said the Sasquatch as he stirred a spoonful of honey into his tea. “Since that seems to be where all this folderol started.” “What’s folderol?” I asked. That was a mistake. “Folderol, brouhaha, fuss, commotion, ballyhoo, tempest in a—” “Gilly!” said both Mom and I at once. “Sorry,” he said. The man was a walking thesaurus. Dad said, “We still don’t understand what, exactly, caused the SCIC outbreak. I mean, we know it’s somehow triggered by the visual subliminals inserted by Billy George. However, when we extract the subliminals from the program and replay them on their own, they have no effect on any of our volunteers, but when combined with the bull animation, the subliminals trigger SCIC in one hundred percent of our volunteers.” “It didn’t affect me,” my mom said with a hint of pride in her voice. “Yes, not everybody who had viewed it in the wild, as it were, was affected—only seventy-two percent of the Flinkwater population who viewed the animation got bonked.”
