Go to Arisia!

I've just started reading First Lensman, by E.E. "Doc" Smith, which is one of the books in Smith's Lensmen sequence, which comprises one of the first space operas ever written. However, I may abandon First Lensman and go straight to Galactic Patrol, because that book, while the third in the chronological sequence, is the first that Smith actually wrote, and by and large, series tend to be best enjoyed in the order in which the episodes were created. (I'd never start a Star Wars virgin with The Phantom Menace, no matter how much I love that movie despite everybody else's dislike of it.)

However, I've read about fifteen pages of First Lensman, which isn't enough to really spoil things (I hope), and there's a scene in the second chapter that had me laughing, albeit unintentionally. If your only acquaintance with comics, for example, is via the gritty titles that exist now, it can be quite the shock to peruse the original Lee/Ditko issues of Spiderman, when everybody is calling each other "Daddy-O".

Here we have a man and a woman arguing with each other during a mixed-doubles game of tennis, and then afterwards, a friend suggests to the man that he and the lady are lovers, to which the man responds:

"Lovers! Who the hell ever said we were lovers?...Oh, you've been inhaling some of dad's balloon-juice. Lovers! Me and that red-headed skinker -- that jelly-brained sapadilly? Hardly!"

Hee hee! Now there's a term that needs to be rescued from obscurity, along with "cockamamie" and "far out!". Starting tomorrow, I will be using the word "sapadilly" in conversation at least once per day.