I stayed up far too late. I was first trying to clean house, then write up the on-dragging incident, and then finally wound up chatting briefly with pyrogenic. He had a question from deeahblita for me.

I've actually run into the word "ulu" in real life -- there are signs posted in the Fairbanks International Airport stating that they don't care if it's just a cool thing you picked up and you'd have no intention of threatening to slice and dice a fellow passenger or any airline staff, you still have to check any ulus you may have in with the baggage.

On a related note, I discovered that the Official Scrabble Dictionary lists "Gor" as "a mild oath" last Wednesday night, and then I wound up explaining Gor to a much-bemused writing group -- out in the parking lot. (It's a Catholic cafe, so I felt that it would be inappropriate to over-share inside the establishment, besides which, we were getting kicked out because it was closing up for the night.) The two counter guys had completed a nearly-perfect game of Scrabble, with only one letter left, an R. I took a gander at the board and discovered that there was "GO" and "NO" that could be made to be an intersecting "GOR" and "NOR" with that one letter left. I knew Gor was a (fictional) place-name, usually associated with me defenestrating novels (boojum gave me one as an example of how a good concept could go very bad); I didn't know that it was used in the Scrabble dictionary.

Regarding the whole gossip-at-work thing, there is all sorts of gossip utterly pervading the phone goon break room, so a quiet discussion of a minor kerfuffle-incident that happened to be within the hearing range of someone with excellent hearing who was probably sitting pretty close is well within the bounds of reasonable conversation as far as this workplace is concerned. No one was bringing anything onto the call center floor, and if you can't have a quiet talk with your real friends when neither of you is supposed to be working, then who can you talk to? Given the people involved, it was a hell of a lot less likely to be a nasty case of mudslinging than I'd think it would be if almost any of the workplace's complement of fratboys, teenyboppers, old geezers, and old hags were in any way involved. (The break room is sometimes scary. The young men talk booze and cars, the old men talk booze and politics, and all the men talk about electronics and women, but the teenyboppers are frightening and the old hags are vicious.)

I had occasion to note that actually, fresh synthetic motor oil and standard Mountain Dew are about the same color. (Much as Code Red Mountain Dew and a lit strawberry votive candle are the same color, except one of them is on fire.) Fortunately, this was merely something I was in a position to observe and make note of, rather than a disgusting and/or regrettable discovery.