I'm going to be out of town this weekend for a small convention in Seacaucus. Some friends are getting a hotel room there, and we're going to all crash like penniless college geeks doing the con circuit. I don't see those guys often enough, so there you go.

What this means, however, is that I'm going to be out of town for the Bellefonte Cruise. This fills me with a great deal of ambiguity.

On the one hand, the Cruise is an interesting festival. Bellefonte fills from one end to the other with gearheads and their mechanical prides-and-joys. It's always entertaining to go down a row of Corvettes, like a muscle-car diagram of evolution in action, or the brightly-painted Fairlanes, each lovingly restored in thoroughly improbable paint schemes.

On the other hand, they’ve used my block for the stereo competition the last two years running. Nothing quite like trying to sleep through "WHOOM! WHOOM! WHOOM!" all night long. The local biker gangs go tearing through town, even more rampagy than usual. And the Fifties nostalgia bands set up in front of the library or on the courthouse square and keep the whole damn town awake with megadecibel renditions of "la Bamba" and "Chantilly Lace". It's not a weekend for the nervous or sensitive, sad to say.

Maybe I'll get one of my neighbors to provide a report when I get back from New Jersey.