And here's one more bit of Orchard Road promotions. I'm not sure if this was connected to Fantastic Four, or to the sale of Vespa motorcycles which set up a tent and had someone playing tuneless music and shouting over the microphone for people to hold their two-dollar bills up to the sunlight to find something that ``looks like a spider'' (many looked, but nobody I saw had anything spider-like on their two-dollar bills), or a party scheduled to be held in a few weeks.
But one of them had a couple of people dressed in Halloween-style costumes, as a cowboy bandit, as a generic space alien, and as a blue-haired fairy. I couldn't get a good picture of the fairy, whose face looked more like an anime character than many anime characters' do. She disappeared into the crowd, implying that someday when the aliens do come to Earth they'll find it remarkably easy to fit in unobtrusively, at least in the cities, if they pass out brochures.
There's a restaurant (chain, I guess), n.y.d.c., which sells traditional American cuisine like bratwurst and spaghetti. I snapped a picture of this menu poster just because on first glance I misread the offering as ``Fanboy Chicken Salad,'' and wondered how that could be. I supposed it would be based on a quarrelsome, doughy white rooster with a DVD collection large enough to kill a moose.
Trivia: The first magazine Mad had its cover mimick was Life, parodied for issue 11. Source: Completely Mad, Maria Reidelbach.
Currently Reading: The Zimmermann Telegram, Barbara W Tuchman.
Oh, and to clarify something -- the bits of history a few days ago about the United Kingdom going to war with the United States for the Trent affair and occupied Maryland and a second Civil War and such were based on my current game of Victoria, the complex Europa Universalis-class grand strategy video game, and not from Eduard Fueter's World History, 1815-1920, which was a straight history of the actual world. I apologize for the confusion; my fanboyism for grand-strategy games overwhelmed me.