[163] NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst’s CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony.
[164] Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal’s ephebic account; Lace-Forché and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and-place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably compelling.
[165] Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.’s apellate-court claims that InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike heels.
[166] ‘Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,’ descendents of the IBM/Apple ‘Power PCs,’ with mainframe-caliber response-time and.25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion-slots for various killer apps.
[167] A couple of Incandenza’s more accessible early documentaries were bought by Inter-Lace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself’s rearview-mirror fortune. InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for its ‘Howls from the Margin’ low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself’s lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn’t make any ILT menus until after his untimely death.
[168] It didn’t do J. Gentle F.C.’s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot of good around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest sign-carrying faithful had been E.T.A.’s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard that even people without watches looked at their watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled appointments whenever Schtitt’s eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he uttered any one of such terms as America, decadence, State, or Law; but Mario I. was pretty much the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt’s attraction to Gentle had more to do with Schtitt’s take on tennis than anything else: the Coach was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle’s proposals for waste, this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return.
[169] Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability makes it a popular ingredient in the ‘Happy Patches’ so prevalent in the American West and Southwest of Subsidized Time — Pharmochemical Quarterly 17, 18 (Spring, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) provides a detailed account of the synthesis and transdermal physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general.
[170] Québecois French: ‘working up steam.’
[171] ‘Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’
[172] ‘Pursuit of happiness.’
[173] Q.v. Note 304 sub.
[174] ‘Absolutely no bonking,’ presumably.
[175] The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn’t really the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys.
[176] It’s also where Mario’s most derivative of Himself, whose own ONANtiad was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with political comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.’s film had concerned not Tine and a Québecois fatale but an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada’s ‘Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,’ the affair presented as doomed and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young Canadian Candida albicans specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast infection, driving both wife and Gentle to ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns during which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Québecois bullet-train and Gentle decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale. The ONANtiad was not Him-self’s strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much everybody around E.T.A. agrees that Mario’s own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is funnier and more accessible than Himself’s, if also a bit heavier-handed.
[177] The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Concavity and Grand Convexité are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the media.
[178] A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: ‘Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.’
[179] Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word AA; all he remembers from the time is just ‘Meetings’ and a Diagnosis he’d construed as chivalric.
[180] But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men’s Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario down to V.F. Rickey’s cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi and down to the YYY studio’s freezing pink basement, where the only person who didn’t talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer’s board, would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be all that long if the absent party hadn’t taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn’t had any idea M.P.’d used a screen, on-air. That’s when he’d gotten agitated.
[181] Corbett Thorp’s sobriquet among the less kind kids is ‘Th-th-th-th.’
[182] Known also sometimes as ‘Pukers.’
[183] The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets associated with Eschaton and yesterday’s debacle.
[184] Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known also as a ‘wrong-foot’ or ‘contre-pied,’ and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; ironically enough it’s Hal, since the explosion, who’s known as the real E.T.A. master of placement and opponent-yanking-around and the old contre-pied. Also a quick insertion that Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a Dutch immigrant low-level pro who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory guru, on the same level with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden.
[185] Stice’s legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he’s got two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing him foods the staff won’t let him eat.
[186] Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the true sign of the novice or hack.
[187] N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as ‘overhands,’ while South Africans sometimes also call them ‘pointers.’
[188] The budget doesn’t allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a certain percentage of this fall’s residents ends up being literal.