We'll scuttle the story and run her around

Back on Cinematic Titanic: We didn't get dessert. In fact, other than me, we didn't even finish dinner, before my brother's friend pointed out that while it was fun talking about how we knew my brother and whatnot there just wasn't time to do anything more because we had the show to get to. The hostess was good about wrapping up what was left over and they trusted that the trunk of the car would be cool enough that the food wouldn't spoil too badly in the several hours of Cinematic Titanic and driving home; I wasn't so sure, but I didn't have any leftovers in the game.

Splitting the bill would be a moderate fiasco. I'm of the ``just divide the bill by the number of people already'' school, which works for me because I don't need to watch my budget that closely and it saves time. Several of the others were clearly watching their dollars tightly and adding up every single item to get things exactly right. Note that adding up every single item to get things exactly right never works, always resulting in the total pile of money being about $20 short. (I think they forgot to account for the gratuity automatically added for parties of six or more.) I threw in an extra $40, and after I went to the bathroom, they forced most of it back on me because they'd worked out where the shortage was.

Since it was ten minutes to the start of the show, and we were about forty blocks away from the theater, we gave up on the subway as a transport and grabbed a taxi where I noticed that fused Wendy's/Tim Horton's had invaded Manhattan. I text-messaged mongologue about spotting a Tim Horton's which I didn't think was a converted Bess Eaton's, leaving him confused because he had no idea where I was. As my taxi-mates talked about their favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes my quip about, you know, I have a friend who's shared con author's tables with Mary Jo Pehl, maybe she'd hold the show up for us, didn't arouse any reaction at all. Maybe I was speaking too softly.

We got stuck in traffic nearing Times Square, and decided it was bad enough we were better off hopping out of the taxi and walking the last couple blocks. It was already past 8 pm, with the show begun; the question was how much would we miss and would they let stragglers in before intermission? So we plunged ahead, going fast and far and ... finding ... we were on the wrong street, so we turned around and walked back and turned the corner twice and ... still ... not the right street. We found a mounted police officer and he pointed us the right way. We hoped.

Trivia: Michigan lead the United States in salt production from 1905, and for about nine-tenths of the time until 1958. Source: Salt: Grain of Life, Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader.

Currently Reading: The Great Game: The Struggle For Empire In Central Asia, Peter Hopkirk. It's weird reading actual history that features ongoing confrontations of the kind of melodramatic spy-thriller with gentleman-adventurer rivals admiring their counterparts and the like. (From the British and Russian views, that is; for the people in the area, it's a lot of horrible and meandering fighting.) I didn't expect that stuff to have ever existed outside stuffy novels turned into comical parodies.