We've moved in; it's still a wilderness of cardboard, of dishes engrimed by newspaper, case upon backbreaking case of trash fiction, bloated biography, unread poetry and over-thumbed reference materials piled in mountains and mesas throughout; of chairs, inherited from friends, which look even more played-out in freshly painted surroundings; of outlets in funny places; of rooms which don't fit our rugs; of uncurtained windows which blaze with too much light at dawn. It’s a chaos in which the knife you were just holding, those keys you just had made, the cat, your drink, the phone number, the goddamn phone, are never ever where you thought they were.

It's also lovely. Come on over – we're always home.

Okay, settle down, class. Just because there's a substitute teacher, that doesn't mean I'm going to tolerate any of those "paper airplanes" you kids are so fond of. And I don't care if it's a beautiful day--we still can't have class outside.

Mr. Tipper's not here. But we're going ahead with the Friday pop quiz and I'm sure you'll all like Mr. BoxJam very much. Now pull out your pencil and paper and put away the history-eraser button, because that nice Mr. BoxJam has given me a question that I'm going to write on the blackboard:

"The Flotsam Family" was developed in 1940 as a radio vehicle for Groucho Marx, but it never found a sponsor. After a few years and a few changes, it went on the air with a different title and a different star.

What was the show?

As ever, renounce the use of Google and reference books, for they are but base cheatery, but look within yourself. One guess per response, please, but you may guess as many times as you want.

Dewey Decimal Owner Sues 'Library' Hotel .

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus seeks triple the hotel's profits since its opening or triple the organization's damages, whichever is greater, from the hotel's owner.

And I thought the fines at NYU's library were steep.

Avast ye, scurvy sea-wombats! It's talk like a pirate day.

But I can't keep up the peg-leg patois for the quiz question, so you'll just have to save the Long John Silverisms for your Arr-guments in the comments. Here's today's question.

In 1961 the government began a project which investigated the effects of the chemical silver iodide on specially selected subjects who met particular criteria. The last subject of the experiments, tested in 1971, was known to the experimenters as "Ginger." The project was discontinued after it was decided that there was not enough real understanding of the effects.

What did the experimenters hope to show the chemical did to the subjects?

First correct answer posted to comments wins the uniball pen whose ink cartridge was exhausted yesterday as I signed my life over to a bank in exchange for six rooms, a set of keys, and a few cubic meters of storage space. No Googling or ringing up the fellows at the Smoking Gun. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.

The AOSH (besides the quizzes, which will MARCH ON, dammit, see you Friday for sure) has been the product of perhaps our impending relocation to the faux-haute precincts of Windsor Terrace, with the concomittant necessity of putting our lives into boxes, plus all the legal foofaraw which must of course precede the material relocation of ourselves from hither to yon, plus we're trying to see if we can get the new place painted (and have you ever tried to agree with another complex and thoughtful individual on the question of is "Texas Sage" really just, you know, battleship grey trying to get over?), and now one-half the household is on bed rest due to the next generation of quizmeisters trying to jump the line vis-a-vis their (all right her) due date, causing a certain amount of inconvenience not to say worry (though currently all quiet on that front, not to alarm), which means that much as we hate to admit it --oh, how this admittance pains us very deeply -- we really now have better things to do than to remedy the AOSH.

(You ask, was the D.F. Wallace parody-style above what was intended from the start? Look into our guileless hearts with trust as we tell you nah, it just sorta came out that way.)

Feel free to use the comments as a place to hang out and smoke. See you Friday.

The answer to today's quiz is the author of a recently published book, from which the following passages have been excerpted:*

I...was standing with a new group of friends, talking and laughing. One young man started to talk and was stuttering something awful. You could hardly listen to him. Of course, being me, I thought he was joking around. So I started to stutter too. He wasn't joking! I nearly died of embarrassment. The hardest thing I ever did was to face that young man a few days later, full of apologies.

Why do we always think that if we add an "a" after a word that we're speaking Spanish? And that we must also talk very loudly and use extensive sign language?

Name this thoughtful philosopher of everyday life, either using the name by which the s/he first rose to prominence, or the slightly altered name by which s/he now goes.

First correct answer posted to comments wins a copy of the volume in question. No Googling or asking the know-it-all kids at the video store. One guess per comment, please, but post as often as you like.

*Any slight infelicities of prose are sic; but as I am quoting from a pre-publication proof copy, the version you see in stores may have been corrected.

The 1980s. While some of us remember it as the decade when the accomplishments of Chilliwack at last gained recognition in the U.S., perhaps there are some who remember the literary highlights. Stephen King, for example, paved the way for our brave new world of kewl spelling by writing Pet Sematary. Andy Rooney, bafflingly, published four best-selling books.

There was one author who, within the decade, hit the year-end top ten in fiction and (in another year) the year-end top ten in nonfiction books, as reported by Publisher's Weekly. The writer did it with different titles, natch, and in different years within the decade (in fact, he accomplished this rare double feat within the years of the Reagan administration).

The author still writes big-selling books today.

Who is the author? For extra credit, what now-famous American was the main person profiled in the nonfiction hit? For extra, extra credit, what was the title of the book?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a mangled Columbia House cassette of Pat Benatar's Crimes of Passion. No Googling or going through that ancient stack of the New York Times Review of Books behind the recliner in the den. One guess per comment, but post as often as you like.

Sick and tired of Eudora's ad-driven free e-mail interface, I found myself finally giving in to Sean and Matt's advocacy for Mozilla Thunderbird. And now I'm busy monkeying around with Firebird, the browser. (Yes, yes, I know, most of you are looking at me as if I just fell off of the back of a steam-powered turnip harvester. Well gosh -- this newfangled open-source software! It sure is something! You say it's been around for awhile! )

Anyway, I admit that for the code-illiterate the fun is in playing with a new set of knobs and buttons, admiring a spruced-up look, and perhaps in the easy-to-forget assertion of one's ability to actually stray from the oh-what-the-hell-they're-right-there ubiquity of Microsoft's toolset (or in the case of Eudora, an alternative that was good way back when I was dialing up on a thirty-pound Mac laptop with a greyscale screen, but now seems not so lovely.)

Of course, I'm now missing little bits and pieces of functionality (if anyone can tell me how to swap out reply-to addresses in Thunderbird, I'd be much obliged); Firebird seems not to want to display the handy little bold/italic/link creator tool that normally resides right above this Movable Type window. But my cavils are small -- by and large, these two pieces of software are working smoothly.

Dare I go whole hog, applications-wise?