Archibald and the Steaming Polenta of Doom Some short extracts . . .  Archibald's latest adventure The hangar was thick with the stench of cheap coffee that had been roasted for too long.  At the far end stood the evil Dr Plexus's giant flying cappuccino machine, preparing for take-off.  The steam gauge pressure dial was already nearing the red mark - soon it would be up to full steam, and ready to take to the air. Dr Plexus's squad of hypnotised henchmen were loading the last of the ground coffee beans onto it.  In a few minutes, it would be launched on its diabolical mission - to cover the civilised world with a thick layer of deadly milky froth.  The evil Doctor chuckled maniacally to himself as he prepared his own biplane with sprinklers - he was looking forward to a victory flypast at the end of it all, when he would dust the lethal foam with a light sprinkling of nutmeg and cinnamon as a finishing touch. Archibald had to do something.  Only he could save the world.  Yet again, it was up to him to thwart this villain, and fight for justice. But suddenly, he felt seven slippery rubbery legs wrap around him! The giant mutant octupus with the wooden leg!  He had heard about it, but had though it was just a story to frighten off unwelcome visitors.  Now he was trapped.  The foul fetid smell of deep sea decay mingled in his nostrils with Dr Plexus's cheap coffee - he felt like fainting.  But he had to be strong.  What could he do?  The one hundred and sixty-four giant mutant suction cups of those thick rubber legs were all over him.  Each of those seven ghastly tentacles held one cup of the evil Doctor's fiendishly poisonous espresso, and slowly those seven cups were being raised to his lips by the incredibly strong octupus &ldots; The Modern Age in arms "What's going to happen to the bar?  Who's the new owner?" "That is even sadder news.  The saddest.  I have had to sell to the American chain.  Età moderna." Età moderna.  Modern Age.  Modern Age! I took a step back, and felt like fainting.  The bar was to be taken over by that disgusting, foul, tasteless, gross, appalling American chain!  The chain that had already ruined half of the bars of Milan, Lecco, Como, Cremona!  The bar that was proud - yes, proud - to serve the "Big-occino, il cappuccino più grande", a bar that didn't serve espresso, a bar that sold doughnuts at breakfast, fake hamburgers at lunchtime, all washed down with ghastly 'popular' music, consumed in a bright tasteless décor reminiscent of the lowest levels of Dante's Inferno. The enemy was plain in view, huge, hateful, all disguise cast off.  It was the Modern Age in arms.  Whatever the outcome, there was a place for me in that battle. Hooper tries his hand at writing PZ2491 wiped the space plankton off his helmet's visor and sat down.  The message coming up on the head-up display of his contact lenses was garbled.  It looked like there was an oligopoly going on amongst the zanthium mining companies of Kalapoppinglum Minor.  A cartel!  How he hated that word.  The capitalist scum of the Kalapoppinglum Minor system might think that they had the production of the galaxy's rarest most essential mineral wrapped up between them, but they had reckoned without PZ2491, the existentialist socialist space musketeer - known to his friends as PZ2  The android who was so human, sometimes even his luscious maintenance engineer Charmerella forgot that he was an android. Plenty of greedy space mining conglomerates had tried to make a dirty dime, in various corners of the universe, and so far he had brought all of them to justice.  He remembered the words of his hero Sartre: 'L'enfer, c'est les autres.' The History of the Negroni The Negroni is a remarkably fine invention, but while history books continue to devote far too many pages to minor inventions such as gravity, electricity, the toasted cheese sandwich machine and latex, the population of this world remains woefully ignorant about this particular objet de boisson. Various stories abound about its provenance, and many is the bar that claims to have been the crucible concerned in the first act of Negroniesque creation. Chief contender: the Bar Negronissimi in Milano, now a tourist hotspot in the Galleria Emmanuelle.  Here, it is recounted, the dashing Count Y. fired his pistol blindfold at a barman who had been impertinent in his allusions to the marital infidelities of the Contessa.  None of the three rounds had hit the barman, the Count being as hopeless at shooting as he had been in satisfying his wife.  He had proceeded to removed his blindfold, draw his sword and skewer the offender to the wall.  The diminished bar staff were left with three shattered bottles, and, not wishing to waste such liquids, decided to mix the contents together, straining out the shattered glass in the process, and thereby created a new cocktail - which they named after the Contessa's recent string of large black lovers. Another bar, in Rome, the Bar Negronaccio, claims to be the genuine site of its creation.  According to this fine establishment, in the 1860's the entire back room consisted of one enormous, gigantic roulette wheel.  But instead of the numbers one to thirty-six, the spinning contraption here had twenty resting places for the hard-working ball - not actually a ball, it was in fact the glass eye of a former employee, of whose fate little is known other than that it involved an irate and belligerent tortoise - and each place was labelled, not with a number, but with the label of one of the bar's bottles.  Thus to nominate one's bet one had to buy a drink of the appropriate variety, put the notes of an appropriate amount under the glass to signal the wager, and les jeux étaient faits, as it were; after the event, one would then drain the chalice in an appropriate display of elation or despair.  One day, the young Signor T., in debt to his eyeballs and keen to reduce his indebtedness to a more acceptable navel sort of level, came with the accumulated savings of various friends and lovers.  All those friends and lovers of his gullible enough, that is, to believe his smoothly-recounted plans of investing the money in a foolish device that would allow the transmission of voices down a metal wire.  He had come to gamble; but he was not naïve enough to put all that oodle on one solitary drink.  He needed to increase that oomph by a factor of six, and so it occurred to him that his best chance was to spread the money on three numbers - that is, on three different drinks.  He chose the three drinks by asking what had been the previous three winners; he ordered those three drinks from the bar; and the rest is cocktail history.  The name Negroni unfortunately refers to the three large black slaves that the gambler in question shot in his ire, after losing the accumulated fortunes of all those friends and lovers that day on the table. And yet another, 'definitively genuine' story, is recounted by the Bar Negrononi in Torino.  Here, it is said, in 1833 the mad alchemist Dottor Z. was demonstrating to a 'professional colleague' - no doubt a fellow member of the Torino Alchemists' Guild - his latest technique for turning water into gold, or milk into Archibald books, or some such transformation involving an inestimable increase in value.  And, lacking his phials, and apparatus and so on, he took three bottles of appropriately coloured contents from the bar to simulate his experiment.  And the rest was cocktail history - or rather, another cocktail history - once they had sample that simulated gold; in this version, no mention is made of the name's derivation.