All was restored tonight: we were a large group again, we had our beloved Corner Booth again, and we had our beloved waitress again. The universe was right again. We were, tonight: Bob, Jennifer, Jeff, Ferne, Don, John T., Sue, Alex, Dean, and myself — Tomek. We started out on a literary bent — well, we would, wouldn’t we? — kicking around some of Ken Follett’s books, before touching on John LeCarré, Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway, and some others I can’t recall. We were on a spy story kick for some time there. (Then Jen brought up Star Wars by Shakespeare.) Man, we sure can sound impressive sometimes, don’t we? Sadly, the bar was empty and so there was nobody to be impressed. Casablanca was invoked, and we talked about why restrooms were so important during the filming of African Queen (with due credit to Katherine Hepburn). And so we carried on about writing software like Scrivener (compared to Word) which at least two among us use, and then on we went to Google Docs and the whole Google cloud thingy, and I invoked DropBox as an alternative for backup and universal access. (Still, several of us ‘fessed up to still using USB sticks for backup. Us older fogies are still wired for an analog world.) Different Windows versions were discussed, from Windows 3.1 up to 10, buffeted by healthy doses of reminiscing. And how Chromebooks are e-machines. Then somehow, we got on to Hannah Dustin, and from there to Joseph Campbell. You’d think we’d wrap it up on such a high note, but no, we decided to slum it a bit and get into politics. Nevertheless, as always, a good time was had by all.