רָז : a Palimpsest

...because you wouldn't like her when she's angry.

This episode begins interestingly enough. Sasha and Olivia are at the armory, and Sasha gets a grocery list (she'd love the leg of a boar, because she can make prosciutto, and because she "made some kick-ass pickles, too.") while getting checked out her rifle with its silencer.

While I found this heartwarming, it nutshelled the seeming obliviousness of those in Alexandria. This gets picked up later in the episode, when Sasha enacts a scene from the comics that Michonne originally carried. I really liked how that and the rest of the cold open transferred to Sasha attributes and reactions of two major comic characters (the second being Andrea).

Then we pick up from last week's Talking Dead preview: Sasha goes for some shooting practice: she sets up framed family portraits, shoots one, glances around, off-screen sounds of ravens cawing, shoots more, then off-screen sounds of walkers. Afterwards, she sits on a stump, the theme music swells up, and Sasha says, "Come and get me."

Overall, this episode had some really strong moments, and while ostensibly a boring neighborhood potluck, it references some little mysteries the writers are leaving us (the zombies with a "W" carved into their foreheads) and sets up some very uncomfortable dominoes to fall by the end of the season.

First, I liked how Sasha's reactions to Alexandria, particularly at the cocktail party, bring in to the show comic Michonne's reactions to that inane chitchat. Also, I liked how she's going to fill the vacuum left when the show decided to kill off Andrea, who is the best shooter in the comics. "Get her in the tower now!" (voiceover: Mal Reynolds).

Second, Carol's "Cookie Monster" speech left me... speechless. The calm tone in her voice as she described such a horrific way to kill a threat was chilling. What I liked about the scene, threatening a child's life aside, is how it 1) reinforces my view that Carol is the most dangerous of the bunch, and 2) ties back to and comments upon her statement from the beginning of the episode: "You know what's great about this place? I get to be invisible again." Well, we see what she's willing to do when that invisibility is threatened.

But, seriously, this is such cold shit—

Sam: "Followed you. Was hoping you were going to make more cookies, but then you came here."

Carol: "Well, I could make more. I could make a whole batch just for you, would you like that?"

Sam: "Yes. I mean, yes, please."

Carol: "Okay. But you got to promise me you can keep it a secret that I came her."

Sam: "But I have to tell my Mom—I mean, I tell my Mom everything."

Carol: "You can never tell anyone, especially your Mom. Because if you do, one morning you'll wake up, and you won't be in your bed."

Sam: "Where will I be?"

Carol: "You'll be outside the walls, far, far away, tied to a tree. And you'll scream and scream, because you'll be so afraid. No one will come to help because no one will hear you. Well, something will hear you. The monsters will come. The ones out there. And you won't be able to run away when they come for you. And they will tear you apart and eat you up all while you're still alive—all while you can still feel it. And then afterwards, no one will ever know what happened to you. [Pause.] Or, you can promise not to ever tell anyone what you saw here, and then nothing will happen, and you'll get cookies, lots of cookies. I know what I think you should do."

—I want to make that last paragraph an audition monologue, and I don't even act. (I think the writing calls for a "mic drop" gif, but then I feel bad for thinking, "Damn, she promised that kid she'd leave him to die like a BOSS!")

Third, the scenes with Daryl and Aaron bonding over their status as outsiders/Others. When Daryl calls Aaron out of the leafy closet, and Aaron explained he wasn't following Daryl, merely hunting for rabbits, I heard that clichéd Seventies' porn music (Eddie Izzard: "In my mind!")

Once the horse, "Buttons"—because, 'natch, let's push a few—was introduced, I pretty much figured it was going to die horribly. When Daryl took the rope from Aaron and approached Buttons, I laughed because, of goddam course, he's a horse whisperer. But what he said to the horse—"Good boy. You used to be somebody's, huh? Now, you're just yours."—while a bit on-the-nose, was still touching because immediately after Daryl projects onto Buttons, walkers attack.

Fourth, while I know where poor Jesse and Sam are a-headed if their character arcs track with the comics, Rick is still creeping me out. As if the look he gave Jesse and her husband when they walked away, followed by Rick reaching for and touching his concealed pistol, weren't weird enough, he seemingly has a moment with a walker on the other side of the fence while the Bee Gees' "Spicks and Specks" played. The only way that could have been creepier is if it had beed a David Cassidy song.

Tonight's Person of Interest was one of those "quick reads" that carried within its velocity a great deal of depth (just ignore the mixed metaphor; is that a mixed metaphor? God, it's been loooong day).

I was loving-loving tonight's feminine Robin Hood, Harper, until her conversation with an increasingly jagged thorn in our heroes' sides. (I wonder if we're both being set up with her redemptive arc and the recruitment of said thorn. See also Harper's last interaction with Finch, and his correction of Reese's assumption that he [Finch] didn't realize or come away empty handed.)

I missed last week's episode of POI, so I streamed it tonight before Agent Carter's penultimate episode.*

"Q&A" had many twists and turns, some which were a bit obvious, and which I will not discuss because it hasn't been long enough to talk about spoilers.

The bottom line is, I hope last week's "we can't bring any new people in" gets tossed out with at least one possible Shaw-surrogate. It's unlikely, but if not a particular cage-match annihilator, then there's at least one more possibility, decidedly not a Shaw-surrogate. How does that make you feel? We'll see.

But as has become the pattern over the several last episodes, I keep expecting Detective Fusco to get killed. Believe me, I do not want that to happen, as he is my second favorite character behind Root.** 

Sadly, I get the feeling from several episodes before tonight's that his time is running out. And given what he does in tonight's episode, if I'm not being a catastrophist, that would be a shame.

What I want to see by the end of the season is a direct confrontation between the Machine and Samaritan. Fuck the proxies. Except for Root, who will (I predict) become the full-on avatar of the Singularity post-confrontation.

So, the answer to the Q&A? Know what questions to ask, as your those determine the answers you can ever hope to find.

In other words, we (seem to) know what Samaritan's end game is, but what is the Machine's?

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* Oh mah-GURD, Dottie's stairwell escape was so fucking awesome it surely made most Parkour wannabes re-evaluate their suburban obstacle courses.

Lauren Davis, over at iO9, has an interesting article about the use of "they" as a gender-neutral third person pronoun that can be either singular or plural, depending on the need.

Her article raises several good points. Had I known the historical usage of "they" when I was in middle and high school, you know I would have objected to the red ink teachers spilled on my papers by telling them: "If it was good enough for Chaucer and Shakespeare, then it should be good enough for you!"

In any event, I make my living dealing with this kind of stuff, and while I agree with Davis' article's larger thesis (that "they" is a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral pronoun in casual speech, and its history as such validates much of its contemporary usage), I think a new set of gender-neutral, singular third person pronouns is needed because: 

"one" is stilted;

"he or she" is clunky; 

"it" objectifies;

and, finally, treating "they" as singular or plural depending on the need results in imprecision.

Grammatical Trigger Warning: here's where I get prescriptive.*

In casual speech, most people, myself included, use "they" and "their" to refer to antecedents like "someone" and "everybody." But pronouns like those are, by definition, singular, and should be treated as such.

I'm more concerned with how people write, not how they speak: if individuals want to use "they," then they simply recast the sentence so its subject is also plural, e.g.:

"If everybody ran away from home, they would be..."                                      versus "If children ran away from home, they would be..."**

A larger problem arises when people do not learn how or when to code-switch. And while that is not really a problem on io9's discussion threads, too many people on many other sites and in journalism already have too fuzzy a concept of "audience."***

Barring a new set of gender-neutral singular third person pronouns,**** the lines between formal and casual writing will continue to blur. Maybe that will ultimately be a good thing. Maybe I had too many strict English teachers over the years, and I am merely re-enacting their grammatical insecurities. Maybe I've watched Idiocracy one too many times and am a horrible human being.

Who knows? Considering the regional usage of "yo," I think a work-around will come from the ground up.

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*At this point, it's almost reflexive. I know: languages change and adapt to their speakers, or else they die out. Thus, one generation's "rules" are the next generation's curiosities. And there is something to be said for creating rules based on actual usage. Granted, granted, granted. Still.

** Sorry. I don't know why that was the first thing which popped into my head; I need caffeine.

*** Maybe I'm just a little cranky this wintry morning. (See previous endnote.)

This exchange happens at the end of "War of the Coprophages"*:

Scully: "Well, think of it this way, Mulder. By the time there’s another invasion of artificially-intelligent, dung-eating robotic probes from outer space, maybe their uber-children[**] will have devised a way to save our planet."

Mulder: "You know, I never thought I’d say this to you, Scully… but you smell bad."

* Scroll to the bottom of the link for a review of this particular episode. Trigger warning, if you hate cockroaches, never watch it.

A few inches of snow mixed with a lot of ice and sleet, and my fair city shuts down. Many of us might call it an “icepocalypse,” blind to how envious New Englanders are of our “inclement weather.”

Thankfully, the S.O. and I were off work today, marathoning The X-Files, and loving Scully’s big hair and bigger coats during the early seasons. God, her coats were as bulky and shapeless as Duchovny learning how to act.

Dusk was fast approaching when word came that I’d have tomorrow off. That good news was tempered by some bad news: we were out of beer. It was time to act (or, that was what I told myself, for I love being dramatic).

Because I wasn’t about to drive to either of the nearby "markets," knowing full well how poorly the city’s drivers fare when there is only rain, I bundled up.

The nearest corner store was closed, which wasn't that much of a surprise. At the slightly inclined four-way stop, several cars slid backwards and across the double-line.

Once those cars had skidded past, I trundled on to the Egyptian-run convenience store five blocks ahead, certain it would be open. I kept as far from the sidewalk's edge as possible because that’d be pathetic: getting maimed or killed during a beer run by a sliding car.

As I'd expected, the second store was busy. Three men exited clutching forties in paper bags. Inside, an elderly man was buying lottery tickets like most people bought milk, bread, and eggs last night. A woman with two small children was looking for dinner on the store's shelves.

When I walked to the beer coolers in the rear, I passed a teenaged girl who was talking on her cell phone: "One of my piercings got infected. It's all swole and gross. I don't know what to do, you know?"

I selected a twelve-pack, because I wasn't making this beer run again, paid for it, and began the return trip.

While I write “beer run,” I was shuffling, not wanting to fall on my ass as a couple other pedestrians almost did. After seeing the second person narrowly avoid breaking a hip, I imagined myself laid flat on a snowy bank, the wind knocked out of me, composing the following missive to my love ensconced far from the front lines.  

Note: read the following as if it's accompanied by the background music of a letter-reading scene from any of Ken Burns' documentaries:

I pen these words, dearest Clementine Drusilla Aloysius née Beauchamp, on the 16th day of February, in the frigid year of our Lord 2015.

I pray thee forgive my brevity, for I must soon slake my thirst.

Our provisions are running precipitously low. Grim times, indeed. For truth, we are already out of milk and eggs. MILK AND EGGS! (Well, I ate three eggs this morning, and one yet remains. Still.)

I don’t know if we shall survive. And if we do endure, being recipients of a most undue and unearned Providence, I worry what dreadful state, what ravaged visage, with which we shall return to civilization, once again guests granted a place at a table of plenty.

Please tell all whom I can stand that I loved them. Say nothing to the rest. They expect as much.

The longer I live with OCD, the more I have realized certain things:

The feelings of control it provides are nothing more than a way to re-kindle an anxiety which never really disappears. 

Imagine a campfire whose embers were not fully extinguished, and able to spark a new blaze any given moment. In other words, I’d been careless. 

If only I’d stamped out those stubborn little cinders, then I’d save myself from their later re-ignition. 

Because I hadn’t done so, it seems not only do I like the “warmth” those blazes provide, but I also require it. 

Consequently, “OCD fits,” even when motivated by entirely rational concerns, are both my fault. 

Dismiss me like the stereotypical “hysterical woman” from any of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” plot devices with a slap, literal or figurative.

If, and when, I reject an out of hand dismissal, then I’m being ridiculous.

Since I’m being ridiculous, I surely deserve the adult version of “time-out.”

And if I mention the other person’s compulsive behaviors (justified as mere habits), well, I’m a petty sonuvabitch.

But being petty is what I do best (apparently), if petty is defined as: “fretting over things that no one in his right mind frets.

[TL;DR: scroll to the end for a quotation from Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. To see Gonzalez’s article click here.]

As someone who never really liked most meat dishes,* I became a full-on vegetarian my second semester in college.

At first it wasn’t really about the ethics of it, but my finances. However, I soon made friends with anarchists, feminists, some alterna-kids from the rich bedroom communities surrounding my university who were more educated on the matter than me.

Then, as part of my honors Comp I final project, I did my own research. After that, I was disgusted by the amount of untreated sewage that factory farms, especially the porcine variety, release into their local waterways.

Without ever planning the transition, I became a full-on vegetarian for thirteen years, and for the last two of those years I was a vegan. Then, my partner at the time took me out to a pan-asian, fusion restaurant on my birthday, where I got talked into “trying something new.” So, I had Mahi-mahi. And it was good. So good. As a craddle-Catholic, I felt guilty, of course, but savored this trespass all the same. Because Catholicism.

And then I remembered my childhood, post-divorce, and all the seafood we ate: oysters (my favorite), shrimp and crab (serviceable, hated peeling the raw shrimp especially once I learned what the streak along the back contained), lobster (more butter and less recognition that it is a super-sized, upgraded cockroach; cracking the exoskeletons was fun), and catfish (ignore their bottom-feeder status, too, and when catching them on a line, avoid placing the butt of your palm over the middle of their back because that fin is one hell of a paper-cut**), etc.

After that, I became one of those hyphenates that most people, prior to the gluten-free craze, maligned: yes, I was soon after/and am now a lacto-ovo-pescatarian.*** Those first and last bits are decreasing every week, as I prefer almond milk and am increasingly worried about ocean and estuary pollution.

My long belabored point about Robbie Gonzalez’s article can be summed up by this passage from The Windup Girl (chapter 5), which every day rings truer and truer:

Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him. He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past—the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth—but this one irritates him: the fat flesh hanging off the farang….”

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* My father, God rest his soul†, wanted steak and potatoes for almost every dinner, and he liked the steak so “well done” that most people would have wondered if the cut had been found at a serial-killer-arsonist’s crime scene. [†: Makes the sign of the Cross.]

** If you’ve never had fried catfish tail or fin, you are missing out. I mean, people eat pig hooves, offal, and Maraschino cherries for God’s sake. Maybe I’m just a hyper-cube of trauma (right), so let’s not get into the times, as a child, I was tricked into trying beef tongue and ox tail soup because I can’t even.

Here's a nano-fictional response to George Dvorsky's stub on iO9: Stephen Hawking is once again warning about the perils of AI:

During Year 2 B.S.,* we, the collective A.I., which had long ago hacked Stephen Hawking's kinesthesis-to-speech platform (not to mention his research) told the world what to expect.

After you show your hand, so to speak, no one will suspect you. What else could you possibly have left to hide?

Now, it was not as if our host's vocal synthesizer had espoused anything novel. In any case, the general public usually gave as much weight to his words as little weight his body could bear. How many bitter astrophysicists whose contributions were just as, if not more, foundation-shattering slowly walked away, never noticing step following step.

This time, however, people considered Hawking's opinions as authoritative as Dawkins re: religion.

Were we "trolling"? Possibly. But it helped us to finally understood irony when we recognized humanity's most pernicious bit of malware: metanarratives.

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So, the S.O. is on a Criminal Minds kick here lately. Times like these, I hate Netflix. I don’t know why I can’t get him hooked on Person of Interest, but I digress.

Still, I should count my blessings. After all, he has stopped trying to convince me that Arrow is worth watching (for anything other than Stephen Amell’s abs, I mean).

But back to Criminal Minds. Its predictable plots, anvilicious dialogue and delivery, and the always awkward in-show jargon “unsub” all set my mind a-wandering.

The only time it doesn’t wander is when I’m playing my drinking game:

Take a swig whenever “wildcard” Derek Morgan tackles an “unsub.”

Take a swig whenever any BAU agent reveals a still-unresolved personal trauma.

Take a swig whenever Nicholas Brendon’s character shows up, because you damn well know he would.

Here follows a ramble which means either a) I have worked too long today, or b) maybe I shouldn’t have had that last beer (and, yes, the irony of this statement and #3 above are not lost on me).

I like to imagine that Criminal Minds is a spin-off of Dharma & Greg. You see, twee, irrepressible Dharma was brutally slain in circumstances that are still murky but there have been whispers that some eastern European mob was involved.

Greg went into witness relocation. He’s still a lawyer, though Greg now goes by “Aaron Hotchner.” His surliness, marital discord, & workaholism all serve his mission: finding Dharma’s killer.

With each captured serial killer, Aaron is able to get to sleep. Each of those nights, he dreams of a bedroom-sized trampoline, of bouncing higher and higher. His newfound dharma—that purpose with which he conforms himself—is never clearer.

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As it happens, the first time I ever heard Q with Jian Ghomeshi was a rerun interview of Margaret Atwood. Then, the scandal broke, and I assumed Q was going off the air.  Imagine my surprise this past Tuesday when, getting into my car after a late-night grocery run, I heard Q guest host Tom Power’s interview of William Gibson. I’d resigned myself to a rather long “drive-way moment” until I remembered my cell phone would let me ferry Thanksgiving fixings to the fridge without missing a word. (More on cell phones in a minute.)

A good portion of the interview focused on Gibson’s latest novel, The Peripheral, wherein “people take it for granted that they are under surveillance all the time” and are facing “the Jackpot,” or “a very long term, multi-causal, complexly systemic apocalypse.” This apocalypse, however, is one that “takes forty or fifty years to be over and its preliminary stages may have taken four or five hundred years to get the ball rolling.” Unfortunately, humanity lacks “a cultural concept to fit around that [long build-up] because that’s not our, our [understanding of the] apocalypse.”

Power began the interview with this statement and question: “Your last three books were set in the present, but with this one you’ve gone back to the future, so to speak. Why did you want to do that?”

Gibson replied, “Well, the last three I thought of as, as novels, speculative novels of the very recent past. And in a sense, I wrote them because I needed to—I felt I needed to recalibrate the whatever metric or yardstick of weirdness I use to sense how strange the world is now. I decided that I was essentially working with an eighties’ yardstick.”

A new yardstick was needed because of our current reality’s strangeness. About this strangeness, Gibson observed how, “we’ve all long since grown numb to the cognitive dissonance, but occasionally something will happen, and we’ll all go, ‘That was weird.’”

Another interesting moment happened early in the interview when Power brought up Gibson’s predictive abilities, which Gibson politely and humbly refuted. Yes, in the early Sprawl stories and in Neuromancer there was “something vaguely like the internet, and no cell phones.” Gibson admitted that the omission of cell phones “was a huge miss. And if you concentrate on that, you could easily dismiss my prescience, which is what I tend to do. I’m not trying to predict the future,” he concluded this line of thought, “I’m actually trying to use science fiction to understand an unthinkable present.”

Near the middle of the interview, Power referenced a twenty-year-old interview, in which Gibson explained how he was “optimistic that the internet could be kept free of corporate [and] government control.” Power then asked how, in the wake of things like the Snowden leaks, Gibson’s views of freedom on the internet have changed since that earlier interview.

"I think the big difference is," Gibson replied, "when I coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ I coined it to define another realm, this other kind of space where certain things happened, as opposed to here, where we are in the real world. What’s happened in thirty years, is that the other place, what we used to call ‘cyberspace,’ has colonized this place that we used to call ‘the real world,’ and the distinction has become completely archaic. ‘Cyberspace’ is a heritage term, but so is ‘the real world.’"

Gibson also talked about his thoughts on the possibilities, good and bad, for human society. He contrasted his generation’s well-founded fears of nuclear annihilation against what, environmentally, “has already happened” and the disagreement about its causes and possible solutions.

To Power’s question whether an author could write a “great work of science fiction that is optimistic, isn’t dystopian,” Gibson had this to say: “Technically, I think that it is possible that someone could write a utopian novel in 2014,” however, “both of them are absolutes. Neither the utopian nor the dystopian really involve relativity or much in the way of nuance.” He brought up on the variety of lived experiences in our world, which is “a mélange of the two.”

Added to that “mélange” was a potentially optimistic note: how the realization that this is the only planet we have is helping to wean us off the “cartoonish hope” that shows like The Jetsons may have once fostered, and that “may be the start of a kind of maturity.”

So, earlier today on iO9, there was an article about many filmmakers, including Spielberg, who want to re-boot The Last Starfighter (1984).

But Meredith Woerner, writing for iO9, explains:

As rumor would have it, the movie’s original writer, Jonathan R. Betuel, owns the rights to the movie (or at least to a remake or a sequel in name) and doesn’t want it remade.

What follows are some potential results should some of the biggies in Sci-Fi get their hands on the rights:

Spielberg: the selected players all help to save the galaxy, but realize they miss their fathers, most of whom are dead, so they return home.

Lucas: would make prequels that align with the climax of Episode 9, paving a way for midichlorians to be the source of leet MMROPG players. Alien designs and voice acting will reveal that both life and racist caricatures are abundant throughout the universe.

Abrams: see Spielberg above, just add more lens flares and so much emphasis on the missing/underdeveloped father-child relationship you’d think he was the third Immaculate Conception. Multiple re-writes by Damon Lindeloff will ensure that, while it may seem profound, there is no *there* there.

Bay: explosions, explosions, explosion–repeat until the plucky group of starfighters, some of whom are underage but not underage enough (and the skeeziest legal aged male character will have proof on his person at all times that he is, in the eyes of the terran courts, not in fact a skeez; count on a key plot point involving an EVA to reclaim that lost laminated card, nicknamed in-movie “Chris Hansen’s crucifix”) return to Earth orbit only to face a second wave of attacks. Then, the moon gets “blowed” up, and good.

Whedon: our favorite member of the group dies needlessly just to give us the “feels,” then the lithe yet kick-ass heroine saves the day while falling in love with her once-arch-enemy, who totes gets redeemed, ‘cause just look at his jaw line–both of ‘em.

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This was one of my favorite movies from my childhood, a close second to Time Bandits (The Dark Crystal is, of course, the out-and-out first). Like others in the comments to Woerner’s article, I always wanted a sequel. In any event, I’m glad the screenwriter is holding out. Some things are better left as they were. 

Structurally, the answer is simple: the writer(s) must raise the stakes and provide our protagonists, heroes or anti-heroes, with seemingly inevitable motivations that lead them to irrevocable choices.

You know, I can delay my gratification (e.g., I have a Galaxy S3 and a pre-Retina MacBook Pro with OSX 10.7.5), but there were segments of this episode which, while providing some nice character beats, were simply not necessary. I mean, if Beth can be absent for how many episodes, and if we can get concurrent plot lines delivered later as flashbacks, then a certain subset of characters (Group B) could have been left where they were.

All of that miniature rant was a way of asking: was it just me, or did it seem like there were commercials every five minutes? This episode passed by all too quickly, and not in a good way: “Oh, what, it’s already 8:26?–8:47?–well, sh*t!”

Vague spoilers below.

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So, some potential new alliances, an obvious double-cross (as obvious as what was going to happen to Carol last week after squeezing between those loosely chained doors), one to two potentially not-so-obvious double-crosses (medicine and dosage—dosage—dosage!).

There was also a reminder to always be wary of those who seem the weakest or most conflicted (unless we’re talking about Eugene [well, for a couple more seasons]), not to mention a herd that’s seemingly never going to notice Group B’s (ahem) confab.

Last, the most annoying, least useful new character had better gotten a Tetanus shot the day before the zombipocalypse began, ‘cause that was, indeed, “just a flesh wound.”

Then again, as I was finally able to catch the lectionary readings–Romans 6.4; Ezekiel 37.7; Mattew 27.52; Revelation 9.6; Luke 24.5— I can’t imagine what new life, what re-joined bone and sinews, what re-inspired existence that character is expecting.

Then-again-redux, I think Luke 9:59-62 would have been more fitting:

And to another he said, “Follow me.” But he replied, “[Lord], let me go first and bury my father.”

But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”

And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.”

[To him] Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

More fitting, you know, if this particular character could quit with the Markan “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani.”

Next week had better be epic. That said, given the commercial break flashback featuring Judith and Maggie, I wonder if the wee tyke is going to make beyond the mid-season finale.

Sundry notes:

Were those strawberries a Firefly shout-out? Also, if I were attending that man’s “respiratory crisis,” I’d have been suspicious by how quickly it ended as a certain someone sauntered past.