The irritating part of the little fair occupying the vicinity of the canteen the past week has been the stands that advertise their stuff as being for ``V-Day''. I don't like acronyms; I've long since concluded most of them are designed to impede clarity. I live reasonably well assuming anything that's an acronym may be safely ignored as a linguistic tic with no content. (You can imagine the trouble this causes me in my space history hobby; it's like trying to do science fiction without goofy apostrophe-laden names.) There are a few inconvenient to go without -- I'll accept NASA, for example, or RPI -- but generally insist the acronym be explicitly defined before its use, and prefer to not use it. Seeing something quite reasonable like ``Valentine's Day'' contracted for any reason beyond saving on telegraph charges gets at me. The irritation's not as bad as confusing it's and its, but I don't want to be pushed.
One of the stands offers the chance to ``Put Your Name In A Test Tube,'' which sounds like one of the things you do when you're a character in an Alfred Bester novel. What's sold is the chance to put puffy, marshmallow Alpha-Bits-font glittered letters inside a sparkly gel inside, well, a test tube, the kind used for auxiliary samples at a blood donation. The examples had names, messages like ``I Love You,'' and such, with the test tubes strapped to rainbow fabric bracelets. It's a charmingly nerdy thing to give.
Trivia: ``Duck Dodgers in the 24th1/2 Century'' was shown with the premier engagement of Star Wars in San Francisco. Source: Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin.
Currently Reading: The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem.
