ANOTHER COUNTRY HEARD FROM – As if the spate of lunatic letters wasn’t enough, your greatly put-upon Editor is aggrieved to report that he has received a communication from the lamentable Miss Gutthwacker – posted, it appears, from her bed in the Western East Roxbury Lyingin Hospital, Composting Centre & Nunnery, and typed, so we are informed, by the only part of her anatomy not covered by a cast – her left big toe. The sum total of the communication, a letter received by carrier pigeon, is the word “Hi.” That’s all – just “Hi.” Your Editor, who in this line of work must ALWAYS be grateful for small favors, IS grateful – grateful that it didn’t meander on like her columns, always aiming at, but never quite achieving, the English language.

REGARDING APPLICANTS – Your Editor has received, by the latest count, some 648 letters, telegrams, telexexs, teletypes, emails and smoke signals from various parties wishing to take over Gutthwacker’s space. A careful examination of these by Senior Office Dog Napoleon Brandy reduced the number to 177, while a further review by office puppy Sampson cut it to a manageable 41, which your Editor then posted on the special web site, loonybincolumnist@wacko.nuts. Readers were invited to cast votes for their favorite (a totally unscientific and quite possibly hazardous method, to be sure, but, as we have to save money somewhere, the cheapest one available), and after three weeks of balloting, we can report the results – Nada! That’s right, nothing – zip, zilch, zero! Oh, sure, the ten whose letters we ran in recent weeks each received a handful of votes – except Bob the Attack Cat, who garnered nearly 9,000, most of which appear to have been sent from Chief Nylon’s computer. Ballot-box stuffing may fly in Chicago, but here in the pure precincts of Northfield-on-the-Dog, such chicanery will not do, so Bob has been disqualified (a pity, because he had a lot to recommend him). Your Editor’s personal favorite, Miss Gloxinia Portmanteau, the exotic dancer, obtained a few votes, but most of the more than 12,000 responses tallied plainly indicated NONE OF THE ABOVE! Of course there were write-ins for the Usual Suspects (all of whom have been rounded up and put on the first milk train out of town) – Mickey Mouse, Alfred E. Newman, Ulysses S. Grant and Peewee Herman.

This being the state of things as press time approached, your Editor was prepared to bite the minne ball and hire Marcus Aurelius Halfbury, the gossip columnist at the Timeless Agony (it’s all gossip over there), an ineffective if inoffensive purveyor of small talk disguised as news, who was rumored to work for peanuts (which, as it turned out on further investigation, to be cashews) and would thus fall within our budget. At the penultimate moment, just as we were winding the crank on our wall-mounted telephone to call Halfbury, a Furtive Person appeared at the office door and by gesticulations indicated that our presence was required in the corridor. We stepped outside (taking care to bring our arquebus with us as a precaution) and demanded of the Furtive Person what his business was. Touching a grimy forefinger to his pearly white lips, he withdrew a document from his codpiece, thrust it into our hands, and then turned on a dime (which he first threw to the floor) and departed in a Trice (a late-model one with brass wheels and a Paris taxi horn).

Nonplussed to the max, we returned to our desk to peruse the document (after first disinfecting it, of course, and sending the staff home lest the document contain something either incendiary or incriminating). As it was written in a code obviously based on the Code of Hammurabi, we pulled down our Babylonian-Greek dictionary and set to work. We confess that we labored long over our translation and decodification, but in the end we triumphed (as superior brain power always must). At the conclusion of our labors, we sat back in stupefaction at what lay before us – an astonishment to end all astonishments, a shock to end all shocks, a perplexity to end all perplexities, a conundrum to – well, you get the drift. It was, in short, an astonishing and shocking perplexity that left us in a conundrum, and one which, owing to the fact that we have now come to the end of our space, will have to be revealed in the next issue.