Blog housekeeping and real live entertainment!

HI. No highfalutin library philosophy today. Today is just notes on my sidebars over there (yes, yes, off to the right, huddling against my printer for comfort. You can't see my printer? Well then, what's to the right of your screen?). And then we whisk you off to literature (no, you don't have to go). So it's either a slow day on the blog or a heavy one, depending on how you look at it.

First, our inaugural feature of 'What's the free food in the break room' has either been eliminated or put on sabbatical. This may be because no one brings in any interesting free food anymore. I'm hoping that has nothing to do with my occasionally inadvertently referring to it as poison. I meant it affectionately. You may also notice my increased use of the space right to help organize my copious blog posts. These things multiply like tribbles! Some of them I don't even write, they just spawn! Anyway, the people willing to actually talk about my blog with me seem pretty comprehensive oriented and use the phrase "need to get caught up" or "am all caught up". But in my unceasing optimism I see millions of new readers, and I am thinking maybe some links to thematic groupings of posts will be of use to them. Finally, I have posted up the second Wiki story, which one can probably fathom without reading the first, though the first is up there too. It can all be found through the 'Short detective stories' link at my entertainment hub over there on the right, next to the...oh, just, to the right.  Anyway, to help you along with this I am putting the start of the story here. Just try it. You don't have to click the continue link at the end of it. It'll be good for you! There is a special kind of high fiber in this story, and omega nine, which is three times as powerful as omega three.

Wiki and the Dog that Barked

Wiki Magenta was a detective, but detectives need cases and cases can be very hard to come by. Solving, so effectively, the case of her own being robbed was impressive enough to Phoebe and I, but not the sort of thing with a lot of future to it. Wiki allowed herself to be carefully introduced to kids around the neighborhood and even had a couple of my friends over. She inspired more awe and respect than outright affection, and when the information was quietly made available that she worked, at a small, sliding fee, as a detective, it did not inspire the derision and skepticism nearly anyone else would have engendered. Nevertheless, it did not either get her clients. Few people, and perhaps even more so kids, think in terms of detectives as useful tools in life, and an extraordinary resource such as Wiki was outside of the normal conception. She had to be learned.

My and Phoebe's summer was coming out way better than I had any hope. On the one hand there was the perfectly enjoyable standard stuff I had every reason to expect. I had a long little league season with a team that had its act together and a shot at state glory, and the aimless adventures of the neighborhood kids and the long bike rides with longtime buddies James and Keith. My dad, head chef at one of the best restaurants in the city, liked to whisk Phoebs and I off on strange culinary experiments around town for the education of our palates (Phoebe went at this with more gusto than me, but I loved the different cultures and strange people we got to meet more than the things people managed to do with the fat of geese). My mother, an avant garde composer (meaning no disrespect, but this means she made music you likely wouldn't recognize as, well, music), saw to our arts entertainments when she had a chance (this was interesting, but something closer to hard work than to the experience of seeing the latest Star Trek movie). But whereas in past summers there was a large chunk of leftover time spent spacing out in front of screens or asking people what they wanted to do in a desperate and futile hope that they will say, first, anything possible, and second, something actually appealing, this summer, instead, nearly obliterating that chunk, was Wiki. 

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