Superheroes, Chicken, Cross Country

There's an interesting map at the Patchwork Nation website, where you can enter your county and it will tell you what kind of county it is?

Is it a Boom Town?
Is it an Evangelical Epicenter?
Is it Tractor Country?

As it turns out, I grew up in an Evangelical Epicenter. I have now ended up in a Monied Burb. I'd rather live in the latter than the former.

Here's a story about the town I grew up in. You might not know this, but the state of Kentucky is divided into wet and dry counties. (There is also a subcategory of "moist counties", which have one city as wet.) In a dry county, the sale of alcoholic beverages is not permitted. Drinking is not against the law, and you can bring alcohol in from a wet country into a dry county. Of course, you can only bring enough for your personal use and not for resale.

These laws do very little to stop drunkenness or crime. As a matter of fact, methamphetamine use is a real problem in my home town. People drug themselves in other ways, like prescription medications. The local religious hierarchy - deeply intertwined with local government - has put a stop to my home county becoming wet. I'm sure the bootleggers were more than happy to assist with any fund-raising in such efforts.

Anyway, back to the story. My hometown has a rivalry with a neighboring town whose only claim to fame is that the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was founded there. (There used to be billboards in Chickenville, long ago, that read, "N_____, don't let the sun set on you in Chickenville.')



If the fear was that blacks would lower property values, rest assured, Armageddon couldn't have lowered the property values in Chickenville. The place was a rock-bottom dump back then and despite Harlan Sanders, remains one today.

So our dubious little paradise always had the joy of looking down on Chickenville. My father said this: "This town will never let Chickenville get a leg up on it." (My father didn't think much of the churched residents of our hometown.) For the longest time, the county of my hometown and the county of Chickenville were both dry. But in the 1990s, Chickenville passed a law allowing liquor to be served in restaurants as long as 70 percent of the income of the restaurant comes from food sales.

Did my hometown raise the banner of war, and shout from the throat of every fierce tongue, "the sins of Chickenville shall not be visited upon our fair city?" No. One or two years later, my hometown passed the same law. Trust me, sundown towns and dry counties do not stem from great moral principles. They stem from something baser and meaner.

(* * *)

If you ever read superhero stories, there will generally be a set of powers that are evenly proportioned out among the members of any superteam. There's one person who is very strong, one person who can fly, etc. etc. These powers, as a whole, are not duplicated. There's never been a superteam where every single person on it had the same superpower - but if they wrote such a story, it would be interesting. (Five strong heroes, five fast heroes, etc.)

Many of these powers correlate to useful tasks. After all, when one has abilities far beyond those of mortal men, one first must understand what abilities are possessed by mortal men, and for what those abilities are normally used. These tasks are usually employment-based.

Super strength - any job where you have to lift stuff for a living, or where you have to use actual strength (carpenter, furniture mover)
Super intelligence - any job where you have to calculate something (mathematician, chemist, physicist)
Super speed - any job involving travel (pilot, mail deliverer, etc.)

If you think about it, one could start with the job and come up with the superpower. Maybe somewhere out there there's a super pet groomer, or a super actuary, or a super cordon blue chef. "Activate super cordon blue chef power, which is highly specific!"

Even the basest jobs could have a super power associated with them. Take all of the shit cleaners out there. Someone on the planet must have a job cleaning up shit. I don't want to do it. You don't want to do it. And there's some poor sap out there, cleaning up dung for a living. I'll bet he wishes that he had some kind of super power or combination of super powers.

This got me to thinking about something else - what is the definition of a superlative dung cleaner? I'd assume that the person could clean dung so well that you wouldn't know that dung had ever been deposited in the spot from which it was cleaned. However, there are two ways to clean dung:

a) by sheer effort - getting some water and scrubbing, or
b) using your noggin - by using some sort of specialized detergent that makes the job a breeze - or by using some method kept secret by the International Dung Cleaners Association of America (Local 3135).

So here's my question: you are presented with two dung cleaners. Both do a mathematically equivalent job of cleaning dung. The one does it with eight hours of sweat. The other one does it with some much easier specialized method that lets him drink rum and coke for his remaining seven hours and fifty minutes. The results are the same.

Which one is the better dung cleaner? Are they equivalent because the results are equivalent? Is Dung Cleaner B cheating by using some method that Dung Cleaner A doesn't know about? Do we have to provide both sides the same methods to make the results equivalent?

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night.

(* * *)

I'm currently traveling on Route 80 in my imaginary run, and you can find out more about this road here at the Wikipedia article.

If you're not familiar with US history, there's a famous old road that took you through the American west called "Route 66". Route 80 was actually a transcontinental route at one time, that started at Tybee Island, Georgia and took one all the way to San Diego, California. Unfortunately, in 1964 it was decommissioned in California when Interstate 8 took it over and various other city and county governments encroached on it. The current western terminus of Route 80 is at the border of Dallas and Mesquite, Texas. That would be nice if I wanted to visit my in-laws; the difference is I want to trek across the country, in my imagination anyway.

Marching Through Georgia

On the treadmill, I ran/walked for 3.37 miles. This is 5.42348 kilometers.

This means that when people brag about completing a 5K, I complete one of those...three times a week. Wow. Didn't see that coming, not by a long shot. I know a guy who walks over an hour to work; he can probably cover 3.37 miles four or five times a week - going to work, and then coming back.

Let's see how far I can "run", then. At this rate, I should be able to run across the entire United States in about 1000 days or so. Let's start on the shores of Savannah, Georgia and end up somewhere in Westport, Washington.

Where I start: The Tybee Island Lighthouse, Savannah, Georgia.
Where I end up: Off the Fort Pulaski National Monument, somewhere off State Road 80, Savannah Georgia.
Total distance on map: 5.023 kilometers
Spare kilometers for next run: 0.4 kilometers

Across the road as I end, to my left is a bending river and to my right is the Fort Pulaski National Momument. Fort Pulaski guards the entrance to the Savannah River, which I suspect is on my left. This could have been an important port for the Confederacy, but since they didn't think Union troops would land on Tybee Island, they abandoned the island.

Guess what? Union troops landed, bombarded the fort and took control. That was the end of Confederate shipping through Savannah.

And that's one to grow on.

Women's College Basketball: The Death of a College

In 1997, a small college which had been running for one hundred years closed its door permanently. So what does this have to do with women's basketball? I found myself interested in the subject of colleges, universities and the history of higher education in the United States because I wanted to be able to write intelligently about women's basketball, of all things.

One problem with sports writers is that they write for today. It is assumed that the reader possesses a base amount of knowledge and when he (usually he) reads the sports page, he merely needs to be brought up to date. The move for "relevancy" is a pressing one, and the new fad in sports writing is to pepper one's writing with pop culture references so that a running back can be compared to Snooki or a baseball team's pitching lineup can be compared to Survivor characters. This means that fifty years from now, it will be almost impossible to read the older sports journalism which will be a hybrid of Walter Winchell gossip columns, pop-culture references and incomprehensible in-jokes. Most readers of the future will throw up their hands and these relevant writers will soon become irrelevant.

I remember reading in I, Claudius where Claudius states that he intends to write for a far-off posterity thousands of years in the future. (This gives Robert Graves a reason to fill in background data on ancient Roman society, because Claudius is assuming that his readership might not even know the names of people famous to every Roman of his time.) I thought about sports writing from the same perspective - how would we write sports if we knew that we were going to be read 100 years in the future? What would we say about sports if we assumed that our readers knew nothing about it? The problem is a difficult one, because sports writing is a running narrative of events, and there must be some sort of common understanding between the reader and the writer. The writer can't be forced to redefine everything for every new reader.

If the writer cannot and should not be establishing basic definitions, he should at least know something about the background of his or her own sport, and something beyond the obvious names of administrators and famous players. Knowing the "whats" turns sports into a recitation of dry facts, much like that of the pedestal of an ancient Roman statue listing the names of consuls who were present for some long-forgotten triumph. Knowing the "whys" of sport, however, is of the utmost importance because the "why" explains the "what".

So what about women's college basketball? That's three nouns right there, and the "college" is the part that I want to focus on.

What is called the system of higher education in the United States is founded on two types of institutions - institutions of basic education called "colleges" which provide four years of education after secondary school. The second type of institution is called a university, which provides education for those who wish to seek education beyond the four years provided by a college. The basic degree offered by a college is the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree; at a university one can be awarded higher degrees. The Master of Arts (MA) or master's degree is usually awarded after two or three years of post-graduate study; the highest distinction is the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) degree awarded after many years of study. Those who have earned this degree may choose to call themselves "Doctor [Surname]", as if they were a medical doctor.

The United States has a multitude of these colleges and universities, many, many more than Europe has. This does not mean that Americans are smarter than Europeans. Far from it. Rather, the multitude of these institutions is the result more of historical accident than reflecting a quest for knowledge.

There are only a handful of real universities at the United States: the members of this list change from year to year, but only a few institutions in the United States inspire the awe that a Oxford or a Sorbonne might inspire in Europe:

Harvard

Yale

Stanford

University of Chicago

Johns Hopkins


...and...that's about it, really. The universities that come after this list tend to fade in and out. Some years Dartmouth is on the list, some years it isn't. Some years Northwestern is on this list, some years it isn't. But you'd probably find these five universities among anyone's top ten.

So why are there so many colleges and universities in the United States? The answer is that they're not really colleges or universities at all. At best, they should be called "trade schools" because a long time ago, that's what they were. There used to be a small group of places of higher learning in the United States, and for those that didn't want to teach at the university level, one went to a teacher's college (if one wanted to teach elementary school) or to a school of divinity (if one wanted to preach for a living) and so on.

School like Harvard and Yale became status symbols, and in America's capitalist economy, everyone wanted to be the next Harvard or Yale. Add America's flair for idealism and everyone who had a difference with his neighbors - usually religious - founded a college to preach the higher truth. Add to that historical expansion, which mean that North Dakota had to have a state university just like Virginia did. Add to that the baby boom of the 1940s-60s, which meant that there were more students and more money to chase around. Add to that what I call "educational regression", where one needs higher and higher ranking degrees to be assured of a middle-class job. (Fifty years ago, a high school education might have been good enough for clerical work.)

The result was that many of these schools got promoted. Bowman Teacher School bought a few buildings and added a handful of faculty to offer other degrees and expanded to Bowman College (which has a fine education department). The Smith School of Divinity added some extra theological courses that allowed them to offer a master's degree and became the University of Smith (which has a fine divinity department).

One way for schools to get popular was to offer entertainment, particularly by offering sports. (*) The schools with the most money offered football, a very expensive sport whereas schools with smaller budgets offered basketball because it was cheaper. The hope was that these sports teams would become a draw. To some extent, professional sports in America is partially subsidized by the education system, because most professional players are drawn from the teams that play at these colleges and universities - the professional sports class is trained by the state within the university system.

In 1971, Title IX was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law. This law prohibited discrimination based on many forms - including gender - in how a college distributes its money. In effect, this meant that college sports had to either subsidize women's sports or eliminate many of the fees they charge to students - after all, if a female student pays a student fee or the taxpayer subsidizes the state college, shouldn't all students have the same opportunity to participate in sports? There was an explosion of women's teams in every sport except full contact sports like football and certain other sports that had female-dominated variations (men's baseball vs. women's softball).

Basketball was a relatively inexpensive sport to support at the college level. It didn't require open space that had to be tended by groundskeepers. It took place indoors. It only required giving between ten and fifteen players scholarships, where their student costs would be paid for if they participated in sports. It did not require much in the way of specialized equipment. The result is that there are hundreds of colleges that participate in women's basketball, competing against each other for the honor of being a championship team. Only a minuscule percentage of their players will advance to the professional ranks and make money from basketball - but still, many women compete on college teams.

So what is this about the title "The Death of a College?" Let's go back to that college in my hometown. It was always sort of in the background growing up, but I never really thought about it much. Even in my small town, the college didn't dominate the community - some small towns in America are called "college towns" because if it weren't for the presence of the college as a central point, the town would probably be nothing without the college. My town was certainly not a college town - despite a population of under 10,000 with only about 4,000 in the city limits - despite the fact that we had a college in it.

This college was initially a "community college" - a two-year college that provided basic courses. After the two years, students would usually end their education with an "associate degree" (AD) or transfer to a four-year institution. In 1964 or so, the college promoted itself into a four-year institution, but even so it made little impact on our town.

By the 1990s, the college had a reputation for being an expensive four year school where the wealthy and stupid kids went - the college would take you if you couldn't get into anywhere else. Even so, the 1990s would be a rough decade for the hometown school. Two state universities - in the never ending business-like quest for expansion - established "annexes" which offered basic courses which would be accepted at the university level. The idea was that community teenagers would go to the annex after high school, and then go to the university which would be guaranteed to accept their transfer credits. These two annexes now directly competed with the small town college, and enrollment plummeted.

The result was that the college's endowment began shrinking into the negative numbers, and with no money, the school failed to upkeep the basics....including the library. This brought it into conflict with the triangle upon which every American college is founded:

a) accreditation, or the right to be recognized as a college
b) the power for students to obtain financial aid while attending college, which is granted by the federal government
c) the power to grant degrees, which is conferred by the state

With no library worth speaking of, the college lost its accreditation. It was now on a race against time to regain its accreditation (a) before it fell afoul of the federal government (b). However, the college was already in the red and living off student financial aid. When accreditation was lost, the federal government decided that it would not grant financial aid to any school attending this college. This meant no federal money.

I don't know if the state ever got around to (c) - stripping the power to confer degrees from the school. The school was founded by a religious denomination, and the school's belief was that this affiliation would rescue it as the denomination would not let the school fall. But it did. In December 1997, the school gave up the ghost and closed its doors permanently. Other colleges agreed to accept the credits of the students, one specific college accepted the school's historical records, and that was the end.

The place is now called a "community center". Maybe when I go back home, I'll take some pictures there.

Did sports help? No. In the 1990s the school founded a football team, but it had to compete at the lowest level of competition in the United States (NAIA, I believe). The school had mens and women's basketball for years, but never had the kind of success that could grab the town's attention. Funnily enough, if the school had been better at sports...it might have survived for a few more years. If it had had a good women's ball team - if it had any kind of good team - it might still be a thriving institution.

_________

(*) There is the "bread and circuses" theory of college sports, which goes like this. Many big schools save money by having graduate students teach, and all of those students teach from a select group of college texts, meaning that the education that a student gets at Florida State - in the basics, anyway - isn't really that good. In order to distract students from this fact, there is a lot of fol-de-rol about how important Florida State football is to the university.

It might be important, but the success of the football team has little (if anything at all) to do with one's quality of education or ability to get a job after graduation. Whereas Harvard and Yale...well, those degrees convey some influence. If you really want to insult a university in the United States, call it a "football school" or a "basketball school", two things which Harvard and Yale are certainly not.

Message from Another Time

(Note: review of AD15 coming hopefully today. Till then, I'm just pulling out some old material on the hard drive, dusting it off, and turning it into a blog post. This post is a massive diversion and has virtually nothing to do with Daria or Daria fandom, so you can skip it. -- JB)

If you're familiar with my long, ugly history in Daria fandom, you'll know that I happen to use the term "BNF". This isn't a term I invented. Neither are Greybird's plural for fan ("fen") or use of the term "neofen."

All of these terms come from science fiction fandom, a fandom that has existed since the 1930s. However did they do without the internet, you might ask? Well, instead of message boards, they had the letter columns in magazines. Instead of websites, they had fanzines.
Instead of e-mail, they had real-mail. Instead of instant messaging, they had Western Union and telephones.

Furthermore, these ancient fans, with little more than pencils, papers, and the occasional mimeographed fanzines, managed to have all the same dumbass disputes internet fans have had without the help of internet pseudonymity. All of the heights we think we've scaled on the internet were scaled by people about sixty years ago.

For example, I borrowed my first pseudonym -- Petrel -- from Francis Towner Laney, whose incendiary memorior Ah, Sweet Idiocy! is virtually a bible for modern Insurgents, and who was called "The Stormy Petrel". (Even then, the seeds of CINCGREEN were planted in Petrel.) You can't read Ah, Sweet Idiocy! anywhere on the net -- it's hard to find in science fiction fandom, if I understand -- but I have read excerpts on the next. Laney was an acid critic of the failings of science fiction fans, and Ah, Sweet Idiocy! was his way of burning his bridges. (To get a sense of his style, read "Syllabus for a Fanzine", where he goes after crappy webzines.

Laney escaped being persona non grata by suddenly dying. To this day, there are those who think that Laney's death was a fake and he did the ultimate "get away from it all". (Back in the day, without the internets, faking your death was quite easy. You just had a friend send mail to all your friends and enemies saying "I regret to inform you that so-and-so died." How were you going to check? However, I believe some fans of fans have found Laney's actual death certificate, so R. I. P. F. T. L.)

However, my point was to introduce you to "The Enchanted Duplicator", a story written by BNFs Walt Willis and Bob Shaw. It was written in 1954 and was basically addressed to science fiction fans of the time, but I believe that it has something to say to fans in any type of fandom at any time. From the webpage introduction:

The Enchanted Duplicator is more than a simple fairy tale about one fan's slow progress into the heartland of 'Fandom'. It contains practical advice on the pitfalls awaiting the new fan, puns wherever they could be fitted in, and it is a somewhat distorting window into a past era of fandom. But as well as all this, it is an allegory and a fable. A moral is not stated: it is implicit in every page. Simply: anyone may become a 'True Fan', but only by their own efforts. However, a sense of humour and a willingness to get along with other fans is essential.

(To that, I say there are very few 'True Fans' in Daria fandom. The Angst Guy is one of the few I know.)

The tale is allegorical. I'll close with my self-composed glossary from "The Enchanted Duplicator", now sitting on my hard drive for some time. I'll let it see the light of day and I hope that it whets your desire to read "The Enchanted Duplicator". (Iron Chef: Write a version of "The Enchanted Duplicator" for Daria fandom.)

(* * *)

GLOSSARY OF TERMS FROM WILLIS AND SHAW

Mundane -- the country where all non-fans live

Prosaic -- a village in the country of Mundane

Jophan -- a young man who lives in the city of Prosaic

Spirit of Fandom -- a magical fairy who comes to Jophan and lets him know that there is a world outside of Mundane. She carries two wands, one called Contact and the other called Fanac ("fan activity"). The wands show him visions of this wonderful world, and Jophan wants to take part.

Mountains of Inertia -- mountain range which surrounds Mundane. The mountains are supposedly unclimbable; to reach Fandom these mountains must be crossed.

True Fan -- an inhabitant of the land of Fandom and what Jophan wishes to become.

The Enchanted Duplicator -- what Jophan wishes to seek in Fandom, so that he may publish the Perfect Fanzine. (During the days of science fiction fandom, fans would write fanzines which would be sent through the mails to other interested fans.) Also known as the Magic Mimeograph.

The High Tower of Trufandom -- where the Enchanted Duplicator rests

Umor -- a shield the Spirit of Fandom gives Jophan. If he keeps it polished, it will protect him on his journey. (Umor as in "humor", i. e. a sense of humor.)

Fortress of Stupidity -- a forest that grows all around Mundane, sheltering it from the winds blowing out of Fandom

Swift, Offset and Litho -- brothers that try to distract Jophan on his journey. (Their names refer to a process called offset lithography, more suitable for large scale commercial printing.) They end up draining prospective fans of money and those fans never reach Fandom.

the Great BNF -- the major deity of fandom. (BNF = "big name fan")

Letterpress Railroad -- a railroad which promises a direct route to Fandom, only for its trains to continually break down. (Letterpress is the complicated method of printing with movable type.)

Circle of Lassitude -- A place where people who found getting to Fandom too tiresome a process and have created their own society. Many of them have never reached Fandom. When the occasionally fanzine blows by, they pay no attention to it, preferring to chat and drink instead. (Inspired by the London SF Circle of the 1950s.)

Robert George Leth (Leth, R. G, or "lethargy") -- a member of the Circle

Region of Fog -- an area within the Forest of Stupidity

the Disillusion -- a spirit that tries to convince Jophan not to proceed. Disillusion once rode into Fandom on his high horse, but no one paid attention to him. He tried to teach the citizens of Fandom, but they had nothing to learn from him and he remains indignant to this day.

Plodder and Erratic -- two neofen ("new fans") that accompany Jophan on his journey. Plodder has no Shield of (H)Umor -- but is incredibly thick-skinned. Erratic prefers to rest of long periods of time, and then make up the ground in spurts.

Hekto Swamp -- an area just inside the borders of Fandom. Many neofans perish here, to sink forever within its purple depths. (A "hekto" is a carbon used in mimeographing, and can stain one's hands purple if one is not careful.)

Abydix, Roneoaks and Ellam trees -- trees that grow throughout fandom, known for their powerful root system. (Ellam is a reference to a mimeographic inker; I don't know to what the other two refer.)

Jungle of Inexperience -- a jungle within Fandom that can bring any neofan to a standstill

Torrent of Overinking - a floodstream that occasionally carries neofans away in its wake

slip sheet -- a sheet which can be used to rescue someone from the Torrent of Overinking (They appear to refer to divider pages.)

Typos -- beasts living in the Jungle of Inexperience which attack neofans

Correcting Fluid -- a magical fluid that kills any wound made by a typo

Kerles -- a fan who has the power to make Typos do his bidding -- but not often, and not well. (Named after Max Kerles, a 1950s science fiction fan whose work was typo-ridden.)

Perfexion -- a paranoid fan who attempts to hack his way through the Jungle of Inexperience and is horribly frightened of Typos. He is making very slow progress.

Kolektinbug -- a small bug sold by the Hucksters who on the road to the High Tower of Trufandom. The bug is actually a leach that will suck the life right out of a neofan. (After "collecting bug", obviously.)

"City of Trufandom" -- a place Jophan visits on his journey. It is actually a club that spends most of its time arguing with each other, giving contradictory orders, and awaiting the election of officers so one member can boss around the others. Jophan tries to convince a citizen to join him on the way, but the young man is too afraid to progress without the help of the others and Jophan leaves.

Dedwood -- the builder of the "City of Trufandom". Unfortunately, most of its buildings are ramshackle facades.

"City of Serious Constructivism" -- a city Dedwood works on building. He hopes the public will be impressed.

Mr. Press -- a representative of the Public that occasionally visits Fandom. Jophan watches Dedwood be interviewed by Mr. Press. Despite Dedwood's grandiose comments, Mr. Press pays no attention to Dedwood, failing to write anything in his press notebook except "gosh-wow-oh-boy-oh-boy" and drawing a picture of Dedwood wearing a helicopter beanie.

Profan -- a resident of a colony between Trufandom and Mundane. He only visits Trufandom occasionally, but is willing to help neofans as long as he isn't overwhelmed by them. He tells Jophan of the perils that will face him. (A "pro fan" is a published science fiction writer who used to be a fan, thus living in both worlds.)

Glades of Gafia -- a distraction that Profan warns Jophan about. The glades seem refreshing, but they are so comfortable that most fans never leave them. (After "GAFIA", or "get away from it all". Fans that have taken a long break from fandom and never come back are said to have "gafiated".)

Subr -- a seemingly indifferent group of people who refuse to aid Jophan or even talk to him until he convinces them that he has the stamina to procced and that he will accept their help. (Probably after 'submitter' or 'subscriber', both important to fanzine life.) They then begin to accompany him on his journey, giving limited aid.

Sycofan -- a fan who refuses to proceed until he invokes the power of the "BNFicient spirits". (After "sycophant", a fan who will only associate with "high ranking" fans.) He refuses to associate with Jophan, surviving on the occasional "manna-scripts" sent to him by the BNFicient.

Egg o' Bu -- the egg of a "bu-bird". The yoks and whites of the eggs give Jophan a lot of strength. They do have side effects though -- intoxication and a swelling of the head. (After "ego-boo", or ego boost, basically a kind word from another fan.)

Canyon of Critcism -- the deadliest passage on the way to Trufandom. Many neofans have been known to perish here, their journeys coming to a tragic end.

Magrevoos, Fanmagrevoos, Promagrevoos -- Beings living in the Canyon of Criticism which have been known to hurl large rocks down upon neofans. If a neofan has not kept his Shield of Umor intact, he might perish. These creatures are plodded into activity by Headhunters. (I am unable to make out the reference.)

Fillips -- a near extinct tribe which helps neofans attacked by the Magrevoos. These fans are replenished by the Fillips's supply of Egg o' Bu. (This might come from the word "fillip", meaning "something trivial" -- possibly an exhortation that criticism is trivial in the long run.)

Letteraxe -- a fan which offers to help Jophan by sending messages to the Headhunters that control the Magrevoos. Jophan notes that it would be just as easy to travel, but Letteraxe prefers to stay where he is and send messages. (A reference to "letter hacks".)

The Magic Mimeograph -- turns out to be a rusty hulk of a machine, an eyesore. However, when Jophan takes the handle, he is invested with strength. As the Spirit of Fandom tells him, the final lesson is that "FOR THE MAGIC MIMEOGRAPH IS THE ONE WITH THE TRUE FAN AT THE HANDLE."