Bill_Wolfe wrote:Pretty good, Robert.
But what's with the Morgenstern thing? I kept expecting him to cast a spell and have Al Majius show up and fight him...
Bill Wolfe
The original audience (the judges for the Toronto Star contest) have almost certainly never read the Al Majius stories, so it wasn't a problem there. But why "Morgenstern"?
There was a Herman Wouk novel (later a movie starring Natalie Wood (whose birth name was Russian -- Gurevitch? Not sure.)) called "Marjorie Morningstar", about an actress born Marjorie Morgenstern whose name was Anglicized. (Morgenstern literally translated from the German
is Morningstar.) This played into Aaron Morgenstern's egotistical self-naming as "The Morningstar" (which, if I remember correctly, is also one of the sobriquets for the angel Lucifer). So -- I could have called the U.N. official "Schmidt" or "Von Braun" (the latter having certain ironic connotations in this context), but the name Morgenstern was still stuck in my head.
People of German ancestry would probably object to my association of officiousness and obesity with Germans, but THAT probably stems from Sergeant Schultz of "Hogan's Heroes" fame, and any number of
burgomeister types from popular fiction and movies.
So -- there you have it. I saw the character as German (definitely European, anyway -- I follow aviation news (part of my job) and am always astonished at some of the bizarre policies that seem designed to put airlines into bankruptcy implemented by the EU), and the name Morgenstern was stuck in my head as the first go-to name for a German character.
Sorry about that...
As for the telltale displays on the collar -- they may only have been there on suits designed for "tourists" who couldn't be trusted to interpret them. (That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. I never said where the displays on Murasaki's suit were located -- although I'd guess they were holographic heads-up images activated by voice command or automatically in emergencies.)
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London (1876-1916)