This week, Sanctuary, Knight Rider, and Doctor Who. Last week, in Part 4 of the comedy Fat Diary, some little old ladies learned a little too much about the mayor’s secret gay life. This week, in Part 5, Tiffani Basil melts down.

SANCTUARY, KNIGHT RIDER.

SciFi Wire has posted Sanctuary: Q & A With Tapping; Stargate star Amanda Tapping discusses the evolution of Sanctuary to a TV series, which premieres October 3. SciFi Wire also posted the intriguing article Knight's Poitier Still Lesbian?

DOCTOR WHO.

According to Tony Grew, a gay actor could play the next Doctor Who. It sounds interesting, but I honestly hope David Tennant keeps playing the role beyond his current contract.

FAT DIARY (FICTION/HUMOR) PART 5.

(This story uses a librarian’s diary to introduce readers to a scifi geek, a closeted mayor, and many other interesting characters, in the West Texas town of Acorn. Read Views from the Acorn Universe next week for another installment, and for sf/f news.) Read Part 1. Parts 2 and 3. Part 4.

January 24, 2001
Dear Fat Diary:

So, as you can guess from my last entry, Ian and I later started dating, while the mayor and his wife suddenly but separately skipped town. As it turned out, even Tiffani couldn’t stick around much longer. A few weeks after the mayor’s geriatric outing, I was approaching the check-out counter one day when she was trying to figure out how much change to give our young town doctor, Bolt Briggs, who had returned an overdue copy of Leaves of Grass. Her head kept bobbing up and down, like an oil derrick.

“Let’s see,” she said, “first we need to minus this by 46 cents, no, 47 cents.”

Bolt laughed that annoying machine-gun laugh of his. “It’s all right there, Jennifer, y’all can keep the change.”

“Jennifer?!” she practically screamed, dropping pennies, nickels, and dimes off the counter. “Jennifer is, like, my sister’s name! Do I look like a Jennifer to you?!”

He tilted his head to one side then the other. “Well, yeah. I’m sorry, I really thought you were Jennifer. I treat you both, and the other one.”

“Jerafani! Her name isn’t ‘The Other One.’ It’s ‘Jerafani.’ My parents liked our names, but couldn’t come up with anything for a third daughter, so they just put together our names. I am like so sick of people bringing that up! Who names their daughter something like that?” Tiffani cringed, her mascara practically flaking off her eyes, and the bows practically popping off her super-bleached hair. “I don’t need this,” she stated, to no one in particular.

“Don’t need what?” I asked, in case maybe she was talking to me. I never found out. She left even more abruptly than the mayor.

I soon learned that she had a history of breakdowns, and had spent some time in a hospital, after one of her sorority sisters introduced her to vodka enemas. Don’t ask. I later learned that Tiffani was also upset because her boyfriend had left town with the mayor. Don’t tell. Tiffani decided to be a stay-at-home mom, while staying at her mom’s home. Worse yet, a week after Tif’s tiff, I learned that government cutbacks were about to phase out the student worker position anyway.

I wound up hiring Ian’s older sister to help out, and I found myself spending more and more time with the Aristotle clan. As her unlikely but suitably literary family name suggests, she’s much smarter than Tiffani, or even Ian for that matter, and has had several papers about the beatnik poets published. She wrote one paper about a famous beatnik poem with 320 lines of mad ravings, all beginning with the word “because.” She titled her paper “No One Asked Why.”

I liked her already!

(Next week, in Part 6, meet the ex.)

Duane Simolke edited The Acorn Gathering and wrote four of its stories, including “Fat Diary.”