Valentine's Day

"As I threaded my way glumly through the milling crowd to join Parnell and Maida I found my way blocked by the same lady tourist who had just interrupted the clerk and me.  She was intently studying a large road map affixed to the wall, leaning over and thoughtfully scratching her fanny.  The target was magnificent and I stood itchily weighing the possibilities for making a successful drop kick...

She was hoydenishly clad in Bermuda shorts large enough to sail the Kon-Tiki.  She wore a bandana top and a girlish head scarf and on the incredibly tiny feet of her lumpy piano legs she wore some sort of gay open-toed sandals.  She was, I saw, of the common or sun-worshiper variety of tourist, looking as though she had been but recently dipped, and held, in a boiling lobster pot.  As Mencken once said, she was the sort of female that made a man want to burn every bed in the world. 

"Merciful God," I thought, studying this prize specimen of homotourosis.

-Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder

Chinese New Year- Chinatown, Manila