Chapter 25

Page 266

do you know how to post video material on your Weblog?
YouTube is not invented until 2005

boricua
Puerto Rican

Page 268

davening
Recitation of prescribed Jewish prayers.

that Watergate movie
All the President's Men (1976). It's about Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward investigating the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post.

Page 270

They emerge into the open, high up near a catwalk...suitable for teen adventures, clandestine lovers, well-heeled wrongdoers on the run, and take this vertiginous crossover...
Once again, there's no telling if Pynchon had Hitchcock's Vertigo in mind when he wrote "Bleeding Edge," but it sure is easy to get the two works into a casual conversation.

I've got their album
Is she talking about the band Men at Work?

It's quite possible. The lines that provoke Maxine's comment are: "Look sharp," March ducking behind a vent. "Some gents with metal accessories."

Or, just the fact that to Maxine it looks more like a band setting up to play on the roof than it does the Stingers they saw in the video.

Or, she just means the DVD they just watched.

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introduced piranhas into the Doctor's swimming pool
fwiw, if the pool was chlorinated, the fish would die pretty quickly. There are chlorine-free pool disinfectant systems, but I don't know if they were around then.

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Yozhik v Tumane
Real short film. YouTube. More info at Wiki where you can learn, among other things, that the title means "hedgehog in the fog."

podyobka
Russian подъёбка = a "trick" or "practical joke." It's a mild obscenity, however (the word is derived from the root -ёб = fuck) so it's perhaps more in the spirit to translate it as "dicking around."

what Flintstones call page right out of history
Lyrics to the theme song of the cartoon The Flintstones:

Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones.

They're the modern stone age family.
From the town of Bedrock,
They're a page right out of history.