Updates and Cookies

I've been terrible at keeping in touch with LJ lately.

The good news is that it means I finished my Big Bang (well the first draft) and got it in on time. So I'm feeling particularly smug about that, especially since it is my first time and it is just shy of 100K. It doesn't escape my attention that this also means there will be lots of yummy fic coming our way in just over a month.

I will be catching up with some beta-ing and I actually have time to do some reading too. 

Which is how I get to cookies. I figure I've been good and I've had superb help and encouragement from sylsdarkplace, meus_venator and fedaykin_here and my flist have been very patient, so I should be sharing cookies. I've tossed some up into the air but they don't appear to be travelling on them wireless internet waves. I will have to make do with a story instead.

Since I'm all out of my own stories and I'm busy chuckling to a re-read of The Salmon of Doubt.  I am simply going to quote a bit of my all time favorite Douglas Adams on the subject. If you've never read the Salmon of Doubt and you like Douglas Adams you just have to go read it. The section considering if an artificial God exists is worth it on it's own.

Cookies by Douglas Adams - (from a speech to Embedded Systems 2001) 

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It's very important that you get this very clear in your mind.

Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn't because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice . . ." I mean, it doesn't really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line.

(Excerpted from "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" by Douglas Adams)