I wasn't going to do it. But then Kathleen went and did it. So I did too.

Now if you enter your information, you can sorta pretend we can all see each other playing on Friday. Fun, right?

Right?

Oh, well.

After our heartfelt cry for help in the post below, sometime guest-Quizler Scott leaps to our aid with a from-the-hip puzzle to while away your afternoon.

"Like Remington Steele, he was initially a convenient fiction, but six years after his debut as a fictional construct, an orphan stepped into the role, and eventually got so much mail that he needed his own zip code."

To whom does Scott refer?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a copy of this amazingly-titled book. No Googling or making goo-goo eyes. One guess per comment, please, though you may comment as frequently as the spirit moves you. Scott will, of course, adjudicate the winner.

A very small number of people (possibly equalling the number of people reading this very post) may have noticed that our less than lively pace of updates here has slown to a dismal crawl, punctuated with the occasional desperate plea to come back tomorrow, next week, when it gets better, when it gets different, when I grow up already. Or something of that nature.

This post both is and isn't like that.

On the one hand, the Wombat had bona fide intentions to return to some semblance of productivity with regard to the File. These, in turn, were undermined by circumstances in fact beyond the editorial staff's already shaky control, to wit:

1. The Official Editorial CPU (referred to lovingly around the office as "The Spentium") is badly antiquated, and has not enough RAM to properly run the bloated monster which is Microsoft XP. Startup is an endless and agonizing process, and while browsing, word processing, and even a little photo editing still work fine once the programs have been slapped into life, a click between open windows is now a decision made with great deliberation, and indeed is often the occasion for a trip to the kitchen for some more tea. Either major surgery or a replacement is now clearly in order.
   
2. The Unofficial Secondary CPU ("Theresa's Nice Laptop") has, in an appalling bit of bad timing, died for the second time. We've sunk enough time and money into trying (ultimately without much luck) to get it fixed to be frightened of running out and buying a new one without a lot of serious thought. See #1 for where that leaves the both of us.
   
3. Just when that particular music demanded some facing, we both got hit with a distinctly flu-like virus. The Wombat shivers as it types! How much do I love you?
   
4. Work continues to be rather all-consuming while I'm in the office, and the sense of "no time to fool around and think about what to post later" is now pretty much the norm.
   
5. Aforementioned all-consuming nature of the job is attended by a growing awareness of how easy it would be to lose said job by choosing to comment on any aspect of the book/publishing world world that I could be perceived as associated with at work. And at work I pretty much touch on....well, you get the idea.
   
6. Aforementioned all-consuming nature of the job means that I don't wind up with the time and/or energy to learn about the wonderful world outside of current books and publishing. And that I'm starting to forget most of what I knew about old books. Which leaves me little to write about, outside of that which I feel sufficiently dissuaded from getting into.
   
7. During what little time I'm able to grab for writing, you'd think I'd be working on my book, wouldn't you?
   

With all that, the sane thing to do would be to call a hiatus. A cease-fire. A Winter Break. A Sabbatical. Something covered under FMLA, perhaps. The problem there is that it would just feel dreadful to lose the strange, tenuous, perhaps shallow sense of connection this ill-maintained jumble of thoughts and idiotically convoluted brainteasers allows me to feel with...here it comes...you.

That's right.

It's your fault.

OR...maybe I'm just too much of a narcissicist to give up on this little stage at the back of the coffee shop (and no, we're not getting in any more of the brioche this week. Our supplier moved to Prague.) In any event, I am going to try to do some things differently around here. Most of it, you won't like. Long, rambling posts that are straight out of the History Channel of memory, and badly edited at that! Things of that nature. Sounds pretty wretched, doesn't it?

The Quiz -- I tried to banish it once. But the File without the Quiz is like a cute little monkey without virus-carrying lice; we pretend to disdain the lice, but secretly we're rooting for them to take over the world. Go, go, you little bloodsucking champions! Similarly, the quiz parasitically leeches our precious time and thought away from all that we could do and accomplish. It drains us of energy and supplies us with nothing satisfying in return. It's like Everybody Loves Raymond in this respect, and that's one of the most successful shows in the history of television. Deny it if you can.

So the quiz stays, if at all possible. But the Quizmaster is now overmastered. I desperately need some guest MCs to come in and preside over it. Write today, won't you? Because if you won't, who will?

All right -- I will. But you'll regret it.

Final bit: Though all of the above is characterized by what spelling-challenged nations refer to as "whingeing," I will add one dissonantly happy note, in the form of a link to four years ago today.

Overwhelmed today. No Quiz for the deserving, nor the undeserving. Nor for the underservants, or the undershirtless...

Next week we'll be back in our usual tawdry splendor. Promise.

No time for preambles:

In 1866, he quit his gentlemen's club because a servant told him he couldn't do something. Through his young adult life, he chafed under his parental restrictions about the subject. And in 1901, with an air of triumph, he was finally able to do it without restriction, and famously announced that everyone else he knew could, too.

Who was he? What was the subject of his announcement? And what made his decision possible?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a prototype version of Apple's iPunge, which allows devotees of Smell-o-Vision to download and enjoy the only completed Smell-O-Vision feature, 1960's Scent of a Mystery (Steve Jobs has indicated that future versions of the iSmell application will also be able to handle the Odorama format). No Googling or digitizing the entire contents of a library (wait a minute – that's just more Googling, isn't it?). One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.

Picking up my fork I promptly cut a piece, and was able to see and smell the wonderful aroma of cheesecake.

Applebee's restaurant came through for a diner known only as "sweetkat" back in April of '01.

Late, late, late and late. Sorry. Here we go with today's insult to your collective intelligence.

Originally trained in classical guitar, Walter Werzowa first had recording success outside his native Austria with an ABBA-parody song in the late 1980s, "Bring Me Eidelweiss." However, it wasn't until 1994 that one of his compositions became well-known around the globe. Although the entire composition is quite brief, the first note alone was composed of over a dozen sounds, including an anvil and a tambourine.

What composition of Mr. Werzowa's brought him international success?

Once we've disposed of this little amuse-brain-bouche, we'll move on to a bonus question.

First correct answer posted to comments wins a high-level "crony" appointment at the Wombat Institute for Pointless Research, with the title "Associate Director of Corrections and Apologia." An impressive line on anyone's C.V. No Googling or calling Karl Rove to testify, without sending him a letter of intent on the good stationery. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.

I've finally posted some photos of our August beach trip, including a couple I got of the tide pools.

When one watches or listens to a George W. Bush news conference, one inevitably perceives a fundamentally stupid man whose notion that the best way to cover for his idiocy is to speak to others as if they need simple ideas explained to them.