convulsions of laughter but somehow we did accomplish something. At breakfast I had been fascinated,as I have already said, by the menu and in particular by something called pigs-in-a-blanket. The photo on the menue of this item contrived to make it appear a masterpiece of the culinary art. Sad to say the actual article looked nothing like the photo and was merely a couple of sausages wrapped in some of the dryest and most tastless pancakes it has been my misfortune to suffer. They were unedible. The old Australian fall back in a situation Iike this is tomato sauce (or whatever the locals call it) poured liberally over the offending food and thus smeared the meal was to some small extent consumable. The others at the table were amused by such an unusual combination, the waitress was not at all impressed. As the Guest of Honour Buz opened the evening programme with his keynote speech. He began by talking about all the things he was not going to mention, passing over some of the aspects of writing I would have liked to have heard about, and finally settling into telling us about marketing stf. He talked for about an hours and he held everybody in the audience captive. To somebody like myself who has always imagined selling stf was easy the talk was an education and once more I decided to beawe struck by writers who go to so much trouble to bring us their humble works. The speech was well received and the projector and the screen were again set up, this time for "Jason and the Argonauts" which turned out to be a reasonably good film with highlights in the spectacular animation sequences. Almost anything would have been better than the film of the previous evening and I suppose that I should recommend this as a film to be seen if you like real live monsters that walk and move, as well as the usual creaky plot and acting. After the film somebody slid up beside us in the crowd and whispered a number which might have been 414. We could only suppose that we had been issued an invitation to a highly secret room party, and we weren't wrong. So as not to cause any suspicion we left the convention and went to our room for a few minutes but while we were there we made the mistake of turning on the tv. The face that appeared on the screen was that of Christopher Lee and immediately we were stuck like flys on fly paper. Probably the only person we find more difficult to escape from is John Wayne. The film we had been caught by was Terror of the Tong and Lee ran around chopping off hands with his little silver hatchet in the most delightful manner. I managed to escape during an advertisfng break. I knocked on the highly secret door which was opened a little while I was inspected to check on my worthiness to enter: The bottle of gin I'd brought all the way from Sydney (duty free naturally) seemed to be accepted as a good entry pass. By the time Valma arrived an hour or so later I had somehow managed to take almost complete control of the time of the Guest of Honour. I'd met Buz for a while through SAPS when he was a membex and we had met for a little while when we arrived at the Holiday Inn but then he was on his way downtown to autograph books and Valma and I were on our way to somewhere to sleep. Somehow I had avoided the trap of visualising what most Americans would look like but I had prejudged the ways they would seem in person. Buz didn't upset my prior notions in the least and it was easy to see why he had remained a Big Name Fan for so long and appeared to be well liked by everybody. He is forceful in his way but that is no disadvantage and we conversed with no effort, though aided by the contents of cans and glasses. I was staggered at the way in which he put away the cans of bheer, I thought that at any moment he would have to sink to the floor a sodden heap. No way, he just kept taking off the tops and pour- ing the contents right in. Later Bob Vardeman told us that most American bheer is a lot weaker than the Australian counterpart but I cannot believe that that is the only solution and I'm sure that a long history of conventions must have something to do with it also. Gradually the party thinned out, when somebody said it was two in the morning the situation explained itself. From having to stand right next to the stock of drinks we could lounge back on the beds and chatter on. After having read in too many fanzines various writers and their bad opinfons of fandom I was 25