Ken Wheeler is like a crazy cousin; the one you only see at weddings and funerals and despite the reverence of the occasion you have to fight the compulsion to knock his head against a brick wall. Yet if anyone else tried to hurt him you'd inexplicably do whatever you must to prevent that. Go figure? Nikolai was just bat-shit-crazy like so many geniuses who out-lived their own potential, unable or unwilling to accept it later in life that they didn't have all the answers and that some of their detractors actually were correct, perhaps even more often then not. Someone told that other Ken, when he was just a wee lad, "how gifted and handsome you are" and he took it to heart. No, seriously! Real Dale Carnegie stuff! Besides, his mother wouldn't lie... (Something else, too, about "growing family" and Long Island tomatoes. Or was it potatoes, in Muttontown? Anyway, God bless mom, her boy Ken and all the rest. )
I'm somewhat in owe of these three, to varying degrees. See I never did learn that parlor trick: the one where you blow smoke up your own ass. Oh, the places I might have gone but for that.