It's a strange feeling; you've worked hard to be
extremely different.  You've practiced uniqueness
until it's coming out of your pores.  And then a
thin-faced woman that you never heard of and can't
figure out at all-at least not yet-maps you out. 
Completely.  She knows what you're going to do before
you do.  She know where you're going to go.  Probably
even knows by now what you had for breakfast, if she
didn't know something like that yesterday.  And you
don't even know her name.  Or anything else about her!
 But it was time to find out.

As soon as he left Caraboo and Neva in Central Park,
he walked east across the park and out onto Fifth
Avenue.  A few minutes later, he found a phone booth
in a little magazine shop on a side street that
probably sold more lottery tickets than magazines and
called in.

Over the phone, he told the woman presently on duty in
the room that security had been breached.

"We already know," she said.

Snake immediately hung up.

He realized he'd made a mistake.  The possibility was
quite strong that whoever had broken security now also
knew that they'd been found out.  Unfortunately,
except for a personal visit to the room, the telephone
was the only modus operandi he had of contact.  He was
irritated at himself; he should have taken a train
down to Washington and gone to the room and told them
in person.

Too late now.

And, regardless, they seemed to have figured it out
for themselves.  It had been a useless phone call. 
With the exception that something bothered him about
it.  He shrugged the feeling off.  Probably just
guilt.

He'd planned to ask the person on the other end of the
phone to check out the thin-faced girl, the
"secretary" at Allied Global Destination Ltd. 
However, once he'd discovered that security had been
broken, previous verbal orders from long ago were to
hang up and wait for further instructions.  The new
telephone number would be mailed to him in a day or
two.  In fact, the new telephone number might be even
now in his mail box up in Harlem.

Six men picked him up as soon as he came out of the
small store.  They were spread out, but they neatly
hemmed him in.  Three were to his right, two about 12
yards away at his left.  Another was across the
street.

All of them appeared to be professionals and, as much
as he liked dealing with professionals because of
their lack of emotion, he now began to wonder if it
was too much of a good thing.

No one had yet drawn a gun.  One of the men to his
left kept his right hand in his coat pocket.  Another
man appeared to be scratching his ear, which more than
likely meant his had a gun in a shoulder holster. 
Snake would have given odds that all of them carried
at least one gun.  And that little guy across the
street Snake had pegged for a sawed-off shotgun in a
coat sling; he could get that thing out and in action
by just lifting his coat flap.

All of this, he saw in an instant.

He stepped back into the store.  The owner, a wizened
little man, could see two of the men out the front
doorway.

"Should I call the police?"

"No, sir," said Snake.  "These are just a few
friends."

"I don't want to criticize, young man, but I don't
think you're hanging around with the right sort of
people."

"Sometimes I wonder about that myself," said Snake.

"I would be grateful if you could keep from getting
any blood on my store."

"No problem," said Snake.  "I'll just be a moment."

>From an inside jacket pocket, he took out a small
fountain pen.  Except it wasn't a fountain pen.  He
flicked the button on the side and pulled.  The tube
expanded like a small telescope.  Another pocket
produced a small case.  He opened it to reveal more
than a dozen tiny darts.

He carefully inserted one of the darts, aimed the
small blow gun, and shot one of the darts.  It hit the
neck of the guy across the street.  For a moment, the
gunman wasn't aware of what had happened.  Then,
slowly he began to collapse.  He felt on the sidewalk.
 A man in an overcoat the color of coffee with cream
paid the limp form no mind; he stepped around him and
continued down the sidewalk.

Snake was quickly able to dispose of two more of the
gunmen before the others realized something was
happening.  They didn't know what it was, but their
comrades were falling around them.  How, they didn't
know.  That made it all the more frightening.  Two of
them whirled, as if seeking an opponent behind them. 
Finding none, they burst into flight and ran down the
street, dodging between oncoming cars.

The remaining gunman was the hunter's friend-Rabbit. 
It was obvious how he'd earned his nickname.  His ears
were just slightly too prominent for his head.

"I was hoping we wouldn't meet again," said Snake.

Rabbit gestured toward the three bodies on the
sidewalk.  One of them, according to his dull green
overcoat, was probably the hunter himself.  "Did you
kill them?"

"No.  But I'd promised to kill you and your friend if
I saw you again."

"I guess he forgot to tell me that."

"That's a pity.  Go for your gun."

Rabbit sighed.  He looked up the street as if seeking
help, then down at the hunter's limp form.

"I guess I could.  Hunter said you didn't even carry a
gun.  But, I'm going to take a dumb chance and not do
that.  I ain't going for my gun.  But you can go ahead
and kill me if you're that kind. I don't think you
are, though."

"I see," said Snake.  "And you think I'll have to meet
with you again and the next time you'll have an edge."

"You wouldn't believe me, I guess, if I said there
wouldn't be any next time?"

"Your friend there told me earlier it was just a job."

"I can quit."

"Can you?"

"I've been thinking about Arkansas for some while.  I
understand there's good fishing in some of the streams
up in the Ozarks."

"We could try that, I suppose," said Snake.

"I'd like to give it a try, if that's okay with you."

"A man who's going fishing don't need a gun," Snake
said.

"You want my gun, you can have it."

"Just toss it in the trash can over there," said
Snake, "but you don't mind if I suggest a little extra
caution.  I wouldn't want to think you were going to
try something and get nervous and cause an accident
that would prevent you from your fishing trip."

"I get the message," said Rabbit.

"Goodbye, Rabbit.  Good fishing."

"Thanks."

He lifted his gun gently from its shoulder holster by
two fingers and dropped it carefully into a trash can
in front of the magazine store entrance.

Without stopping, without looking around, he walked
down the street toward Third Street.  Snake watched
until he turned the corner, heading south.

Then, with relative ease, he picked up each of the
unconscious gunmen and, one at a time, carried them
into the store.

"Amazing!  No blood!"  said the store owner.  He
grinned.

"Do you have a storage room?"

"No blood?"

"No blood," agreed Snake.

'It's rather small."

"Good."

"Are you some kind a cop?"

"Dressed like this?"

"Well, tell me this:  Are those bad guys or good
guys?"

"These three?  They probably never belonged to the Boy
Scouts," Snake said.  "At least, that would be a good
bet."

He carried the three men into the small store room. 
Two of them, he draped across some boxes face down
after thoroughly searching them.  He sat the hunter on
a box.  The wall was his back rest.

The billfold he found on the hunter obviously
contained false identification; the driver's license
could have been him or it could have been somebody
else.  The billfold was too thin.  No family photos. 
No ticket for dry cleaning.  Nothing that ordinary
people carry in their wallets.

"So you now know who I am," said the hunter.

"Not really; I rather doubt that you're named Charles
Rake," said Snake, handing the man back his billfold. 
"How long have you been conscious?"

"I was just surveying the scene.  Are they dead?"

"Your friends?  No."

"The word was that you wouldn't kill except in direct
confrontation."

"Who spread that kind of word?"

"Again, I'm not at liberty to say."

"And, again, I told you what would happen."

"They say you always follow through on a promise. 
They do say that."

Snake nodded.

"It's not that I particular enjoy this sort of thing. 
But I can't have you a constant threat.  One kills
mosquitoes."

The hunter smiled.  "And I'm no more than a pest to
you?"

"Afraid so."

"Is that why my gun is still in my holster?"

"Yes," said Snake.

"I suppose you gave Rabbit the same opportunity?"

"He decided to go fishing."

"Good.  He talked about the Ozarks and the trout that
practically leap onto your hooks.  He talked about
that a lot."

"Seemed to be a rather pleasant sort."

"He really wasn't cut out for this game.  He wasn't
willing to pay the price.  But you and I, Snake, we
always know that the day is coming when it's time to
pay up."

"You know an awful lot about me.  You and Rabbit."

"There's a dossier on you, Snake.  We know you."

"Anything you want me to tell anybody?"

"You're assuming, of course, that you're going to win
this particular auction."

"So far, so good," said Snake.

"You forget.  I also know you don't carry a gun."

Before he even finished the sentence, the hunter,
alias Charles Rake, reached for the gun in his
shoulder holster.

He was extremely fast.  His gun had already cleared
his holster before Snake could react. However, the
hunter had not exercised for countless hours for just
such occasions as this.

Without thinking about it, allowing only gut instinct
to control his mind as well as his muscles, Snake
leaped across the narrow room.  It was over in an
instant.  The hunter fired one shot, but it thudded
harmlessly into the ceiling.

Snake looked down at the body.  It distressed him. 
Killing had become too easy.  It had been easy for a
long time.  In spite of the gun, Snake had an
advantage in close quarters like this.  A knife would
have been better up close.  It the right hand, of
course.  But still not good enough.

The owner of the store peeped in.

"I didn't want to bother you, but I heard a shot."

"Was it loud?  It went into your ceiling up there."

"This building hides noise."  He looked at the body of
the hunter.  "Still no blood, I see."

"Poor guy," said Snake.

"And he was a friend?"

"I was beginning to develop sort of a fondness for
him," said Snake.

"You and I had best be enemies," said the store owner.
 He stared at the other two gunmen.  "Are they dead?"

"No.  Could I trouble you to call the police about
them?"

"What do I tell the police?  These men didn't do
anything, so far as I know.  Not to me.  At least, not
yet.  If I tattletale to the cops, they might come
back and do something once they get free."

"You've no need to worry," said Snake.  "Just tell the
police to check their records.  Thugs like these
generally have records yards long."

"And that guy on the floor?"

"Just say he fell and broke his neck.  His
fingerprints on the gun won't help his problem much."

"Frankly, I don't think he has any more problems,"
said the store owner.

They walked out of the storage room into the store. 
The owner went over to a telephone booth.  He put in a
coin and dialed 911, spoke a few words, and hung up.

"You'd better leave," he said.  "These New York cops
are slow, but they'll eventually get here."

"I owe you one," Snake said.

Snake stepped out onto the sidewalk.  The only people
on the street were ordinary, every day people.

But he was aware that the thin-faced girl had him
mapped out.  She known that he would be in Central
Park.  Because the park is so large, finding him would
have taken an accident of luck, so she'd assigned
people around the park to watch for him.  When he had
appeared, someone had spotted him and called in the
troops.

Was she somewhere in the distance even now watching
him?

She knew he didn't carry a weapon.  At least not any
weapon in the ordinary sense.  He depended on
intuition, invention, and trickery.  And his unusual
strength.  She knew that he liked to give his
opponents a fighting chance.  

She probably knew that he also liked to read for an
hour or so each day.  So libraries were now off
limits.

He'd had planned to go back up town to that diner
where he had breakfast and spend the night over behind
the distant stone wall.  That was now out of the
question.

He knew the tactic she was using.  Knew it well. 
Disturb, disrupt, weaken.  Reduce the prey.  Erase the
prey.

He took a bus for three blocks, dropped out of the
rear entrance and got into a taxi, went up town to the
125th Street station and caught a train down to Grand
Central Terminal.  If he was followed, he couldn't
spot them.

Brentano's wasn't far away.  In the science fiction
section, he found a copy of "Double Star."  The page
numbers were different, but he was able to find his
place without too much trouble.  He stood in front of
the shelf reading for a while.

However, it wasn't the same.  It wasn't relaxing.  So,
he gave up after a few minutes and bought the
pocketbook.

On the street again, he walked over to the center of
Times Square and took the elevator of the New York
Times up to the employee restaurant.  His blue jeans
got a couple of hard stares, but this was not exactly
rush hour.  He bought a steak and ate it at a table
near a window and by the time he'd finished three cups
of coffee, he'd also finished the book, his mind was
refreshed and alert once again.  And he could think
straight.  This was not the kind of prey, the
thin-faced girl would eventually discover, that could
be disturbed.  At least, not for long.

He walked over to Madison and found a quality men's
store.  Half an hour later, very few people would have
recognized him.  A couple of extra hundred dollar
bills had gained the personal services of a tailor and
the jacket had been customized for his collection of
gadgets, none of which looked like weapons or tools,
all of which were either plastic and light or light
metal.  The suit was dark, his tie was black with thin
blue diagonal stripes to match the blue handkerchief
in his jacket vest pocket.

He stood looking at himself in a full-length mirror in
the store.

"I wonder who that is."

He also bought a new pair of Levis and asked the clerk
to throw his old pair in the trash.  The other
clothes, he placed in a shopping bag and took down to
Grand Central Terminal and stored in a locker.

A few minutes later, Snake stopped at a optician's
shop and bought new frames for his lenses-dark plastic
frames.  He ordered new lenses for his gold frames and
told the women behind the counter that he would pick
them up in a few days.

He was ready.

It was easy to hail a taxi even though traffic is
always hectic in mid-town Manhattan.

The taxi let him out at the deli where he'd confronted
the thin-faced woman a day ago.

There was a man posted down the street.  He stood
leaning against a tree that grew from a hole in the
sidewalk.  Both the tree and the man seemed out of
place.

Because he was looking for a guy about 30 years old in
weathered blue jeans, denim jacket, and sneakers, he
didn't pay any attention to Snake.  A careful person
would have been curious at anyone who arrived in a
taxi just to go to the deli.  Most deli customers came
on foot.

Snake ordered some coffee at the counter and when a
cup of steaming coffee, black, was handed to him, went
over and sat down at a table against the wall.  From
here, he could watch the front entrance and keep half
an eye on the doorway at the back.

He later ordered a bagel.

"Philly?" asked the counterman.  

"Why not," said Snake.  "Any lox?"

"This is a deli, ain't it?"

"Lox," said Snake.

He carried the bagel with Philadelphia Cream Cheese
and lox on a small paper plate back to his table.  It
was very Jewish and normally not a part of his diet. 
But his diet had been blown all to hell anyway with
the steak at lunch.

Lox in a deli was expensive.  Fortunately, money was
not a problem.  He had a few thousand in large bills
in a plastic pouch pinned to the lining of his inside
jacket pocket.  In his billfold, he always carried a
few hundred in small bills.

Snake checked his wristwatch.  It was nearly 4 p.m.

After a while, he picked up the paper plate and other
trash and dumped it into a trash can at the end of the
counter.

"Yesterday, there was a thin-faced girl in here.  A
girl in a black fur cap and dark coat.  You know the
one?"

"Sounds like half of the customers," said the man
behind the counter.  He mopped at a dark spot on the
wooden surface.

She comes in here quite a bit.  Likes those celery
sodas."

"Nah, that one's not a regular.  I know who you mean. 
She bought two at the same time, but wanted the second
one bought over later."

"I was hoping to see her again," said Snake.

"Never can tell," said the man.  "Hang out as long as
you want to...especially as long as you keep buying
lox."

"Sorry," said Snake.  "But a little lox goes a long
way with me."

"Me, too," said the man behind the counter.

The man was waiting at the tree outside.  Snake walked
up to him without any trouble and tapped him very
carefully behind the ear with a leather-covered
blackjack.  The gunman may have realized he was in
danger, but by then it was too late.  The sap knocked
him unconscious and he fell by the foot of the small.
leafless tree.

Snake kept the blackjack hidden in his hand as he
walked to the corner and turned.  In a few moments, he
had entered the entrance of the building that housed
Allied Global Destination Ltd.  There was another
gunman standing by the door of the elevator as he came
out into the office lobby.  His gun was in his hand,
but his arms were crossed his chest.  He was not
prepared for an invasion.  Again, he was watching for
a different person.

Snake cracked the man across the side of the head with
the blackjack and leaped almost in the same motion to
the desk of the receptionist and caught the man behind
the desk by the hair and jerked his head down against
the surface of the desk.  The only sound the man had
time to make was the that caused as the bridge of his
nose broke against the desk.

The thin-faced woman was not there.

He quickly raced through all of the offices.  Not much
had changed since his previous visit.  No one else was
around.

A quick search offered no clues.  Neither the gunman
at the elevator nor the man sitting at the
receptionist desk had viable identification.

Only one thing proved interesting.  A telephone number
had been scrawled on the desk pad by the phone.  And
the number had been written by an obvious female hand.

He noted the phone number and tucked it away in the
back of his mind.

The gunman sprawled near the elevator was beginning to
groan as Snake left.  The man with his face resting on
the desk of the receptionist, unfortunately, was no
condition to groan.  Not ever.
Crushed facial bones had evidently penetrated his
skull.

As soon as he left the offices of Allied Global
Destination Ltd., Snake walked over to Eighth Avenue
and headed uptown.  After a few blocks, he hailed a
taxi at a corner and went over to Grand Central.  In a
restroom, he changed back into blue jeans and his
denim jacket and sneakers.  He just felt more
comfortable dressed this way.

He placed the suit and tie in the locker out in the
terminal and caught a train heading toward
Westchester.

At the 125th Street station, he got off the train and,
making sure he wasn't being followed, walked to the
post office and checked his mail box.  A new phone
number had been mailed to him.

There was a phone booth right outside the post office,
but he walked to one two blocks away and called.

So Caraboo thought he was predictable, huh?

"We've moved," said the woman.

"Glad to hear that," said Snake.

He told the phone to check out the phone number he'd
found scrawled on the desk pad at Allied Global
Destination Ltd.

Rather than wait for her to check out the phone
number, he hung up and walked east and a few minutes
later called again.

She told him the address.  "A pay phone."

It's not easy to catch a taxi in Harlem.  But it
wasn't far back to 125th Street station and there were
several cabs waiting in line for customers.

He was too late, of course, but they'd left the owner
of the small magazine store alive.

Snake ran down the street to another phone, just in
case the one in the store had been bugged, and called
the woman.

He told her the address and asked for special
treatment and hung up.

In the store, he lifted the small man up and placed
him in a chair behind the counter.  But he had to hold
him there to keep him from falling.

"Some...of your friends," said the store owner.  He
was barely able to talk.  Blood seeped from a wound in
his head that had obviously been carved with the
barrel of a pistol.  His face was beginning to swell
from a beating.

"We'll take care of you," said Snake.

"My store."

"It, too," said Snake.

The ambulance and a doctor arrived within minutes. 
"Mt. Sinai," the doctor, a very young man with that
certain brightness in his eyes and manner that was
attracted to this kind of work, told Snake.  Two men
wheeled the store owner away on a stretcher and put
him in the ambulance.

"Guard him," Snake told the doctor.  "These people are
not very nice."

He kept the store open until about 10 p.m.  As he'd
expected, most of the customers wanted lottery
tickets.  Now and then he sold a candy bar and a
magazine or two.

"What happened to Herman?"

Sick," said Snake.  "He'd be out for a few days."

Between customers, he had a lot of time to think.
It was all very strange.

And unbelievable.

There were only two explanations and one of them was
extremely unlikely.  He doubted very seriously that
the thin-faced woman worked for the same people as he
did.  That left only one conclusion.

For years, Snake had been working, without knowing it,
for his old friend, Caraboo, and Allied Global
Destination Ltd.


(continued next week)

America spends money on blood in Iraq when Haiti is
starving for bread.  The logic escapes me.  I think
part of the problem is that Buchenwald is a
cottonpickin' radical.  Stupid.  But a radical.  I
would say a filthy stupid radical, but he probably
takes a bath now and then.  Regardless, he is without
question a filthy stupid  cottonpickin' radical.  In
his un-State of the Union address a year ago (Glenn
Kessler, Washington Post, Jan. 19. 2004), Buchenwald
said that Saddam Hussein had enough anthrax to "kill
several million people," enough botulinun toxin to
"subject millions of people to death by respiratory
failure" and enough chemical agents to "kill untold
thousands."

I.e., an attempt through the promulgation of fear to
control you and me.  An attempt to lend reason to his
insanity.

The distance between blood and bread, incidentally, is
quite vast.  Blood creates enemies.  Bread has the
tendency to create friends.

My definition of a radical is someone who doesn't fit
in with the norm.  Liars who lead a nation to war on
lies are definitely not among the norm.

Even if there had been a reason to go to war, he
rushed into it with thinking.  Yes, the kind of
emotion-based decision that a radical might make.

Meanwhile, people in Haiti starve because of a storm.

But Buchenwald's entire administration has been
replete with lies--education, jobs, prescriptions, you
name it.  And many lies, of course, about Saddam
Hussein.  One thing for sure about Buchenwald, he
doesn't flip-flop very often; he sticks with his lies
and keeps sprouting his idiocracies because evidently
he's found that there are enough people out there on
the lee side of the bell-shaped curve to believe him.

What's sad is that this administration of baby killers
headed by Buchenwald wishes to "try" an old man for
crimes that do not exist.  No weapons of mass
destruction.  No mass graves with hundreds of
thousands of bodies.  The only crimes that have been
committed so far have been committed at the
instigation of Buchenwald.  And Saddam Hussein is
going to pay for things he didn't do...literally, pay
for the lies of Buchenwald.

Buchenwald has not had to flip-flop on these crimes
against humanity for various reasons.  First, because
the United States is more than likely the most
powerful nation on earth; Buchenwald had absolutely
nothing to do with this; when it was his time to
serve, he ran and hid in the National Guard, then a
hidehole for cowards.  On CNN, (crawl Sept. 23)
Buchenwald was quoted as saying "We will never be
intimidated" regarding the two American civilians
beheaded in Iraq.  Ah, yes, dear people, he's awfully
brave when someone else is doing the dying. Second, we
are never told how many innocent women and children
and, yes, men, too, who have been slaughtered
needlessly in Iraq...deaths for which Buchenwald is
primarily responsible.  The White House that has been
disgraced by Buchenwald even hides the caskets of our
own American soldiers killed in Iraq; furthermore, the
numbers of American soldiers who've been maimed in
this senseless war in Iraq are obscured.

We have an irresponsible administration that operates
mostly in secret.  This, of course, is only when they
are not lying outright.

Bruce Spingsteen recently stated: "Our American
government has strayed too far from American values.
It is time to move forward. The country we carry in
our hearts is waiting."

I don't know this for a fact, but I think he's talking
about Kerry as the best potential for America.  One
thing for sure, we can not continue to suffer from
Buchenwald.  The price is much too high!

Meanwhile, people in Haiti go hungry.

OTHER MATTERS
Robby Vee has his own website: www.robbyvee.com.  Rob
and his band are playing honky tonks and dives--and
casinos, too--in the Midwest area.  I hope if you have
the chance, you catch his show.  Entertainment plus! 
Say hello from Claude and Barbara Hall and sons.

Joe Nick Patoski, joenickp@yahoo.com: "Your post about
hearing all that great music in NYC just warmed my
heart. It was very rich.  And speaking of rich, check
out  VoicesOfCivilRights.org.  I'm on a bus tour
across the US collecting civil rights stories with
four writers and a crew from the History Channel.
Every day is a rewarding  experience."

George Wilson, a very popular figure on the Internet
these days--No. 1, in fact, on the Big Internet
Hits--was on www.rollye.com at 8 p.m. Albuquerque time
Friday.  Live show hosted by Rollye (James) Cornell, a
former radio-TV editor of Billboard.  Just off the top
of my head, I would think that George Wilson is
probably the greatest real radio person still alive. 
Maybe Kent Burkhart would also be in the running. 
Chuck Blore, too, of course.  And, without question,
Ron Jacobs, the great Hawaiian guru of broadcasting. 
My oldest son, John Alexander Hall, wrote me the other
day that people used to read Vox Jox to find a job. 
Now, he said, they read Commentary to see who's still
alive.

Just FYI, Rollye has a great thing going.  She once
had Ruth Meyers on her show.  Big coup!

Dean Landsman, dean@land-com.net: "Somewhere in my
'drafts' I still have a the beginnings  of a reply to
you I was composing before my PC all but exploded one
day--it was about your quandary in how to counsel your
niece (?) who wanted to get into  the biz.  Here's the
short reply, albeit a few months late: yes, tell her
to follow her heart.  But warn her of the pitfalls,
the idiots, the fact  that ego, darkness, greed,
lawyers and money are the true powers that be, and
that art and creativity are just a footnote.   A
thankful one, surely to be nurtured, but sadly just a
byproduct of the business that gives it no mind.  And
then tell her that people with  passion, creativity
and heart are the ones who save it from being totally
destroyed by the powers that be.  That's the Yin and
the Yang, although, as we sadly know from experience,
they are not equals in the  entertainment biz."

Dave Martin, radiopers@aol.com, just emailed about his
webside featuring an item by Bob Henabery.
http://davemartin.blogspot.com/2004/09/greatest-danger-for-most-of-us-is-not.html

Right behind that, a note from Jim Carnegie, publisher
of Radio Business Report, an epaper, offering a 30-day
free trial: http://www.rbr.com/rbr-signup.html 

Huge bunch of websites available these days for fans
of radio.  Hard to tell which ones will survive. 
Because I think you have to love radio in order to
write about it.  And the question will boil down to
who loves it enough and who loves it the most.

In an earlier Commentary, I mentioned about Bill
Pearson's house in the mountains of Arizona being
destroyed by fire, along with a comic collection worth
perhaps a million dollars or more (he'd placed the
entire collection in his will to raise funds for a
local high school).  Well, Bill is coming out from
under the mess.  That stuff he lost in the fire was,
of course, irreplaceable.  But Bill has just acquired
the lot next door with two storage sheds and I would
surmise that he will be back collecting in the near
future.  Bill is an artist.  I've got an oil he
painted of a gremlin hanging on my wall.  Guess it
must be 30 years old by now.  One of the things that
Bill used to doodle well was toadstools.  I wanted to
chide someone in Billboard's Vox Jox 30 or 40 years
ago and so I came up with the Purple Toadstool Award. 
Someone did something that I didn't think was quite
kosher, I'd slap them with the Purple Toadstool Award.
 Never got around to having Bill draw me one, but that
was my intent.  However, as things happen in radio,
the award became sort of popular and everybody wanted
one--kept asking for entry forms--and so I gave up on
it.