A Little Dotty? M*MILLION artifact of character set

Dan, " Hmmm, I always assumed the plate read: M . Million Sometimes a dot is used to indicate multiplication. "Monsieur" is often abbreviated to "M." " You're right, of course. I would actually have preferred to use a "bullet" dot floating at mid-line height for this, but of course the email character set wouldn't support it, so far as I know. But that's how I envisioned what Number Five saw, with his hungover revelation proceeding when he realizes that the dot is not a period but a dot at half-height in the line of text. I tried to approximate it with an asterisk, which of course is also used as a multiplication sign, esp. in most programming languages. BTW I apologize to all for my mishap last couple of posts; I didn't realize my new email software defaulted to HTML.