I’m sitting in Newark airport waiting for a connection to Austin and I’m reading a UK newspaper which has a story about someone getting fined £16,000 ($28,800) for downloading some games from the Internet. It seems that the UK has chosen to put a stop to the P2P theft of digital property. So I’m thinking about whether this is the beginning of the end of the digital free-for-all, when the man sitting next to me suddenly says, to no-one in particular;

“wampire”

I look at him. He’s sixty-going-on-seventy, he’s got a tanned skin, a white mustache and beard and he’s dressed pretty much like the East European peasant he appears to be. Realizing that I have noticed him, he looks me straight in the eye and slowly repeats the word;

“wampire”

I don’t get it immediately, because I’m not sure what “wampire” means, but it doesn’t take me long to catch on. He points at the image on the flat-screen television that’s hanging from the ceiling about 20 feet away. On the TV screen they’re showing yet another replay of Michael Phelps’ extraordinary series of gold medal races. There’s Michael Phelps arms in the air with a wide grin on his face.

“See teeth,” says my newly acquired acquaintance, “He’s wampire.”

So now I get it, he’s accusing Michael Phelps of being a vampire. Well, it’s quite clear that Michael Phelps has a healthy pair of canines. No doubt about it as far as I can tell, and I’m sure his orthodontist would confirm the fact. However, a pair of canines does not a vampire make. But then the TV starts showing an under water shot of Phelps doing the butterfly.

“See,” says the man proudly, with the conviction of the Professor of Vampirology from Bucharest University (which he might possibly be), “he move like bat.”

I’m tempted to suggest that all the butterfly swimmers move like bats, in fact it could have been called the bat-stroke rather than the butterfly, but then I start thinking…

“Wait a minute, butterfly’s his best stroke, What about that story about his goggles filling up with water and him not being able to see, yet he still swam on and won. Perhaps he was using bat sonar to detect where the lane dividers and the other swimmers were. Do you really think those ears of his are incapable of sonar? All those pictures of him, but have you ever seen a picture of him next to a mirror? What if he was one of the undead? How would anyone know? And more to the point, would he be disqualified on the basis of “not really being alive in the conventional sense.” Perhaps all of the medals he won should count towards the medal total for Transylvania.

I was rescued from a deep discussion of the implications with my Rumanian vampire expert by a call to get on board the plane to Austin.

Ah Austin, where half a million bats live beneath the bridge on Congress and take to the skies at dusk – the same time of day, I believe, that Michael Phelps slips out for a bite to eat.