Books into Film: Fight Club

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk (1996). Page 47:

“Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it’s been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I’m running the laptop projector so I’m off to one side of the room, in the dark.

“More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth.

“You can swallow about a pint of blood before you’re sick.

“Fight club is tomorrow, and I’m not going to miss fight club.

“Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, ‘I’d hate to see what happened to the other guy.’

“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”

US Servicemen Help Wash Museum Aircraft

…from the Eastern Daily Press (follow link for full article)…

“And the spirit of the so-called friendly invasion was recaptured on Saturday as more than 50 servicemen and women came to the aid of a committed group of volunteers.

But on this occasion they were armed with buckets, sponges and hoses as they helped wash down the planes at the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum.

They travelled from RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath to help the volunteers at the museum in Flixton, near Bungay, by cleaning the aeroplanes that sit outside.

The museum, a tribute to East Anglia’s aviation heritage, has more than 60 aircraft, but the 14 outside need to be washed each year.

It is a big task that is completed by the committed volunteers, but when Dan Janssen, of the Air Force Sergeants Association, met Pam Veale, museum treasurer and education officer, and asked if there was anything he could do to help, she took him up on the offer…”

Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum, Flixton