Walking to the subway a few days ago I'm thinking high thoughts about James Boswell, the great biographer, and am wishing that I could write as well as he did. And then, as usual, my mind slips back into the gutter: the sound of the name "Boswell" suddenly reminds me of the buxom young "Miss Braswell". She's a well-endowed minor character in one of the late Keith Laumer's comic science fiction stories that I first read as a teenager. Could Braswell be a subtle reference to Boswell? I had always assumed that it was simply a made-up name, designed to suggest her feminine charms to the pubescent male mind. If "Braswell" is really a literary allusion, this is a new Personal Record for me in terms of how long it takes me to catch on to a joke—more than 40 years! My face is red ...

(cf. brief excerpt in from Laumer's story in AwesomeProwess (2003-03-17), Bawdy Blind Spot (2009-02-12), ...) - ^z - 2009-02-28