Meanwhile, at a table not far away, an ebullient Principessa continued to pore over the invention of the 21st century, which given that so far the top invention had been the Florida ballot, was not saying much. The erstwhile inventor, cozily Hiberniating like any good Hyperborean, felt an increasing sense of apprehension as he witnessed her scanning of his Scanner in the works, but actually faking his awaking was tempered by the realization that the thing hadn't been actually built yet, and so should he come to what passed for life he would be back in the tense no man's land without a red cross nurse, or to put it more succinctly, between Abraham holding up the knife to kill Isaac and the as yet unarrival of the ram chops, known as the Shyness Unto Death.

He was somewhat relieved to discover, as best he could given his awkward lying doggo position, that she had inadvertantly dropped onto the floor the second page, upon which he had indicated the flipsite settings for the opposite sex, to whit:

1. wedding ring detector: how significant is the little tanless circle on his inner finger, on a Tan gradient scale of 1-10? Has he removed a ring in the past 24 hours, and is it perchance sitting on the sink of his pottery studio where he took it off to ensure a smooth finish, if I can put it like that....

2. Gameboy assessor: a skein of flashing lights and smashing sounds determining if his idea of interaction is, on the evolutionary ladder, somewhere above amoeba and below pinball.

3. Hubble Hairoscope -- Roots, shoots, tapeovers, plugs, wind arounds, backhair up the collar and over, eyebrows combed back, dyed partially forehead colour and then browned?

4. Dumpsterferometer -- Calibration of the half-life of promises, based on Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Standard Time, i.e. A million years unless things go wrong next week.

5. Snappycomebackcomplexifier-- Computerised evaluation of repartee beyond initial pickup line, response, subsequent bifurcation, 4-ply potential responses, 16 track mind, etc. Printout: How long can he keep it up before resorting to grunts?

6. Diamondsandrustometer -- Ultimate synthesis calculation, crosstabs of costs, family, the really bad day when his Other VISA bill came home by mistake, plus benefits.

It was a start, though of course he could not fathom or even drop a string with a weight attached the mysteries of the female mind. What began to interest him however was the intriguing fact that she had connected the male to the female in his wiring diagram in a complex, but plausible way that had never occurred to him before, and this meant that he could actually see his way to making the machine work, though, like the poet Horace, who liked to have walls of mirrors in his bedroom so he could work through all the variations, it was going to be like a Mobius stripper he once saw who never seemed to come to an end.