stock day...

Every two weeks, a very special thing happens at the Incidental Bookshop.

Princess Bookaholic, Sir Laurence the Indispensable and The Incidental Bookseller arise at the crack of dawn and hurry on down to the Incidental Bookshop where a parade of strange men deliver, with varying degrees of competence, a couple of pallets of new stock.

Oh, the stories I could tell of Stock Day!

But I'm tired and my back hurts and it's time I was in bed so I will just tell you today's saga very quickly.

Our stock is all warehouse overflow and so we never really know what's going to turn up with each new delivery. The sad truth is, we get whatever hasn't sold elsewhere or whatever someone somewhere ordered too much of. Today they sent us about one million and seventy five novels and about forty five thousand craft books. In amongst the novels are a set of classics - The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Lady Chatterly's Lover... You get the picture.

Princess Bookaholic began to salivate the moment she saw this fantastic new intoxicant. Classics. In a set. Cheap but not too nasty. This is really beginning to look like her drug of choice for the day.

She loves those books. She spent two hours taking them off the pallets where they had been packed messily in no particular order and arranging them into the above pictured display. The Jane Austins are all together. The Victor Hugos are all together too. The horror stories form a single vertical line down the right side. Apparently there are other examples of the new order that Princess Bookaholic imposed upon this crazy mess of books but I don't know what they are because, even though she explained them all to me in detail, I wasn't actually listening.

On Stock Day, you can't get caught up in anyone else's literary triumphs and tragedies. Head down and bum up. If someone's little house of books topples, you have to detach - you have your own Pooh Bear, Dr Seuss and How to Win Friends and Influence People to juggle.

Anyway, once the worst was over, after the cardboard boxes were all opened and the ugly empty pallets hidden away out back of the shop, Princess Bookaholic served a customer. Her Majesty's head was still obsessing over the beauty of those affordable unabridged paperbacks she'd been sorting all morning.

"Do you like the classics?" she said to the customer by way of making conversation.

The customer looked at her like there was something a bit wrong with her and said, "No, mate - my family all like country and western."

wraapt in plaastic...

It was a big day today in the Incidental Bookshop.

We gave the old girl a bit of a face lift. You think I mean 'a bit of a face lift' in a manner of speaking, don't you? Well, in fact I mean we literally gave her plastic surgery. You see, the company I work for is like the SAS of book sellers, the Green Berets of the publishing world. We sell books at prices other book shops couldn't because we're prepared to go to places other book shops wouldn't.

Dumps. Places with no paint on the walls. Places with no carpet on the floors.

My shop, for example, is an enormous old barn of a place in the biggest shopping centre in our small city. It used to be a discount supermarket till a few years ago but since they closed that down, the space has been boarded up and the resulting walls decorated with the art work of local kindergartners. You might think that's a bit tight, using free paintings from little kiddies to make it look like they are a community minded kind of shopping centre. You might think to yourself, 'Jeez, guys fork out some cash and buy some REAL paintings...' But let's face it, who doesn't like to look at finger-painting after incomprehensible finger-painting as far as the eye can see along the boarded up former frontage of old IGA Independent Market?

Luckily for everyone, last Christmas the company sniffed out a bit of an opportunity there and opened a gigantic discount book shop. I say lucky because it means that finally we saw the end of the fingerpainting madness.

But there was a small problem. Once unboarded, the space behind was putrid. How do you get around that when you don't want to actually spend any money on fixtures? Well, what you do is you get miles and miles of shiny red or green plastic wrap with the company logo all over it proclaiming "BARGAIN BOOKS" - it comes in enormous rolls about three foot wide and god only knows how many metres long - and you staple it to the walls. You wrap the grubby old tables in it as well so that it falls like a curtain hiding that grubby old table's grubby old legs.

I know! I know! It sounds awful! But it actually comes up pretty well. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the place sold and sold and sold. It sold so well they decided to keep it open and see if it continued to sell after the Christmas rush.

It died down considerably of course - but it paid its way and some weeks still did exceptionally well. So here it is nearing the end of May and we're still going.

But let's be honest here - it's an illusion. It's like The Wizard of Oz. "Pay no attention to the dump behind the flimsy plastic wrap curtain!"


Children poke at it and pull on it all day and as I mentioned in yesterday's entry, also occasionally vomit on it. It takes a skilled surgeon to keep up with all the nipping and tucking required. Sometimes, as I tape yet another patch of plastic wrap to a table straining under the weight of hundred discount books, I'd swear I can hear a little voice crying out from the darkness underneath, "I cannah hold 'er-r any longar-r, Capt'n!"

And so today was refit day.

Sir Laurence the Indispensable, a knight of the Order of Designated Ladder Climbers, came to my assistance as always. We pulled down all the daggy old red plastic wrap and put up shiny new green plastic wrap. We interspersed lengths of shiny green wrap which says over and over "BARGAIN BOOKS" with small snappy red posters that say "BOOK BARGAINS". There are a couple of ugly looking poles that just hang there in the middle of the shop doing nothing very useful except perhaps to hold the ceiling up. I wrapped them barber pole style with red wrap that says, surprisingly enough "BARGAIN BOOKS". It was a big job. A big big job.

Look, I know it's rampant commercialism. I know I'm exploiting people's addiction to consumerism. I know it's just plain tacky. But guess what? I love it! As I behold my bright green and red book cave with its fluorescent lighting, I smile to myself and say, 'Lo, it is good.' Not out loud though - that would be strange.

This entry has reminded me of Twin Peaks which I was completely obsessed with when my kids were small. My older daughter has grown up into the kind of person who would love the series so I suggested we get it out on DVD and watch it together.

She thought this was a great idea and told me that she remembers Twin Peaks from when she was small. Not the show itself which she didn't watch - but the ads, all of which contained a visual of a body and the words "... wraapt in plaastic..."

She was five or so and didn't know what any of it meant but somehow through those ads, she came to associate plastic wrapping with death and thought it was the normal thing to do - that we are all wrapped in plastic before being plonked into the old coffin.

Later on, when she had begun to read for herself, voraciously but dyslexically, she encountered the common phrase 'the late and unlamented' for someone who was not missed in death and therefore somehow neglected.

For several years she thought it said 'the late and unlaminated' and found it sad that some people could be so unloved that they had no-one to wrap them in plastic after they had died.

did you really have to bring that up?

Today, a small girl vomited all over the floor of my shop.

I was on duty by myself and I heard a plaintiff voice cry out from the depths of our cavernous shop, "Excuse me, could I have some assistance down here?" In the very back aisle of the store, a small grandma type woman was struggling under the weight of the heaving retching child in her arms.

Ugh.

I hurried to her side and instinctively extended my hands to help her in any way I could. Then I realised that she, the child and a three foot radius of shop floor were covered in red lumpy vomit.

Double ugh.

I instinctively retracted my hands again.

"She's not very well," said the poor Grandma.

Hmmm. You can say that again.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," said the poor Grandma.

"That's fine," I said. "You just get her home. I'll take care of this."

Translation: Get your barfing granddaughter out of my shop.

I called Customer Service and asked if they could send a cleaner around to fix it for me. Well, no, Customer Service explained - the cleaners won't clean inside a shop. It's not their job.

"But," I said, "If you ask Jo, she'll come and help me. She is the GOOD Cleaning Lady."

Customer Service explained that they couldn't call Good Cleaning Lady Jo directly. The request would have to be radioed through to the EVIL Boss Cleaning lady who is none too happy at the moment because her company just lost the cleaning contract on the whole centre.

I wondered how Customer Service could tell the Evil Boss Cleaning Lady was particularly unhappy. She has always been one of the most bizarre and miserable women I have ever had the opportunity to observe in her natural habitat. Evil boss cleaning lady takes her job description seriously and it is NOT in her job description to clean up after any of the staff of any of the shops. In fact, we are not even supposed to put our rubbish in the bins. Those bins are provided for customers, says Evil Boss Cleaning Lady. I once put a small piece of cardboard in one of the centre's rubbish bins. She saw me do it and took the cardboard out of the bin. She very deliberately placed it on the floor all the while looking me in the eye. It was like some kind of crazy challenge.

I dare you to put your rubbish in my bins again.

She straightened slowly, still eyeballing me like John Wayne, in any number of his movies, putting the uppity heathen Injuns back in their place.

I double dare you.

"I'm afraid you're on your own with the vomit situation, dude," said Customer Service. Yes. It's true. The girl at Customer Service calls me 'dude'.

But my question remains - what could this woman do that could possibly make her seem even more unhappy than usual? It's kind of scary really.

I was on duty by myself, as I said, so I couldn't go out to get cleaning gear. I have the basic equipment in the shop of course - a broom, a cloth, a bottle of disinfectant spray - but nothing of the caliber required to combat the kind of damage a projectile vomiter can inflict in a matter of seconds.

And the smell! The smell was permeating the entire space. Customers were streaming out the door. I had to do something!

It's amazing how much you can achieve without inhaling when you must. On my haunches, armed only with tissues and Orange Magic spray clean, I managed to mop up almost all of the mess.

Then as I stood up, I looked out through the front of my shop and saw the cavalry riding down the corridor to my rescue. Well, actually, it was two cleaning people - Good Cleaning Lady Jo and Nice Cleaning Guy Brian pushing their cleaning carts. They were accompanied by Kent, the Centre Manager.

Well, that little spew had certainly caused a kerfuffle, hadn't it? Kent is pretty cool. He strides about the centre with his trusty walkie talkie ever to his ear, just about the only man in our small tropical city who still wears a tie to work. He made a Kent joke as he approached. "What's this I hear? You vomited all over your floor? What'd you do that for"

"I got bored," I replied. "You know how it is."

Everyone thought this was pretty funny. I said to Jo, "I thought you weren't allowed to clean in my shop."

"Kent told me to," she replied innocently. "What was I supposed to do - say no to KENT???"

Kent's chest expanded a little at the mention of his power.

Jo and Brian went forth with mops, both wet and dry, and small spray cans filled with overpoweringly pleasant odours.

As they finished swiping their mops back and forth, ridding me at last of the contents of that small child's over full stomach, I said, "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you! You are so good to me."

Jo said matter of factly, "Well, you're always good to me too."

It's true. Just that morning I gave her a tiny discount on some books for her kids. It dosn't matter that the amount is small, it's just that everyone likes the acknowledgement that what they do is appreciated. Same with the security guards. All of them repay me by looking after me above and beyond the call of duty.

A lot of people think that Kent and those like him have the most important jobs in these kind of places - but the truth is, Kent went away for a holiday and nobody even noticed he was gone.

Try going a week or even a day without cleaning staff and security. God love 'em.

the whole Harry Potter and Twilight thing...

I know I'm late to the Harry Potter discussion but for Book People it's a debate that never really goes away. It raises its head again nowadays with the gobsmackingly popular Twilight series. I haven't read it myself - I don't do vampire romance (or Kills & Wound as I like to refer to it) but my daughter is a bookaholic who has to try every new book she sees and she tells me that Twilight sucks like a Hoover on crystal meth. We don't actually sell the series in The Incidental Bookshop but if only we had a dollar for every starry eyed tweenage girl who comes in asking for this tale of unrequited blood lust... Well, even a cent would do; we could still buy a small island and a lifetime supply of garlic to keep all those smoulderingly angsty vampires away from us.

So, does the fact that the Harry books and now the Twilight series are generally not considered great writing negate the fact that they have made avid readers out of millions of kids who have never before willingly picked up a book for pleasure?

My own opinion is that great writing is in the mind of the reader. If fifty seven and a half million people want to read the latest installment of Harry Potter so badly that they can't wait till nine a.m for the shops to open and start queuing hours before dawn like crazy people in order to make sure they get a copy, then it's good writing. It might not be MY kind of good writing but it's certainly doing something right in the communications arena.

Let me tell you what Harry Potter fever was like at my house. I've never had even the tiniest smidge of interest in Harry Potter and neither did my older daughter the bookaholic.

But my younger daughter did. Well, she's not all that young really; she's going on nineteen now and is reading the series from start to finish again, as she rides the train, day in, day out, to her boring job.

She has never been interested in books. When she was a child she was always on the move, up and down trees, on and off bicycles, and when she was a teenager, she was always on the phone, always on the lookout for action, except for the week after the latest Harry Potter came out. Then she was a different kid, in her room with her head in the book till she finished it. Six months before the final Harry book was released, she told me she was buying it the moment it came out and straight away locking herself in her room . She vowed she would not answer her phone or read a paper or the surf the net till she had finished it in order to avoid spoilers.

I remember one day when she was seventeen and the latest Harry movie had just come out, she said to me at about lunch time, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.'

I looked at her like she was mad and said, 'I hate Harry and besides I have work to do.'

She stuck her lip out like she used to when she was three and went off to her room.

The next night, she came out of her room and said, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.' This time I laughed in her face. She stuck her lip out like she used to when she was three and went back to her room.

I sat there trying to work - but then I got to wondering how long it was since she and I last went to the movies together. And how long it had been since I had made that common parental sacrifice of going to a movie I loathed just because one of my kids wanted to see it.

It had been a while.

Somehow I found myself at the web site of the local cinema and found there was a
9 pm session that we could make if we hurried.

So I knocked on her door. I went in and said, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.'

'Really?' Her face lit up and she literally jumped up and down for joy just like she used to when she was three.

I remember it was just coming on winter and I am such a sook - I don't like to go out in the cold. I said to her, 'Hey, do you think it would be okay if I wore my moccasins?'

She said, 'Your what?'

I said, 'My moccasins.'

She said, 'Those black furry things?'

I said, 'Yeah.'

She said, 'They're slippers, mum. Stop fooling yourself.'

So away we went. As I remember, I changed my shoes and the movie was tolerable. It didn't turn me into a fan but what a great night it was - to be walking into a cinema on a cold night with my girl smiling by my side.

On the morning the last Harry Potter book came out, she was there, as threatened, at the bookshop at the crack of sparrowfart to pick it up. She cuddled and kissed the book on the way home in the car, taunting herself by flipping it open to the last page but stopping herself from reading what was there.

Then she got this really wistful look on her face and said, 'Oh, mum - why can't I be a wizard? ... Everybody who's anybody is a wizard nowadays. A wizard or vampire slayer. I am so boring!'

I said, 'Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm just a vampire wizard slayer myself and jeez, I can hardly keep my eyes open, it's so dull.'

She said, 'Don't be ridiculous, mum - there's no such thing as a vampire wizard slayer. Everybody knows that.'

I looked at her like I imagine CIA agents look at people when they talk about their jobs. 'Yeah, well, that's what we want you think.'

self help books and the psychiatrists who loathe them...

I read recently that psychologists have finally taken a small step towards acknowledging that many of the strategies recommended by the stupendously popular self help movement actually work.

Well, duh!

Oh, I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Why wouldn’t mental health professionals feel threatened by a movement that seriously impacts their livelihood? Let’s face it, the advice we give our sanity challenged associates has increasingly changed from, ‘I’ll give you the number of my therapist.’ to ‘I’ve got a great book you can borrow.’

Self help books get around the world faster than swine flu rumours around the internet. Self Helper One buys it and is so impressed and de-stressed by the self-help it contains that he cannot wait to pass it on to Self Helper Two. Self Helper Two is in turn so radically enlightened by the information that she no longer needs assistance and hands it on to Self Helper Three. Self Helper Three is days away from embarking on a bus tour to Darwin and won’t have time to finish before he leaves. Could he possibly take it with him? But of course, Self Helper Two insists. After all, a large part of helping yourself is helping someone else. Self Helper Three reads the book on the bus and is so excited and enthused and determined to shake off his past that he leaves his luggage on the bus and walks off into the Northern Territory desert to become a roadie for a passing Aboriginal rock band . He leaves the book in the pocket of the seat in front of him where it is later found by a beautiful Swedish backpacker who can't work out why, for all her blonde locks and long legs and big jugs, she still can't find love. She eventually gives the book to the long term companion it helps her find for his second cousin who is in jail for defrauding the generous Swedish social security system and then... Well, you get the picture. By the time that adventurous self-help book, dog eared and spine broken, finally ends its journey in a dusty second hand book shop in Glasgow, it has passed through the hands of no fewer than fifty struggling people, leaving them a little happier and wiser.

Let’s do a little comparison shopping. Say a therapist charges $80 an hour, one session per week and that on average each of his patients stay in therapy for a year. That equals $4160 per patient. On the other hand, the self-help book which cost Self Helper One $15.95 has made fifty sadder people wiser at a cost of 0.319 cents per Self Helper.

We are talking the Little Psycho Babble Engine who Could here. We are talking the featherweight champion of the mental health world, punching way above his weight. Self help books made me the woman I am today - still mad as a one armed traffic cop but comfortable that way.

Some of my favourites:

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. This book fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world . I can't thank the author enough.

Men Who Hate Women and The Women Who Love Them by Dr Susan Forward. After I got myself out of a bad relationship, this book helped me leave it behind. Truly. It wasn't me, it was him.

Creative Visualisation by Shakti Gawain. Your world is created in your mind. If you can conceive it, you can achieve it. You are the master of your own ship and all of that cliched blah blah blah. But guess what? Cliches get to be cliches by being fact. This stuff is so true, you can take it to the bank. It's so real, you can taste it.

Of course, there's a lot of dross published as well, a lot of complete tossers writing self help books that help nobody but themselves, but you get that in any field. The general philosophy of self help is that we should each take responsibility for every aspect of our own lives and that includes the responsibility of not swallowing, without due examination, anyone else's philosophy . If ever you were duped by some slick talking positive thinker, self help tells you to thank him kindly for the lesson in how not to get duped a second time.

la belle et la bete

I was looking at one of the gorgeous kid's books we have in the shop at the moment - a beautifully illustrated version of a dark medieval fairy tale.

It reminded me of the time I was reviewing for the local paper and the editor forced me to go see a local production of Beauty and the Beast. Yes. You heard me a local amateur theatre production of Beauty and the Beast.

I was like ... Aw... Do I HAVE to?

And they were like ... No, of course you don't have to. And you don't have to do anything for us ever again either ...

Then I was like … OK! OK! I'll go watch the talentless local show-off hacks bring to life an immortal Disney classic…

You know what I hate most about immortal Disney classics?

They're immortal.

Jeez! Die already, Nambi Bambi and Stuperrella! And somebody disconnect Sleeping Beauty's life support system, for god's sake!

But guess what? While the music for Disney's immortal classic Beauty and the Beast was, is and always will be bloody atrocious, and the sweetness of the tweaked for the twenty first century storyline almost requires an insulin shot to process, it's a phenomenal yarn!

Where do I start? There's a such a lot to this tale of trauma and transcendence. Such a lot that a girl who was always considered nice enough but kind of weird, who always nearly, but never quite, fit anywhere she went, a girl with nameless longings and an awful fascination for the beastliness of life, could identify with. In short, a girl like me.

First of all there is a handsome prince, of course. But the handsome prince happens to a prick who thinks he is better than everyone else. He's cruel to an old woman who, unfortunately for him, is an enchantress. She turns him into a beast to teach him a lesson and her spell has a punchline – he shall remain a beast until he genuinely loves someone who genuinely loves him in return. So you have a beast in a suit, a bitter man-beast with no manners nor consideration for others. A man beast who shakes his fist at cruel fate and blames everybody else for his beastliness.

How Freudian can you get?

Enter Belle, a girl who doesn’t fit in, who is a little bit different, who the lovely mob of plebs in the village take great pleasure in mocking.

And so of course they fall in love and both are transformed. Blah blah blah – how banal and so forth. How boring! And yet, it’s a true thing, the transformational power of love. It may be the truest thing in the whole world. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in others and even had it happen to me. There was not a thing in the world that could have made me willingly leave a warm bed in the middle of a cold night till I was changed forever, for the better, by the overwhelming love of a baby who needed me.

Anyhow, for Belle and the Beast, it’s not the normal course of an affair at all. They despise each other at the start and must work their way through the whole beastliness issue before coming to accept both themselves and each other. Then, of course, he is transformed and voila! - he is actually a gorgeous human being underneath the selfishness – as are we all!

The original story was written in France in the 1700s by a writer named Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. It was a dark tale full of all sorts of Jungian shadows. It was abridged and lightened up about twenty years later by Jeane-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and I’d like to complain about this whitewashing of the story but in fact, it’s unlikely we’d know the story at all if it hadn’t been homogenised for public taste.

“Villeneuve's version of the tale also differs from Leprince de Beaumont's in its eroticism and its insistence on the Beast's monstrosity. Villeneuve makes explicit the transgressive sexual union at the heart of this tale. Not only does the Beast repeatedly ask Belle to sleep with him (in Leprince de Beaumont's version he asks her to marry him), but Belle has pleasurable dreams of being courted by a handsome prince. The transgressiveness of these descriptions is intensified by details of the Beast's frightening appearance …” answers.com

I wish I had enough French to understand the original story. But I don’t so I will have to make do with pale translations. Jean Cocteau apparently made a fabulous film version called La Belle et La Bete in the 40s. If I were just a little more of a film geek, I might buy it. But alas, I too am a pale imitation of a true film geek and will have to make do with the pale imitation of the stage version that I saw at the local theatre.

Imagine - a story with a truth so strong that not even an amateur theatre company and an overdose of Disney tunes could kill it!

come the revolution, all bookshops will be run by writers...

I am a bookseller.

But I'm not primarily a bookseller. My highest calling is that of Creative Genius but unfortunately the world hasn't yet realised this and so, I am forced to supplement my meager living by selling books. It's not so bad. Quite sexy in fact at times, when the new stock comes in and there are all those luscious taped up boxes full of unsullied books wanting nothing more than to give up their retail virginity to me. To me! Ooh, it feels so GOOD! Suck it and see for yourselves, all you green eyed book monsters out there. A writer who is also a bookseller. Maybe there is a god after all.

Still, satiating as it can often be, being a bookseller is not an afternoon at the beauty spa. Selling books is hard work. It is at least as hard as writing them - this I know because I have done both - and it is most certainly much harder than reading them. Well, most of them anyhow. I'm sure we all have a difficult book in our past, the reading of which was the frustrational equivalent of having your eyes sandpapered out of their sockets by an angry soccer hooligan. But that is food for another blog...

Now, to the specific aspects of the general difficulty of selling books.

1) Physically, the most difficult thing is that BOOKS ARE HEAVY. Carrying one lonely book from the kitchen to the front veranda to sit in the morning sun and sip a fresh made coffee is no great imposition, it's true. But now I want you to close your eyes and imagine carrying ten or fifteen of the suckers from the back of the shop to the front and then carrying the ten or fifteen that were at the front down to the back for no apparent reason except to participate in the mysterious ritual of 'rotating the stock'. When I first heard of 'rotating the stock', I tried cheating by just picking up a few books at a time and turning a quick circle. But it didn't seem to help sales at all so I stopped doing that - I felt it may have made me look a little bit silly.

2) Emotionally, the most difficult thing of all for a Creative Genius like myself is DEALING WITH THE PUBLIC. The Public, in case you didn't know, is a seething mass of crazy idiosyncrasy*. They want the impossible yesterday. When you offer to order it for them by tomorrow, they huff and they puff and they finally grudgingly agree to wait the extra day for whatever impossible thing it is that they can't live without. So you run around like a cat with a dead rat strapped to its tail and procure the preferred impossibility for them. You dutifully, smugly even, have the impossible sitting there waiting for them to pick up and while they're about it, give your ego a quick but hearty touch up. You know, say something like, "Holy shit! How the HELL did you ever manage to get this impossible thing for me so swiftly? Who are you really? SuperBookGirl? You're astonishing! You're fantastic! God, let me slip you an extra tenner just for being so damn clever" and other suchlike things.

Now keep in mind, this is only what I think should happen, what I am expecting to happen, what God has decreed should happen to all diligent book sellers who go beyond the call of duty for a customer who desires the impossible.

What actually happens is that they don't even bother to pick it up at all.

After a week, you put it back on the shelf sadly. Another week later and you feel glad when someone else buys the impossibility - it hurts too much to see it there, a reminder of your magic making gone unappreciated. Another week later again and the original customer comes back and wants to know where their impossible to find book is. When you tell them that you sent it home with someone who actually wanted it enough to give you money for it, they call you names and walk out, vowing never to return. It's cruel and unusual and I don't know how I go on sometimes.

3) Finally, spiritually, the most difficult aspect of selling books, the roughest, the most soul destroying, is that you somehow have to stop yourself from standing around all day reading the stock. Or not.

Seriously, it's a burden.


* Why don't we just cut out the middle man and spell idiosyncrasy with a z? Idiosyncrazy. That says it all.