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took off. Randy Dan will proudly show off his wings (a trophy from a college hot wing eating contest) to anyone wandering past his cube.

Up until a year ago, RD's shape attested to his fascination with the gastronomical arts. Then he got a little healthy living religion and his weight bounced around as he experimented with a variety of diets. He ultimately reached a new, lower mass equilibrium and achieved dimensional stability in the horizontal plane (we are both engineers, and favor such techno-geeky phraseology).

Roger heard the challenge from his table behind ours, and felt the train gaining speed.

"Hey, I'm in for twenty."

In another two minutes we were over four hundred dollars. RD stopped eating. His eyes darted from the money pile to the fountain and around at his friends. He looked like a cornered deer. Then his eyes caught mine and the same lightning thought struck in our brains - heroes. I knew he was going for it. He shoved back from the table, sucked in a big breath and headed up front where the management clan had gathered for the door prize drawing. He turned back to me and squeaked, "Hold the cash for me."

A few weeks before we were sitting in his cube wasting time when the topic of heroes came up. Randy-Dan was going off about some corporate mega-slob, how he'd started with nothing, made billions, revolutionized retailing, da-da-da.

Randy-Dan, or R.D., isn't his real name and I'm not even sure how he got tagged with it. Andy is his real name, but we already had one of those in the group when he hired in, so maybe that had something to do with it. On the other hand, nicknames like his are often born of slurred, drunken misspeaks, or from the punch lines of off-color jokes. In any case, the name stuck and only a few of us even remember his real name anymore.

R.D. clings to concepts like truth and lies, right and wrong, and heroes and villains. He holds them close and warily, like a winning poker hand. Personally, I'm too cynical to believe in much more than a good argument, but the topic of heroes appealed to me, so I engaged.

"Big deal - so he's a genius at lowering standards of quality and taste, exploiting third world kids, adding no value to anything, and turning a huge profit all the while. He is truly a master capitalist. doesn't make him a hero."

"Well, you couldn't do it, and neither can most anybody else." Randy-Dan declared. He punctuated with an authoritative pointing of the nose, sensing that he'd scored an early slam dunk with that retort.

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