would have been looked over and only the best shown. Well I suppose that was a sort of dumb idea to get since it would be a very easy way of insulting a lot of people but on the other hand a lot more people got bored. Now if somebody had told me that I didn't have to sit through the whole masquerade but only through the final run through I would have been saved a lot of idleness. As it was Valma and I got bored and went off and fed our faces just over the corridor and came out just in time to see some of the costumed people appearing out of the door of the hall (and to get moved on by one of the committee members as we were blocking the road which was' already blocked by hundreds of other yobs, and we must have been standing in the one place for all of five seconds (ten at the most). I was a bit annoyed at the fellow but then he was trying to keep a convention running so I really don't blame him too much, I'll probably be worse next year. The main event of that evening was, as I said before, the TAFF/DUFF Party, and thanks very much Dick for thinking it up. On the next day we'd promised Susan Wood that we'd go and see the panel she was going to be on about academic stf (or something like that). The adventure wasn't that informative or educational but that was probably because the event was called to a close almost before it had a chance to get going, and I'd imagine that a lot of people in the audience who were particularly interested in the topic would have been a bit disappointed. Never mind, the next event was the banquet, and I can't say that I . wasn't warned, though most of the warnings had concerned the food which was almost edible. It was the whole business of the speeches and the awards which was off- putting, the honourable toastmaster went on and on and then there ware all those awards with nobody to pick them up. l was a bit amazed that things didn't run a bit more smoothly. To say the least, it was a relief to get out of the room after the end of it all. The next thing that happened was that there was this AUSSIECON party, see, and Valma and I had bought this bottle of Jim Beam all the way from Australia for Bob Tucker to demanstrate Smoooooooooooth with and we got to doing it a lot and some tea after that it was Sam and I had to be up at 10 so I grabbed an hour and a half sleep and was 'up fresh as a vaulted cabbage to attend a TUCKER FUND auction at which I spent my $10 for a copy 'of Ethel Lindesay's TAFF report and dozed fitfully. After they wound that up I got the distinct impression that I wandered over to where the business session was being held but quite honestly I wasn't up to that sort of excitement so after a while I tottered off to the AUSSIECON table to sell lots more memberships, which had a certain excitement value of its own. And I think that that was about all the official programme that I got to see, and it was probably just about all the convention, I got to see apart from all those parties that seemed to be happening all over gust about all the time. Some were small and nice and some were big and nice and they all filled in the time in an enjoyable nature and that's about the most that one can expect, I expect. And since there are a lot more pages yet: to be filled up I suppose I night as well go back and mention the highlights of downtown Albuquerque. Well all we saw of that area was from inside Bob Vardemanb car but after we'd been in the city for four or five days I thought that it was about time that we did the city the honour. The downtown wasn't too much to speak of:but the main reason for getting to look at it was because I had had the impression that the area around the Holiday Inn was the beautiful downtown area and it was a bit sparse on things like shops but then I wasn't familiar with tha ways that you US citizens conduct business and maybe that's what your central business districts were like. So on the day before we left to get to DISCON Bob put us in his car and drove us over quite a bit of.the top half of New Mexico and we saw Los Alamos and some ruined Indian cave dwellings and the grandure of Santa Fe and then back to Albuquerque where we ate Italian food in a STRANGE place (by Australian standards) and then got driven downtown and uptown and all about and the city impressed me very much and though I've now discovered that I like Minneapolis and Providence (RI) I thought Albuquerque was a pretty marvellous place. It occurs to me that I may as well up-date 63