Most of the action taking place in this story occurred in the mid-1980s, when the threat of industrial pollution was already well known. The narrator was perhaps one of the first to realize that industrial pollution was interconnected with a vast international conspiracy of brain surgeons. He found evidence of this conspiracy not only in the proliferation of brain surgery clinics and in their activities, but in coded messages embedded in bus schedules, in syringe marks on fruit, even in television commercials. Although he played only a minor role in the struggle against the brain surgeons, he...

Second edition enlarged. Dictators' pets are too often ignored-but no longer They're all here in this hilarious collection of madcap ditties: Lenin's cat, Hitler's dog, Qaddafi's sweet-scented camel, Caligula's horse, Mao's cockroach (he banned real pets), Stalin's spider, and many more. The volume also includes philosophers' songs and a Holy Roman opera, "Turmoil in Brindisi" about a long-forgotten ecumenical council called by Pope Sixtus the Sixth, an equally forgotten pope. Written over a period of 35 years, these jottings are also a record of a lifetime of laughter. "Sabrina Ramet's...

The Curse of the Aztec Mummy traces the adventures of Wolf Romulus, a clinically deranged professor at the University of Western Uptown, who manages to get elected Governor of Nebraska after presenting a fake Aztec artefact to a delirious university crowd. His rise and fall from power are set against a background of celebrations of Uptown Okra, the newly designated state vegetable, visits to a clinic for the mentally disturbed, and a visit by extraterrestrials from Planet Xypon.