I think the brothers may be getting ready, or much closer, to turning over the old house to a realtor. One asked me if I wanted the mattresses, two of the few things of any size left, before the next garbage day. I need another mattress so my plan was to ease one home, unsecured on the old wreck, after dark.

The trip was made and there is blog material in the tense drive home but first some word play, anathema to certain tea-pouring stalwarts who claim doing is so much better than thinking and elitism. On one of my Yahoo train boards a hard-bitten railroader belittled an "intellectual" lady regular expressing such sentiments. And it stuck in Gents' easily reached craw.

Back to the folks' evaporating castle before even all heck breaking loose has symmetry by comparison. After some saxophone practice on the premises I figured I'd look around the garage for some rope-related material to render the mattress appropriation more routine. Well, to quote the "--- Law" of a puzzling acquaintance, all kinds of random material was in the garage but not what I wanted!

The young lady next door, J., came around and was looking for her cat who had bolted a bedroom window.

I won't tell you his name but he turned up safely.

We talked a while and I brought up in the dodgy, no time for proof, trail of conversation a computer hacker who long ago made national news; I used to hear him via my scanner on our area's ham frequency for the derelicts. A pair of teachers for several computer classes I had taken at a J. C. were never impressed and I condensed the contempt the pair had for his reputation as being so clever into the expression "piker".

Hold on! J. had never heard this word. Well, Mr. Hacker is now a proud product, speaking of the "doing" sector and all-American concepts, of taking one's lumps as an apprentice ( = prison time and what got him there) and now, in his role as chief of an online security company in Las Vegas, being the well-off tradesman. But with all his sweet talking of phone people into giving him codes to Mess With Things and obsession with computer programming, many experts don't subscribe to the designation of genius. Being audacious and chance-taking, yes. A "piker", a 'mere' one.

Hacker claims to have invented the term, and perhaps the concept of, "social engineering" in his approach to those who would be softened into telling him sensitive information. I tend to doubt that. But in throwing out a term I seem to remember being quite common a long time ago I stopped someone in their tracks. Indeed, J. says it's in her vocabulary now!

I don't invent words but have the mixed fortune of remembering them.

And writing way too many.