And one more stray bit of business from March Hare Madness. One of bunny_hugger's friends from the bookstore, who'd had a job at the local cinema, donated to the cause of door prizes. This was a bunch of promotional movie posters. Most were in pretty good shape. Some looked appealing at first but then we realized they were for the Independence Day sequel. It added a nice bonus to what could be given away.
One of the posters was the advertising card for La La Land, and when he heard about this ADM declared he had to have it. This didn't strike us as the kind of movie he cared much about. That's what happens when you know a guy so much from one context you forget he has others. The movie is his girlfriend's favorite, and their first (or one of their first) dates was going to it.
The La La Land poster was among a couple of the largest, heaviest-stock prizes, so were going to be given out to the finalists, champion taking first pick, #2 second pick and so on. ADM figured he was a lock to be one of the finalists, surely, but to be safe asked the other likely-finalists to leave the poster for him. Easy enough to arrange. He wasn't one of the finalists, to everyone's surprise, his included. But he went on to deal-making anyway, offering to trade for it. He had a Game Of Thrones pinball backglass, for example, that he could offer. (He wouldn't accept assurances that we'd be happy to just give him the poster as a gesture of friendship.)
So, when we finally had the tournament done, CST came in first and didn't want or need another pinball backglass. So he picked some other poster. That left me picking, pro forma, the La La Land poster and discovering that it wasn't on the table downstairs where we'd left it. We panicked that the one door prize that someone specifically wanted had been stolen. A text to ADM confirmed he had taken it home, so, that was settled. The next time we saw ADM he had the backglass, rolled up in a poster tube, for us.
He had, we understand, framed the poster with the movie tickets from their date, and gave it to her on one of those new-relationship small anniversaries. Must say, that's well-done.
Trivia: An 1848 estimate counted some 233 boiler explosions in American river steamboats between 1816 and 1848, resulting in 2,563 deaths. 1838 alone witnessed 14 explosions causing 496 deaths. Source: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.
Currently Reading: Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, William R Trotter.