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[71] The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is ‘You Can’t Unring a Bell.’

[72] About which Pakistani manager and his ancestry and ratty little mustache and officious management style McDade has a colorful thing or two to say, boy.

[73] One of the graduate prorectors’ little tasks is supposedly to go around to different Subdorm floors and check the rooms for things like are the beds made up drum-tight, with unpleasant little extra drills added to the regimens of bed-making and toothpaste-cap-replacing slackers, though few of the prorectors have the combination anality and drive actually to go around to their assigned rooms with a checklist, the exceptions being Aubrey deLint, Mary Esther Thode, and the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi, who’s got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all times.

[74] Davis Cup is male, Wightman female.

[75] Hal’s private dread is that Tavis will want him to offer up his personal competitive map and dignity to John (‘N.R.’) Wayne — who’s never in several matches lost more than three games in a set to Hal — for the titillation of the alumni and patrons at the November Fundraiser-gala’s exhibitions, though this is pretty unlikely right before the What-aBurger, when Hal’ll be apt to face Wayne in the semis anyway, and Schtitt isn’t apt to want an utter demapping that fresh in Hal’s mind right before a major event.

[76] Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder — partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve’s acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D. — and for a while there’d been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis’s Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal’d been classified as somewhere between ‘Borderline Gifted’ and ‘Gifted’ — though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.’s diagnostic tests weren’t quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal’s mono-maniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing — and when he’d committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he’d pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure — the Weston MA School District in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called ‘Battle of the Books,’ which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest — when he’d extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he’d felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.