FEDCOMS

I don't want to say that we were exactly brainwashed during our first night's stay at the FEDCOMS facility. But they fed us an awful lot. A SUSPICIOUSLY awful lot of awfully GOOD food. More than is natural. And they showed off their kids. Those kids are not natural either. Too polite, too... grown-up. Something sinister about that. All we know is that we found ourselves in this very weird laboratory, doing things. By that I mean, a laboratory WEIRDER THAN MOST SUBGENIUS ONES, and doing things most SubGeniuses PROBABLY WOULD NOT DO.

Driving by this house in the Poconos, in fact, even ENTERING this house, you would never guess that beneath the basement is a whole OTHER "house," and not what you would call a healthful or SEEMLY place. We all have collections of bulldada knick-knacks, Evidence of "Bob," mysterious curios and shunned, eldritch tomes -- BUT NOT LIKE THIS.

And certainly not with CHICKENS.

At one point in his storied life, Pope Sinphaltimus used to actually commute from this place to NYC. He was an invaluable guide through what was to us a potentially strange and terrible land. His warnings regarding the abysmally poor signage leading into the island city saved us. We didn't get horribly lost until we were within a block of our destination, the Marriot hotel in Astoria. It could have been worse; we could have been using a GPS. But we were working from detailed paper maps, and were able to locate our hotel parking lot after only an hour of driving in Friday afternoon rush hour New York City traffic.

The second we parked in the hotel parking lot, life became heavenly, like something out of a dream. The Official Hotel of the NYC Devival was NICE. For NYC hotel rooms, they were cavernous -- almost as large as the closets in midwestern Motel 6s. The wifi didn't work on Macs but hey. The front desk girls were uniformly friendly, helpful and HOT the three nights we stayed there.

I have wandered all over NYC, I thought, but this was a neighborhood I had never experienced. Someone called it "Little Pakistan." Outside the hotel, on the many blocks we first explored, we might as well have been in another country, so little English was displayed in the signage. I'm a fairly well travelled fellow, but I have never been in a foreign city that had so few hints I could read. It was mostly some kind of Arabic or Swahili. You could get kidney kabobs anywhere, but it took us an hour to find sandwich fixings we could identify (a can of tuna fish). I say this as someone who has successfully navigated Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Tangiers, Fez, Hamburg, San Antonio, Tokyo and even London. Even L.A., Chicago and Manhattan! But this subneighborhood of Queens was slightly weirder than any of those.

We loved it!

Late that night I wrote my sermon for the next day's NYC Devival.

Er... come to think of it, I probably did that Saturday afternoon before the devival. I think we spent Friday night reminding ourselves why we don't subscribe to cable TV.

Next: THE NYC DEVIVAL or jump ahead to THE NEW YORK MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY