Traditional Welcome

I bid you a suspicious welcome to my seedy corner of the web.

The traditional welcome at the Strip is to overcharge you for your first and last drinks, insist you add pricey extras to your mediocre meal, convince you to give the girls ludicrous tips, and add a couple of bucks on your bill as a 'band fee' even when there's no band.

But since it's your first time here, I shall be lenient.

Here at the Strip, there's burlesque, there's music, there's ghastly drinks in funny-shaped bottles; and, more importantly, there's a salon at the back. (No, idiot. The literary kind, not the kind where some poof fingers your hair twice and announces that you simply must have Raspberry Chocolate Streaks or he will betray the sacred scissors of his mentor, the Great Lu Shi.)

The crowd here don't like mediocre books, pal. Bad movies - those can be discussed like rational people. Bad music ditto, if such a thing exists. But if it's going in print, it better deserve it. Or else it'll end up in the alley out back in a puddle of rancid slime, courtesy of our hyperliterary bouncer.

Got the gist? Now, in we go...