Eight hours, five thousand words

I dropped Janie off at school, got Rocinante’s oil changed and his tires rotated,* and had my rear in the writing chair by 9:10.**

My stomach and my husband—who wasn’t wearing my favorite headphones and could therefore  hear my stomach complaining from across the room—made me break for lunch around noon-thirty.***  Checked my e-mail and feeds.

Got back in the saddle around one.

My husband left to pick up the kids around three.  I think.^  he came back with them—and an oven-bake pizza, which made him my official hero^^—about four-thirty.

Took a  break—dinner, joined Facebook,^^^ kidstuff, tv, bedtime rituals—and went back to the chair until . . . now.

What time is it, anyway?  I’ve got work tomorrow.

My shoulders hurt, my bottom hurts, my eyes are burning, and my brain is full of fuzz and stray bees.

But y’all, I wrote some today.

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*I didn’t get his cracked windshield replaced, but did receive an estimate that didn’t cause an immediate stroke, so I’m still ahead of the game.

**After paying the car place, I figured the best place to write would be home, as it’s  inexpensive (or pre-paid, anyway) and I don’t have to pack everything up to visit the restroom.  The hot and cold running caffeine ran out waaaay too early, though.  I complained to the management, told myself to stuff it if I didn’t like the choices, and slunk back to work.

***Lured by a two-liter of diet Pepsi.  Damn, I’m easy.

^He did, at one point, venture into my peripheral vision to glance at the screen.  I slid off my headphones.  ”Yes?”
“Just wanted to see what you were giggling about.  Thought it was a video, but you’re writing.”
“I was giggling?”
“Yeah.  You were.”
“Oh.”  I turned the music down a notch, slid my headphones back on, and kept going.

^^Damn, I am easy.

^^^Yeah . . . but only to play Words with Friends.  Really.

Random Thursday: Hairy Balls and other Intellectual Stimulation

Catchy Title, no?

This Random Thursday is going to be a quickie, because the writing, she is like this right now:

And I must take advantage.

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Warning: Intellectual Time Suck Ahead
(and some ads—sorry)

I don’t subscribe to many YouTube Channels—actually, I just figured out how—but besides the Piano Guys and Tim Minchin* the only other channel I follow is the one owned by CGP Grey.

All you need to know—and all I know—is that CGP Grey’s tagline is “Complex Things Explained” and the video that this individual produces do indeed explain complex things, like what places make up the UK and why coffee is the most excellent addictive substance ever.

This is the first one I saw, but it wasn’t the last—I lost hours . . .

. . . but gained knowledge.

Not a bad trade.

ooooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo

Warning: Intellectual Time Suck, Serious Geek Edition:

I don’t follow the MinutePhysics channel ( “cool physics and other sweet science”—I just found it this morning by accident while trying to copy and paste the above video into WordPress before the caffeine kicked in—but I will.

Not just because I really do love physics,** or because they gave me a great title for this blog post, but because these guys have given me a scientific, mathematically-proven excuse for my hair.

You can’t put a price on that:

Right?

ooooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo

And This one’s Just a Bunch of Cool Words

But what words they are:

It’s also one of the best book trailers I’ve seen.

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I have tomorrow off, and I’m going to spend it in a yet unselected location,*** where I will be writing until I have to pick up Janie from school.

We’ll see how it goes . . .

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*For reasons that most of you probably already know. If you don’t, keyword them into the search window to your upper left to find out.

**Someone asked me this morning—as I was exclaiming over this video—how I can love physics and maintain my aversion to basic math. Well . . . physics, on my level, is made of amazing plug-and-play formulas and fantastic experiments created by brilliant minds that explain how the universe itself operates. The main thing basic math has shown me is how much money I don’t have in my bank account, and I have to do all the work. Which would you prefer?

***Which will have a hot and cold running caffeine supply, convenient bathrooms, and possibly WiFi, although I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.   But first, I have to get  Rocinante’s oil changed—where did the mileage go?  I haven’t been anywhere . . .

Poetry Wednesday: A Little Light Dante

I thought I’d keep it simple this week, since I don’t have a lot of free time, brain cells, or energy . . . but when the time came to sit down and write a fluff piece on Ogden Nash and his habit of throwing scansion to the winds, I found myself thinking of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy instead.

Go figure . . .

The original title of this poem was simply Comedia and it becomes clear within the first few lines that comedy in the early 1300s didn’t mean belly laughs.  In fact, until recently, a literary comedy usually meant that the story would end well or at least without all the main characters dying.

Which is a good thing to know in advance about a work that begins with a man—Dante himself in first person, which was a dramatic and dynamic choice—being chased through the dark woods by fierce beasts before he’s rescued by the great Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro— Virgil^ to you and me—and promptly taken on a safari tour of Hell.  For his own good.

This isn’t light reading by any definition.  Practically speaking, it weighs in at a whopping 14,232 lines, give or take, and it delves deeply and thoroughly  into Christian and Pagan theologies, with side orders of cultural dichotomies, class systems and political commentaries and all sorts of other leaden matters, all wrapped up in symbolic allegory.

And like the Canterbury Tales, few people who aren’t academics, theologians, or hoping to pass World Lit are willing to give it a try.  In fact, one might be forgiven for thinking that one of the Circles of Dante’s Inferno is dedicated to the reading and understanding of this specific poem.

Which is totally meta . . . and not outside the realm of possibility.

Even heavy-handed allegories can be tricky creatures to pin down and this poem is so heavy on the symbolic references it was probably slow going even for a highly educated reader born Catholic in fourteenth century Italy—or the thirteenth, really, since it was written in the very early 1300s and this isn’t for kiddies—who has a good chance of understanding the language and all the cultural, religious, and political references—and who, if confused before 1321, could send a missive to Signore Alighieri and ask him what the hell he was going on about in lines 12,117 through 12,124.*

But like the Canterbury Tales, this poem helped establish a standard language —or the standard (Tuscan) dialect, anyway—of an entire country through sheer popularity.  It’s been in print for seven hundred years in pretty much every language that bothers with classic literature.  And most of you, I suspect, got the circle reference three paragraphs up,** which means it’s been absorbed into the foundations of the world’s literary culture.*** This is another poem full of familiar and even common phrases that weren’t common when the poet wrote them and eventually became part of our recognized, everyday language because everyone thought they were amazing and stole them.

So there’s something going on here besides a five-pound allegoric poem about theology, cue the crickets.  Like good writing and a fascinating story, regardless of one’s personal beliefs.

Hear me out:

The bare bones of this poem make up a sort of traveler’s guide to the Afterlife.  Virgil takes the narrator through the various levels of Hell, including a brief and harrowing jog through Lucifer’s office, and partway through Purgatory, before Beatrice, the woman of Dante’s dreams—chaste dreams, mind you—appears to take him all the way through heaven to ask questions of several saints and be ushered into God’s presence where all is finally understood as well as it can by still-mortal brain.

Still with me?

The Inferno is the best known section of this poem, and is arguably the most intriguing—or I’d argue it, anyway.

The language is rich, the ambiance thick and humid and brutal, and Dante is in some danger from the creatures meting out the punishments for the specific sins of each circle—which, to Dante’s contemporary audience would have been poetic indeed, pun intended.   It’s supposed to be a cautionary tale and a horror story, and it is:

Thus, not by fire, but by the art divine,
Was boiling down below there a dense pitch
Which upon every side the bank belimed.
I saw it, but I did not see within it
Aught but the bubbles that the boiling raised,
And all swell up and resubside compressed.
The while below there fixedly I gazed,
My Leader, crying out: “Beware, beware!”
Drew me unto himself from where I stood.
Then I turned round, as one who is impatient
To see what it behoves him to escape,
And whom a sudden terror doth unman,
Who, while he looks, delays not his departure;
And I beheld behind us a black devil,
Running along upon the crag, approach.
Ah, how ferocious was he in his aspect!
And how he seemed to me in action ruthless,
With open wings and light upon his feet!
His shoulders, which sharp-pointed were and high,
A sinner did encumber with both haunches,
And he held clutched the sinews of the feet.
From off our bridge, he said: “O Malebranche,
Behold one of the elders of Saint Zita;
Plunge him beneath, for I return for others
Unto that town, which is well furnished with them.
All there are barrators, except Bonturo;
No into Yes for money there is changed.”
He hurled him down, and over the hard crag
Turned round, and never was a mastiff loosened
In so much hurry to pursue a thief.

— Inferno – Canto XXI

A little later on, we’re told that flesh hooks are used by the devils to keep the sinners under.  A ‘barrator,” by the way, is one who swindles,  cheats, and harasses others in order to sway a legal matter.  Dante didn’t like them much.  But you should see what happens to those who commit violence against others.

The next section, Purgatorio, is an exploration of the motivation to commit crimes or sins.^^ These are the personal  sins—the Seven Deadlies, the ones that, Virgil implies, result from loving unsuitable things to excess.  But since personal motivations and desires can be changed this is more of a lengthy pit stop instead of eternal damnation.  Things are, so to speak, looking up, and the imagery becomes cleaner and brighter with each step:

I saw upon its right wing wheeled about
The glorious host returning with the sun
And with the sevenfold flames upon their faces.
As underneath its shields, to save itself,
A squadron turns, and with its banner wheels,
Before the whole thereof can change its front,
That soldiery of the celestial kingdom
Which marched in the advance had wholly passed us
Before the chariot had turned its pole.
Then to the wheels the maidens turned themselves,
And the Griffin moved his burden benedight,^^^
But so that not a feather of him fluttered.
The lady fair who drew me through the ford
Followed with Statius and myself the wheel
Which made its orbit with the lesser arc.
So passing through the lofty forest, vacant
By fault of her who in the serpent trusted,
Angelic music made our steps keep time.

— Purgatorio – Canto XXXII

And then there’s Paradiso, which is pretty much what you’d expect . . . except for the science.  The higher Dante climbs and the closer he presumably gets to figuring out Life, the Universe, and Everything, the more the expressions depend on pure thought and the more . . . mathematical the metaphors become.  I’m serious— solid scientific facts are sprinkled throughout this section—including a probable reference to one that had Galileo in hot water some time later—and right at the end of the poem, when the narrator is in the very presence of the Creator, we’re given this:

As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

— Paradiso – Canto XXXIII

So here’s the deal—there’s a lot in this poem that personally makes me grumble.  I don’t agree with the basic interpretation of Hell°; it’s a really, really long poem in a non-Germanic language that I have to read from a translation,°° which means I can’t effectively check the original°°°; and except for one small devil making a “trumpet of his rump,” there isn’t a whole lot of humor.

But you know . . . take away the theological bludgeon, and what you have here is a man trying to find his way—on several levels, because that’s what allegories do—and describing his personal journey in language and imagery that reflects that journey.

So it isn’t a light work, but I believe that it’s worth reading  lightly, as an adventure tale and as a sometimes scathing commentary on what Dante Alighieri thought about the state of his world near the end of his life.

And if that doesn’t convince you to give it a try, think about this:   Dante may be led through Heaven by his ideal woman, but it’s a poet who guides him safely through Hell.

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*Sorry, made ‘em up.  I’d look, but the lines in my copy aren’t numbered and not even for you marvelous people will I count that far to see where I’d land.  If your copy is numbered, feel free to let me know.

**If you didn’t catch it, go read more of everything, because this work is referenced everywhere.

*** And part of our artistic culture as well, since a lot of people have attempted to create Dante’s words in visual form over the centuries.  Some of the results are extremely . . . odd . . . and I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the imagery in this poem isn’t supposed to be translated into the visual outside our own imaginations.   Especially when it comes to making the Circles of Hell look like a Roman condominium.  I’m just sayin’

^He wrote the Aeneid, which should be credential enough.  It would have to Dante’s first readers—the Aeneid leads up to the founding of Rome and was considered The Poem, much like the Divine Comedy is today.  So Dante made a good choice, there.

^^Does anyone else hear George Carlin saying, “You gotta wanna!”

^^^Which can mean blessed or clockwise, depending.  I like that.

° Without getting too much into it, the part that annoys me is in canto twenty, when Dante weeps for the tortured, and a scornful Virgil rips him a new one, telling him to save his pity for the worthy.  But while I don’t personally agree with his argument or the whole damned for eternity thing, it’s a magnificent rant delivered very well.

°°Interpreting the original Canterbury Tales is a walk in the park in comparison.  My Italian is comprised mostly of musical notations, food, and stock phrases I’ve picked up from The Godfather and Oscar. My French is better than my Italian, which is sad.

°°°Like y’all didn’t know I was a humongous nerd.  Please.

Pigeons and Shipwrecks

I’m working on my WIP tonight—gonna turn off the WiFi, plug in the appropriate playlist and thrash out one small continuity problem,* if I have to rip the entire chapter to shreds and redo.

You know, I’ve shipwrecked manuscripts for less . . . But I refuse to let Pigeon go.

And vice versa, thank God.

So no real post today, but to fill the space and speaking of shipwrecks, I thought I’d toss up a weird character study I found in my file cabinet the other day, while I was looking for something else.

It’s dated around the time Sunny was born, so it’s probably also a study on what hormones can do to one’s subconscious.  I think I stopped after two chapters and partial outline with this because another story captured my attention—can’t remember what that other story was, but it obviously didn’t make it out of the harbor, either.

But while I’m not letting another story get in the way of Pigeon—hush, those others meant nothing to me—I do like Ms. Daisy Zelda Fitzgerald, possibly because her nemesis might have her pegged.

Anyway, it’s good for a laugh.

_______________

I’d only thought about committing murder once or twice before—who hasn’t—but it was looking more and more like a viable option.

I snapped my cell phone shut, and reached into the icy wind for my deposit receipt.  “Thank you, Mrs. Fitzgerald!” said the cashier, smiling in her warm bank as I shoved the container back into its tube and hit the window toggle before I froze to death.

I lifted my hand in return, not wanting to brave the elements again just to correct her.  It was a common, logical mistake for tellers and salesclerks, who assumed from the joint household account and same last name that Nicholas and I were husband and wife, instead of brother and sister.

But this particular misunderstanding would soon be at an end, along with the convenient financial arrangement—all the arrangements we’d set up over the past few years.  Of course, the bank would probably think Nick had left me for another woman, which was technically the truth.

Nick was getting married.

I repeated that sentence a few times as I turned right onto Kimberley Road, trying to make it an everyday, normal statement instead of a major upheaval.  An upheaval made worse by the frequent calls and voice mail messages that were encouraging my recent daydreams of homicide.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want my brother to be happy—I wasn’t entirely selfish.  But Nick’s marriage was going to change everything.  And after mulling over the problem for a few weeks, I’d decided that it wasn’t so much what was going to happen as who was making it happen.

I could not believe that my brother was going to marry Annette Billingsley.  I knew from personal experience that love could be blind stupid, but this . . .

Annette was everything I was proud not to be, from her artificially enhanced figure—it is genetically improbable to be a size two and a double-D, Dolly Parton notwithstanding—to her manipulative, avaricious, and all too obvious ways of getting what she wanted from the opposite sex.  And she thought I was a homely, sour-grape-fueled, man-hating control freak.

We were each fully aware of the other’s opinion, too, which proves that effective communication isn’t necessarily the answer to world peace.

Nick, one of nature’s ostriches, apparently assumed, since nothing had been discussed, that Annette would simply move in, start adding a paycheck a month to the household account, and all would be well.  To be fair, we had been more or less civil to each other for his sake, so the poor man was probably unaware that a court order from God wouldn’t make us give each other access to money.

Living in the same house was unthinkable.

Thanksgiving dinner alone was going to be something of a trial, unless I snapped and poisoned her potatoes—except Annette would rather die than eat a starch after two p.m.  I grinned as the wind shoved me across the parking lot and into the grocery store. Maybe just offering her potatoes would do it . . .

I went up and down the aisles in my habitual pattern, produce to meat to dairy to frozen, selecting the staples on my list and the more perishable ingredients for tomorrow’s feast.  A Fitzgerald Family Thanksgiving owes much to the time-honored tradition of full fat dairy products, which I don’t keep on hand, as a rule.

Nick would’ve had the refrigerator stuffed full of them, if he could’ve, along with half the bakery department—and wouldn’t Annette have something to say about that—but the weekly shopping was my job, like the laundry was his.  Though I guessed I’d be making better friends with the washing machine in the near future.

My cell vibrated while I was pricing sour cream.  I checked the number, shoved the phone back into my coat pocket, and selected two pints of Swiss Valley.  A short while later, a single beep told me I had a message, which I also ignored.

I wondered whether arsenic or hemlock would make a better choice of seasonings.  But wasn’t hemlock was out of season?  I had the new Penzie’s spice catalog at home—maybe I should see if they had a Socrates Blend.

Arranging my groceries on the conveyor belt in the order I wished them to be bagged, I switched gears from the amusing to the practical, and thought through the financial side of keeping up the house on one salary. I didn’t have to worry about a mortgage—thank you, Grandpa Frank—and the last quarterly property tax payment for the year was ready to go.  Only eight hundred and sixty-three dollars owed to the equity line of credit for last year’s roof replacement, and I had six years to—

“Don’t put the bread in with the cans, please,” I said, startling the teenager who was tossing my groceries into random bags.  “Put it with the eggs.  And please unload half of that one  into another bag, then double bag both.”  I kept an eye on him as he complied.  “Thank you.”

I could handle the taxes by myself, I thought, as I signed the card reader in exchange for a receipt that was almost a foot longer than normal.  Holiday or not, I winced at the total.  Everyday household accounts might pinch a little once Nick was gone. But I could always cancel the cable and wear more sweaters.

I shivered as I steered my cart through the frozen parking lot.  More sweaters might not be possible—I was already wearing half a drawerful and it hadn’t snowed, yet.  I’m too skinny to deal well with Iowa winters, though my friend Chloe says that someone meeting me for the first time in December would think I needed Weight Watchers.  One more layer of clothing would make it difficult to bend at the joints.

The bags safely loaded into the trunk of my silver Civic, I headed for home.

I wound my way through the mish-mash of residential streets, the leaves swirling in panic as I drove through.  Early Autumn made Winfield County a gorgeous riot of color, but now only a few trees still clung tight to their ragged glory, despite the weather’s efforts to beat them bald.   It would have been quicker, maybe, to use River Drive, but the scenery, which included the businesses that had sprung up along the river over the past fifty years to block the view, wouldn’t have been half as pretty.

To hear Aunt Bernice tell it, our area, high on Bridge Hill,  had been the premier location in the city when the current desirable neighborhoods were still dismantling their Civil War training barracks.   But  she admits we’ve  had some setbacks since then, though in the last decade we’d become popular with people who could see lovely architectural bones underneath the ruinous vinyl siding and were willing to dedicate themselves to repairing the damages done by time and tenants.

But Fitzgerald House, the largest pile west of Union Street, had been tended, pampered, and catered to from the moment Ezra Fitzgerald, the lumber king, carried his bride, the former Clara Cruikshank, over the threshold.  It held court on Bridge Avenue with other homes of pedigree, now owned by families my aunt considered usurpers of history.

I peered up at the gutters of Fitzgerald House as I followed the driveway around to the garage.  The new guards seemed to be working, which was good.  If Nick actually went through with the wedding, I wasn’t going to be the one hanging off the roof to scoop out any accumulated muck, and I didn’t know if my budget would stretch enough to hire a service.

I slotted my car into the attached garage, which had been added to the house years before the city Historical Preservation Commission—or Aunt Bernice— might have made an issue of it. Thank heavens for Great-Uncle Randolf, without whom I would have frozen solid before I could bring in all the groceries.

My phone rang just as I finished slotting the last celery heart into the overfull crisper, and I answered it without checking, assuming it was Chloe, who always rang after work.

It wasn’t.

“Oh,” I said.  “Hello, Annette.  Yes, I received all your messages, but I was driving.  I know you do—I don’t.  Were you?  He did, did he . . . ?  No, I think the Pfaltzgraff  is perfectly fine for Thanksgiving.  . .  Yes.  I do.  It even has a cornucopia pattern . . .  Yes,it is a family tradition—plus it can be put in the dishwasher, too, unless you’re volunteering to wash eighteen settings of Spode by hand?  Uh-huh.”  I clenched the phone in my fist.  “Well, thank you very much for your approval.  Goodbye.”  I shut the phone very carefully, opened it, and punched up my second emergency contact.

As expected, it went directly to voice mail.  “This is Zee,” I said.  “I am going to kill her dead and mount her head in the den next to Moriarty.**  Come on over as soon as you can to help me plan—I’ll be home.”

I turned the ringer to vibrate and left it on the counter.  There was a CSI marathon starting at noon.  Maybe I could pick up some tips.

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*You know that riddle about getting a rat, a cat, and a dog over a river in a canoe, and you can take two animals at at time, but you can’t leave the rat and the cat or the cat and the dog alone together?  I went and wrote me one o’ them . . .

**Stuffed moose head.  I was on a roll.

Knitting the Purple Elephant

Hello, my name is Sarah, and I am a knitter with an extremely low boredom threshold.

This makes sweaters and even scarves of any useful length problematic, and downshifting into smaller projects doesn’t seem to work. I have, for example, an extensive collection of single socks, and when I took classes to learn to knit two socks at once, I became bored halfway through and after almost a year, I’ve yet to finish the cuffs.*

My friend and co-worker Grace** knows this all too well, so when a knitting book featuring even smaller projects crossed her desk, she put it on hold for me. I took it home and let the kids look at it.

(click the cover for Anna Hrachovec’s wonderful website)

They immediately demanded a teeny-tiny menagerie, and I was willing to oblige, except . . . all of these projects are done with double-pointed needles. I don’t consider myself to have anywhere near the physical coordination or mental health required to knit with a handful of oversized toothpicks.***

But for something this small—the first cast on for most of these little guys is 6 stitches or fewer—I thought I might give ‘em another try.

It was like thumb wrestling a small wooden octopus. And losing every stinking time.

So this past week, I took Grace to lunch, not only because it was her birthday and that’s just the kind of person I am, but also to corner her into showing me how to use double-pointed needles, which she valiantly tried to do before her salad arrived, even though the yarn I’d brought to the restaurant was a little too thick for the needles I had (rookie mistake).

I went home, found some purple sock yarn^ and tried, tried again. And again. And again and thank heavens the kids are in bed so they didn’t hear me say exactly how much I loathe these stupid wooden pieces of. . . Oh, wait. That worked.

I managed one round of increasing stitches without it falling apart, set it down very gently, and took a break with a nice stiff drink. This might be the perfect time to mention that I picked up knitting to relax.^^

But I came back, well fortified, brought up Would I Lie to You ^^^ on the laptop, and got to work. One and a half episodes later, I had accomplished one-fourth of a tiny purple elephant butt, after which it went a little faster:

   

And an episode or two after that, I had a purple grape on a stick:

I called it a day and did the trunk the next morning and finished the rest after work.  Elephants have far too many feet, by the way, especially when rendered in I-cord, and it was very slow going until my MIL took pity on me and offered her smallest crochet hook so I could pick up stitches without risk of rupturing that pulsing vein in my forehead.°

But in the end, I got the hang of it.

May I present Brumple, the Tiny Purple Elephant Who Does NOT Look Like a Pig with a Nasal Condition, Thank You So Very Much:

And, yes, I repaired that little, tiny hole I only noticed after I’d uploaded the image and delivered him to his new owner.

To give you a better idea of how small Brumple really  is, here’s a celebrity shot with George Washington:

Sunny’s requested a monkey next—with a banana.

I think I might rest up a few days first . . .

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EDITED TO ADD:

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*Mom, if you’re reading this, I swear (again) that they’ll be done by your birthday (again), though this time I’m not going to specify which one.

** Who actually learned to knit because she was tired of waiting for me to start the pair of socks I said, in a fit of self-delusional optimism, that I’d make for her—said, not promised, by the way. She’s a much better knitter than I am now, so my procrastination is good for something, see?

*** When knitting small things in the round, like socks, I use a pair of circular needles. Like so many of my methods, this can be a bit clunky, but it works.

^Which was enough to make baby socks for Sunny at the time I bought it but isn’t quite enough now that she’s almost, um, four and three-fourths . . .

^^That sound you hear is Grace snerking. My yarn tension is so tight that my scarves need to be persuaded to bend. In fact, she suggested I cast on over two needles so I had half a chance of making those increases without snapping a needle in half. I’m a little surprised she didn’t suggest three.

^^^Another one of my new-to-me British comedy panel show finds.

° Probably more for the sake of the kids, who were pressing dangerously close and asking me every ten seconds if I was done yet.