Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Once the New Orleans Underground Gourmet was published, Heap and Brenda started branching out into unfamiliar neighborhoods, to eat, and broaden their palette.

I don't think Heap would have tried squid in its own ink, if the Underground Gourmet hadn't recommended it.

The drawback was, atterwile the restaurants listed were full of people casually acting as if the book's recommendations were their own idea. Dude-ranch gourmets, tennis-lesson people, reading Playboy to find out what to wear, what to say, some people really do read Playboy for the ads, no one ever lost money telling phonies how to look cool.

Heap identified with the nerd's father in Revenge of the Nerds.

Heap once thought of writing a book called The Above-Ground Gourmet.

The closest he got was A WINE TOUR OF PARKER, where he went into beer joints that sold red, white, and rosé screw-top jug-wines by the glass, plus fortified wines like muscatel and white port and California pale dry cocktail sherry.

This was a book like Sideways making fun of a book like Sideways. Before Sideways.

I was there first. I was cooler, I was hipper. Man, that's lame.

Whatever Heap's look was, he looked the same way now he did at Tulane in 1969, only older, fatter, grayer.

This machine fights fascism.

Q: Mechanic and machine are related.

A: I am not the engineer, I am the mechanic. Not the designer, the repairman. The bricoleur. Put together out of scrap. I improvise, put things together, fix things that are broken. Out of the materials at hand.