"We had two bags of 1-up mushrooms, seventy-five pellets of fire flower, five sheets of high-powered stars, a saltshaker half-full of raccoon tail, a whole galaxy of multi-colored turtle shells, hammers, POW blocks, laughers... Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious power-up collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

"The only thing that really worried me was the Lakitu cloud. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an misting binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."