Her Serene Highness: what a great title! I wonder how I can get to be His Serene Highness? (Actually, that's a rhetorical question.)

There's no escape from Her Serene Highness in the claustrophobic little principality. Even HSHPG's burial site, La Cathedrale Monaco, features "tasteful" vending machines, a tacky practice even by my low standards. I got caught up in the fifteen year old hysteria and made Princess Grace Slept Here: Twenty-Nine Scenes of Luxurious Monacan Horizontal Excess. (It's available in the PDF format).

At least there weren't any photographs of the car in which Princess Grace died. What is it about princesses and automobiles?

It's too bad I'm not very excited by pure science, otherwise I might take more pleasure in discovering the third bird family. Since the tiny critter is too small to shoot or eat, I doubt anyone will be interested in my find.

I read a story in the Monte Carlo Tattler that claimed the burger building is periodically sealed off from the public. Harried cooks then prepare 700 sandwiches (sometimes hamburgers, sometimes cheeseburgers, but never fish) for the allegedly anonymous royal. (The number is chosen to commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Monaco.)

He (or could it be a she?) arrives in an armored royal limousine with armed guards and enters the "restaurant" through a secret entrance. Once inside, the anonymous royal(s?) eats/eat perhaps one of the sandwiches, but usually just take a bite or two. (In addition to avoiding the known health risks from eating at McDonald's, the royals are as scared of obesity as their wealthy subjects.)

The uneaten sandwiches are dumped in a garbage container. This might seem like a terrible waste; but for palace guards it's a cost-effective way of minimizing the risk of intentional food poisoning.

Ever since the Tattler reported on the royal visits, things have become even stranger. Local residents reports hearing explosions and feeling tremors in the middle of the night. Could it really be true that workers are building a tunnel from the castle to McDonald's?

I walked.

I'm enjoying pretending to be a rich American. I called the front desk and requested three clean washcloths for each finger and two towels for each toe. Within an hour a young man delivered twenty towels and twenty-eight washcloths to my room. (I wonder how they knew and remembered I was missing two thirds of an index finger?)

While I was waiting in the lobby to meet a friend, the concierge asked if there was anything he could do to make my stay more enjoyable.

"Jump!" I replied.

"How high, monsieur?" he asked.

I told him such a clever answer was worth a ninety centime tip, and apologized for only having forty centimes with me. He accepted the gratuity gratefully; I suspect he's underappreciated.

Since I had a huge room, I invited a friend to stay with me. Two or three times a day we'd roam the corridors looking for half-eaten trays of food left in the halls for the room service people to collect. We ended up with huge feasts of rolls, croissants, breads, jams and butter, and buckets of fresh fruit. (About the only thing we didn't find is a good bottle of wine, but since wine's cheaper that soda pop here that's not much of a problem.) I've always figuratively described my financial strategy as an artist as living off the scraps from an affluent society, but this is the first time I've literally used the approach.

Hunter gatherer artist: that's the life for me!

The parking lot in front of the casino is the main drag for cruising. Since Monaco is so small, a lot of the cruising actually involves simply parking in a long row of the world's most expensive cars. Imagine how you'd feel is you just parked your $400,000 Ferrari there, then someone else parked the same model of Ferrari beside yours ... and that the other one had a bigger engine, wider tires, fuzzy dice, curb finders, and a bumper sticker that said "I brake for hot babes" in six languages.

I don't have to imagine what that would be liked, I talked with Enrico, the man who just had that unpleasant experience. Enrico comes to Monaco every Saturday night, parks his Ferrari in front of the casino, then sits in the cafe across the street watching people admire his car. (It doesn't take much to amuse an accountant.)

Enrico was very depressed by the appearance of the über-Ferrari, so I tried to cheer him up by telling him the old joke about the mouse, the elephant and the Ferrari.

One day an elephant was walking in the jungle when he fell in a deep elephant trap. A mouse heard the pachyderm's cries for help and came to his rescue. The mouse drove his Ferrari to the edge of the hole, tied a sturdy rope to the bumper and threw the other end to the elephant. The mouse revved the Ferrari's huge engine and pulled the elephant out of the hole with ease.

A few years later the mouse found himself trapped in a hole, and who should come to the rodent's rescue but the same elephant he'd previously extricated from a similar predicament? (It was of course the same elephant, but I'm not going to say that in so many words because the answer was implied in the previous sentence, which was a "rhetorical question," a literary device I just read about; it provides a welcome break from my only other literary device, the run-on sentence.) The elephant lowered his penis into the hole, which the grateful mouse used as an escape ramp.

The sad look on my companion's face indicated he hadn't heard the joke before, so I delivered the punch line. "The moral of that story is that you don't need a Ferarri if you have a big penis!" I exclaimed, but Enrico just stared glumly at the car that was bigger and more expensive than his.

Since there was obviously nothing that could be done to cheer up Enrico, I walked back to my hotel through some of the planet's most exclusive carbon monoxide.

Monaco Means Motor City: kick out the jams!

I got the idea when I watched a couple with a thick Oklahoma accent come out of the Bulgari shop laden with gold-plated doodads and leather knick-knacks. They seemed quite happy with their overpriced purchases.

And that's how I came up with the idea for the "Vulgari" label. Imagine how many people would wait in long queues to shop at the snooty Vulgari stores and be patronized by the haughty employees! Imagine the snide pride consumers will enjoy wearing Vulgari clothing and accessories that cost twice as much as my nearest competitor's shoddy products! Imagine all the merchandising and licensing spinoffs!

Vulgari!

I'll miss the cheap wine, but it will be good to get back to San Francisco on Halloween. Actually, any day's a good day to return to San Francisco, and Halloween is like any other San Francisco day except that the people from the suburbs all come to the city dressed up like they lived there.

I don't have the time (or the skill) to retell the epic tale of Morrie's long night in Tokyo, an evening that involved love, death, wild men, wild women, wild men posing as wild women, and enough whisky to disembowel an entire fraternity house. The story could be, should be, an opera.

As for Morrie's profound observation, he said "Edward Weston made documentary statements about his own worth." I wish I could come up with brilliant ideas like that.

The right fool in this case was Charles "Chuck Boy" Ablan, a Texas oil magnate. He was cooking a huge steak when he decided to sear the meat by augmenting the modest gas flame with some Old Carcass Kentucky bourbon.

Chuck Boy connected the hose from his bar connection to the grill, and that's when the problem started. (Southern Aviation Airlines connected hoses from each of the first class seats to central liquor reservoirs allowing rich customers to mix their own drinks. "We adjust the altitude, you adjust the attitude" was the advertising slogan that had originally caught Chuck Boy's eye.)

None of the plane's designer envisioned that Wild Buzzard, 89.5 percent alcohol, would be popular enough to fill the largest booze reservoir. When Chuck Boy connected the Wild Buzzard tube to the barbecue, it started a cabin fire that was quickly extinguished by the safety equipment installed in each grill. The tragedy occurred when the flame traveled down the liquor distribution tube and ignited the reservoir of Wild Buzzard. That explosion wasn't large enough to bring the plane down, but it was strong enough to set off an explosion in the main fuel tank.

Et voilà! 747 flambé!

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Pesky computers.

I was reminded of the deficiencies of this approach when I came across a copy of a ninth-grade textbook, Introduction to the Poem and found a poem by the noted Latin poet Anonymous:

Spring in New York

Der spring is sprung,
Der grass is riz,
I wonder where dem boidies is.

Der little boids is on der wing--
Ain't dat absoid?
Der little wings is on der boid!

That's certainly not how I remember it. This is obviously a bad translation, for Anonymous clearly intended to use the Dutch "da" instead of the German "der." (The Brooklyn accent is a hangover from 1636 when the New York City borough was a Dutch settlement; dat's why da people dat live bote in Brooklyn and da Nedderlands talk like dat.)

Spring in New York

Da spring is sprung,
Da grass is riz,
I wonder where dem boidies is.

Da little boids is on da wing--
Ain't dat absoid?
Da little wings is on da boid!

Memorizing poorly-translated poetry for good grades: ain't dat absoid? Da stupid poem had da wrong woid!