It's Thursday

And I'm finally sitting down to watch

The episode of Young Indiana Jones

From last Saturday night

This is the episode

That I forgot to set up the VCR for

And actually drove home and back from Janet's

To set up for,

After dinner with Janet's parents

Only a few minutes into the episode,

Which is taking place in 1916 Princeton,

Where Indy is in high school

(And where I was in high school 50 years later),

The screen fills with a colorful book cover -- Yikes!

It's a Tom Swift book about an "electric runabout"

That Indy is reading

He even starts reading aloud

And we see the page

And then the action itself

Until Indy's girlfriend

Shakes him out of his reverie

Come to think of it,

This is reminiscent of how computer game players

In Piers Anthony's latest Xanth book,

Demons Don't Dream,

Which I started yesterday,

Step through the screen and into the scene

Why Yikes?

Yesterday I had finished the last of seven straight

New Tom Swift books that I'd been consuming

I'd been fully prepared for coincidences

To start popping up during that reading

Because of the ones that occurred last fall

While I read the previous batch of new Swift books

(See Driven Up A Tree Near The Field Of Waking Dreams,

Tiger By The Tale,

The Same Only Different,

Tempest in a Teapot,

Drumsticks and Sharkmeat,

And Colonel Bleep)

(Which reminds me,

There's a whole section in Demons Don't Dream

Devoted to a village where, due to censorship,

All colorful language comes out as "bleep")

Also, though coincidences kept happening

Through that couple of weeks in the fall,

Hardly anything had happened since

And it was now March

Well, we all know that

A watched pot never boils

And sure enough,

Nothing coincidental happened

While I was reading these seven volumes

(Well, all right,

There were a couple of mild events:

In one of the books

Tom's security system

Asks a rock music trivia question

About two sisters in a group with a lot of heart,

And the answer is Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson --

Later that day,

In the credits to a movie (Footloose I think),

One of the songs was co-performed by Ann Wilson of Heart;

Saturday I started Mutant Beach,

The fifth of the seven books,

Where large, dangerous sea creatures

Are threatening swimmers,

Which prompts Tom to mention Jaws;

That night while Janet was putting Benjamin to bed

I was watching TV and settled for a while on

What turned out to be the movie Jaws 3;

Later we finished watching the video that Harry Sepp

Had sent me for my birthday;

During the scene where Harry and Priit are playing seals,

Priit's girlfriend Vicky starts singing the Jaws trademark tones (Dun-dun-Dun-dun...)

As they are swimming across the pool)

At any rate,

Nothing much had happened,

Or so I thought --

Little did I know that this Indy 'sode was so relevant

Right while I was in the thick of the books

As soon as I saw this Tom Swift scene

I called Janet and told her,

Then I went back to watching

A little while later

Indy and his girlfriend Nancy

Go in to see her father,

Who is typing furiously at a desk

Where several Tom Swift books are scattered!

Indy asks Mr. Stratemeyer

How the new Tom Swift book is coming along --

He's the series author!!

(Who "Victor Appleton" must have actually been)

Mr. S. explains that he's having a problem

Extricating Tom from his current predicament

And Indy suggests a plot twist that will save the day

So, who's thinking up the plot twists

In this interweaving of real life and Tom Swift stories?

(Not to mention Piers Xanthony and Harry Sepp,

Who've been previously sighted in coincidence country

As attested to in the following stories:

Brother!,

Cats And Dogs,

Common Knowledge,

Didi Dada,

Double Solitaire,

McCary,

MJ Between NJ And LJ (Peace of my Mind),

Moonlighters)