ask the driver’s name. It didn’t matter, really. In the short time he had lived in Dannebrog, Leap had met a dozen men and women who would have helped him out just as automatically, with no hesitation and no thought of reward. In fact, Leap would have done the same himself.

At the bus station, he walked around the pickup and reached up to shake the hand of his new, anonymous friend.  For the first time he saw him full face, not profile. He was tanned and whiskered, lean, maybe forty years old, with a ball cap and a khaki shirt. He grinned at Leap and said, “Running from president. God almighty. Only in America.”

Leap said, “What would you do if they tried to stick you with the job?”

“Run like a deer, leap like an antelope, burrow like a prairie dog. Anything it took to get away.  Good luck. I hope they don’t catch you.”

**        **       **        **

For those of you who don’t live in Nebraska but still recognized the name Dannebrog in the last two posts, yes, you’re right, this is an homage to Roger Welsch, who would also run from President.

203. Leap on the Bandwagon

Leave a reply

This series starts with 178. Leap Boy, back in the news and continues in 192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap and then in 200. The Last Sane Man.

It’s hard to say who made the first mistake. Certainly Leap’s mother should never have named him Leap, even if he was born on Leap Day. Some temptations just have to be resisted. Worse, she should have spoken his name out loud when she named him. Leap Alan Hed, for heaven’s sake. How could she have missed that Alan would become A., and no one could ever meet her son without saying Leap A. Hed.

Leap wasn’t blameless himself. By fighting back to the point of absurdity, he made himself famous enough to come to public attention. Counting his age by leap-day-birthdays and calling himself 16 when he was in his sixties — that’s just asking to be noticed.

Of course Billy Joe Barker was to blame for touting him as a write-in candidate for President. Then when he said that Leap was sane because he really didn’t want to be President, it was the last nail in Leap’s coffin.

People never give you what you want, but they always give you what you don’t want. Didn’t anybody know that?

Shelia Barnstaple of Wilmington, Ohio started a blog called I Want Leap for President. Wilton Damonson of Ash Fork, Arizona started a competing blog called Leap on the Bandwagon, also using the hashtag #LeaponforLeap. You would not believe how many people have 140 characters worth of something to say.

Throughout August, as Donald sank in the polls, people first sighed with relief, then suddenly realized that Hillary would probably win. Someone published a poem anonymously that read:

When Donald came I feared the worst,
If he won it just might kill me.
He surely was the worst of worst,
But second worst was Hillary.

Within days the doggerel was re-posted four million times, and a hundred and ninety-two people were claiming authorship.

Meanwhile, Shelia Barnstaple and Wilton Damonson combined forces and the draft Leap movement really took off. Leap found his house in Dannebrog surrounded by reporters. It looked like Marilyn Lovell’s lawn in Apollo 13. Leap came out with a shotgun to run them off, but they only clicked their cameras faster. He retreated. The shotgun was never loaded, since Leap was basically a peaceful fellow, but the hashtag #Leapforlawandorder raced around the globe at the speed of light.

Leap drew the shades and locked his doors, turned out all the lights but one, and settled in to wait out the silliness with his paperback collection of Nero Wolfe novels. After an hour, the reporters started pounding on his door, then on his windows, and finally on the walls of his house. He couldn’t call for help since he didn’t have a phone, but his neighbors took pity and brought in the county sheriff. He drove the mob back into the street.

That night, Barnstaple and Damonson posted a call to join Leap in his Silent Vigil for America. Three hundred thousand people promised that they would.

Sometime during the night, a darkly clothed figure joined the reporters breifly, then quietly faded away. Once it was light the next morning, Armin Arkin of WFUD noticed that the back door was ajar and announced that he was going in. Within minutes, the street was empty and the house was jammed with anchors and their cameramen elbowing for room to broadcast, but Leap had disappeared.

200. The Last Sane Man

Leave a reply

It was a bad week in mid-August.

Donald was imploding and Hillary should have been, but Donald kept grabbing the microphone. Nobody was thinking about e-mails because Donald kept spinning out one-liners. The Democrats were simultaneously frightened that he might win, and exulting in the poll numbers that said he wouldn’t. The Republicans were furious at lost opportunities, and tearing their hair out over the poll numbers.

On Sunday, August 14th, Billy Joe Barker sat down in front of his computer to compose his weekly commentary for the Tulsa World. The column was called Thank God Its Monday, but this night he simply couldn’t find anything to be thankful for. He had had such high hopes for Trump, but that was only a bitter memory now.

Then inspiration took him by the throat. His fingers flew across the keyboard and he hummed happily as he typed out the doom of a poor schmuck who had never done him any harm.

Please Mr. Custer

If you are old enough, you may remember a novelty song from 1960 called Please Mr. Custer. A trooper was complaining to commanding officer, who happened to be George Armstrong Custer, that he really didn’t want to go with him on his ride out to see what the Indians at the Little Big Horn were up to.

I don’t blame him. Nobody blamed him. It was a good laugh and nobody thought the trooper was unpatriotic for yelling, “I don’t want to go.”

I thought of that trooper today as I remembered my column of August first. It was about Leap Alan Hed, the boy who was born on leap day. Kids teased him so much when he was young about his name, Leap A. Hed, that he got back by counting his age by leap-year birthdays. He told me himself, when I interviewed him over the phone, that it was a piece of silliness he regrets to this day.

I invited him to run for President as a humor candidate, and offered to carry his campaign in this column. He turned me down flat, and I called him the sanest man in America because he really doesn’t want to be President. He didn’t even want to pretend he wanted to be President.

The trooper in the old song said, “I don’t want to go,” and Leap said, “I don’t want to be President.” Fifty-six years apart – the last two sane men in America.

I wanted to vote for Trump, I really did, but I can’t. Hillary – never mind. And the outliers, not them either.

On November 8, I am going to write in Leap Alan Hed, the last sane man in America. If you find Donald and Hillary as unpalatable as I do, I invite you to join me.

The piece was picked up by AP and UPI. All across the nation, every anchor with two minutes to spare read part of it on his broadcast. It became a phenomenon.

The reason was clear to those who paid attention. For a year, Donald Trump had given the talking heads something to cover. He was fun; he was colorful. He was safe. Nobody in his or her right mind thought he would ever win anything, and the rest of the Republican candidates were a dreary lot.

Then he won the nomination. The talking heads felt panic, and a massive sense of guilt at the idea of “What have we done?”

By the time relief arrived through Donald’s spiraling self-destruction, they were really tired of him. And they had always been tired of Hillary. Leap was a breath of fresh air. Leap was something different they could talk about, and he was safe. No one could ever take seriously the candidacy of a man who refused to run.

It seemed as safe as betting against Donald had seemed.

How quickly we forget.

192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap

Leave a reply

All right, we’ve been here before and you already know how it all turns out (see 178. Leap Boy, back in the news). I’ve already explained, long before the rest of America finds out, who will win the Presidency and what will come as a result. And how do I know? I’m a science fiction writer; I have a time machine lodged between my ears.

So you know about Leap Alan Hed, born on leap day, 64 years old and claiming to be 16. What you don’t know yet is what happened in the middle of the story.

Billy Joe Barker, newsman, regular contributor to the Tulsa World was a long time Republican. He had a dalliance with liberalism during the sixties when he thought he was a hippie. He had the hair for it back then, and it’s the only part of that era he misses. By the mid-seventies he was back to a buzz cut and back to being a Republican.

Billy Joe hated Hillary, passionately. He was a Ted Cruz supporter, despite the hesitation Okies have for anything from Texas, but Cruz didn’t last. Billy Joe really tried to like Donald Trump, but he couldn’t. The last straw was watching Trump’s first interview with his new running mate Mike Pence. After that, Barker had a continuing  vision of Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy on his knee. He gave up on Trump even before Cruz said, “Vote your conscience.”

Barker couldn’t begin to support Hillary, couldn’t stand the Libs and Greenies, and knew there was no hope for a third party. He was flummoxed. That’s when he decided to use the Tulsa World to push a pseudo-candidacy. He didn’t care who he ran, it was just a joke in a political season that had lost any taste of humor. He needed someone like Pat Paulsen, back when he was briefly a hippie. On the same day that he came to that conclusion, he read about Leap Alan Hed in Reader’s Digest. The article told about Leap celebrating birthdays only on years with a leap day, and about his claim to be 16 even though he was born in 1952. Billy Joe Barker had found his candidate.

First he had to locate him; that took two days. Leap had moved to Dannebrog, Nebraska, a bustling metropolis of 307 people. Wiki says 306, but that was before Leap moved in. Billy Joe called him long distance. That took a day of phone tag since Leap didn’t have a phone, and had to take the call at a neighbor’s house.

Billy Joe explained his proposition. Leap almost fell off his chair laughing. He said, “You’ve got to be out of your damned mind. The second worst part of what you want me to do is the campaigning. The worst part is, if I lie well enough, I might win. The answer is no!”

Billy wrote up his weekly column for the Tulsa World, telling the story of his aborted search for a candidate. At the end, he said, “If only crazy people run for the office of President, then Leap Alan Hed is the sanest person in America. He really doesn’t want the job.”

Beware of what you ask for. Or what you don’t ask for.

172. Flash Fiction Day

Leave a reply

Today we have a short post on a short subject.

This Saturday, June 25, is Flash Fiction Day in Great Britain. The nice thing about the internet, is that even Americans can click on a British site, so you can check them out.

The term flash fiction is relatively new to me. I discovered it about a year ago while I was writing the blog entry A Very Short Story over on Serial. That entry has since been moved to Backfile.

The story in question was Koan; at 175 words, it would not be eligible for Saturday’s 100 word contest, but it’s short enough not to take itself too seriously, which seems to be important in flash fiction.

I remember, many years ago, one of the science fiction magazines ran a series of vignettes (think of vignette as an old word for flash fiction), then ran a contest for “The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told.” The subject of the contest was, “The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door . . .”

Most of the entries were forgettable, but one stuck in my mind for its cleverness, brevity, and sheer laziness – yes, what else would you call adding only seven words. The entire story read:

The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door. It was the last woman on Earth.

Snicker!

I have to warn you about the British website. There isn’t any science fiction there. It’s all fuzzy and warm and about feelings and relationships. Very academic, very much “literature”, pretty much what you would expect from a site which announces Supported using public funding by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND on its masthead.

If you want another kind of flash fiction, just Google. There are all kinds. For example, National Flash Fiction Day in New Zealand is on June 22, because it’s the shortest day in the year – in the southern hemisphere. I like that.

So, how shall I end this bit? Of course — A flash essay about flash fiction. Eighteen words ought to do it.

Steak is good. Vegetables are good. A balanced diet is admirable. But there’s nothing wrong with potato chips.

135. John Gierach

Leave a reply

John Gierach, writer. If you aren’t a fisherman, you have probably never heard of him. If you want to write, you should probably check him out.

I don’t fish. I once wanted to, but my old car wouldn’t reach the mountains, the local rivers only held carp, and I was too busy trying to be a writer anyway. I could read about fishing though, and that’s how I found John Gierach. It was a happy discovery; I’ve learned more about writing from him than I have from Hemingway.

Sports Illustrated said, “If Mark Twain were alive and a modern-day fly fisherman, he still would be hard put to top John Gierach in the one-liner department.” If that seems excessive, note that they are only talking about quips.

Like Twain, Gierach’s charm lies in understated humor layered into everyday experience. Gierach is an absolutely American writer, sending a message about the America with which today’s urban dwellers have largely lost touch. He grew up in farm country and understands a working man’s simple pleasures. My father, who never played a day in his life, would have understood Gierach instinctively if he had ever done anything as frivolous as read a book on fishing.

Gierach’s work has a cumulative effect. Beyond the one liners there is a picture of a life well lived, described with clarity and simplicity, and a steady hum of understated humor. Here is an example:

It also occurred to me, for some reason, that I now had just about everything I’d wanted when I was fourteen years old and was just starting to hang out with men I admired and wanted to be like. . . . I remember that, as a boy, the men seemed glad and competent in the field, but there was also sometimes a kind of subdued melancholy about them, too. I didn’t understand that as a kid, but I do now. . . . Anyway, somewhere in the past, based on the little I knew for sure, I had fastened on the perfect life as one based on art and sport, plus a few other things like love, friendship, pretty country and good food. Given a loose enough definition of art, that’s what I had.
               from The New Pond in Even Brook Trout Get the Blues, by John Gierach.

Not at all profound. Or is it?

If you are a would-be writer, try him; but if you are seduced by the ease of his writing remember that nothing is harder to pull off than the appearance of ease. And don’t write everything in second person – only Gierach can get away with that.

*****

I originally wrote this post months ago but couldn’t find quite the right time to run it. Two things have changed. First, I just got John’s 2014 book All Fishermen Are Liars and his first story, A Day at the Office, is the perfect thing for me to recommend if you only intend to study his chops. But don’t blame me if you get hooked.

Second, my new novel Cyan is due out shortly. It is, among other things, about the rediscovery of nature by people fleeing an overcrowded Earth. In addition to exploration, adventure, and danger, there is one brief scene about a colonist who grew up reading old fishing books on an Earth where all the fish were dead, and who achieves his lifelong ambition by catching the first fish on the new planet. I think John would like that.

112. You Can’t Be Serious!

Leave a reply

If you were to take your time machine back to the years when I taught middle school and drop in at the teacher’s lounge, you would find me full of jokes, puns, and snappy responses. Honest – ask anyone. Somehow, for me, that humor doesn’t seem to translate to my novels.

Nevertheless, you can’t work with language for decades without becoming attuned to irony and word play, and over the years I’ve heard some dandies.

*****

In 1965 I was a high school intern at a medical facility. One of the physicians working there was Dr. Sexauer. I saw his nametag, so I can guarantee that he was real, and I fully believe the story that I was told about a brief phone conversation:

Caller: “Hello, do you have a Sexauer there?”

Respondent: “Hell, no, we don’t even have time for a coffee break.”

*****

One of my college roommates was brilliant, and proud of it. His girlfriend was college material, but ditzy. It was the late sixties; most girls chose to seem ditzy.

They were walking at night near the Red Cedar river, which smelled anything but sweet in that era. He challenged her to make up a sentence using the word odoriferous. Without hesitation, and without losing her ditzy persona, she said, “Oh, de rifer is so pretty tonight.”

*****

A friend was talking about how often she procrastinated. I told her, “I was going to procrastinate once, but I kept putting it off.” She was half way through telling me what procrastinate means, when she realized she’d been had.

*****

When I had just begun to write, I was also a Red Cross volunteer. The local chapter director Jim Curley was fearlessly quick witted and a friend of mine. I was in his office one day, talking over Red Cross business and leaning way too far back in my chair, when I went over and hit the floor hard.

Jim leaped to his feet and rushed around the desk. Before I could assure him that I wasn’t hurt, he shouted in a voice that could be heard throughout the building, “And if you ever say that to me again, I’ll knock you down again!”

*****

At Westercon (Western Regional Science Fiction Convention) 33 in Los Angeles I sat in the audience of a spirited, but deeply nerdy debate on the use of language in fantasy. The notion of archaic language came up, and someone said that it should only be used as a spice in regular English. Spice morphed into general food terms, and the metaphor had become almost embarrassingly labored when one member of the audience stood up and said:

“Are you trying to tell us that we can have archaic and eat it too?”

*****

Yes, they all really happened. No joke.