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Grady Adparnassum (As Others See Us), former staff editor for Wolfman Jack, one-time skydive instructor and noted authority on the lost choral music of Albania.  Grady says he is about to embark on a bicycle jaunt across Argentina, in search of the Welsh-descended yodelers of western Patagonia. 

Henry Blackburn (jpt Jazz Lines Special Feature) genially escorts us again into the '47 Chicago jazz scene, wherein an evening's venture nets the delightful and the dubious (Bing and Lee: Jazz Limited and the Victory Club). Additionally, Part III of his Musical Chronology: Age 23 to mid-1960's presents highlights from his life as performer, promoter, and patron of the music he loves.

Ray Dadberry (Sci-Fi Furever) is the dean of old-timey SF scribblers, with more book and story titles to his name than Carter has Little Liver Pills.  Best known for The Martian Diaries (1947) and The Illuminated Man (1951), he has collected a broom closet full of trophies and certificates from every organization willing to dispense them.  Now an advisor for educational TV, he spends most days twiddling.  Sometimes appears as helpless oldster in TV commercials.

Clarabelle McGrabbe (Artzy-Krafty) has been a longstanding contestant on Who Wants to Be a Bankrupt? and Hollywood Polygons, a chef-trainee for White Castle and a high-profile microbond analyst for Bumfizz-McHoon Moneylenders. She has published a scathing investigation of the first Chester A. Arthur administration, Prologue to Screwup Bigtime (Neopitman Press, 1990).

Willis Quick  (March of the Z-Men) revisits our cyber-pages with a brief snippet from his last uncompleted novel, Death for a Distant Stranger (ca. 1987), from which we once showed you some cowboys vs. aliens action, way back a few issues ago.  It finds intrepid dick R. Poole trying to make sense out of a murder at an archaeological dig and finding a whiff of creepy mystery in the pages of an old pulp magazine.

Irvin (Dusty) Rhodes (Alleys) rose from rodeo clown in the 1960s to CEO of a small electronics company in Silicon Valley in the 1980s.  Along the way, Dusty discovered he had a talent for storytelling, put in a stint (under the tutelage of Wolfman Jack) as an all-night jock at station WXKV in Settler’s Wells, CA, and in 1990 collected the scripts and prompts he had written there into The Boy from Eepaneema, a bestseller in the category of oleaginous nostalgic humor.

Rupert E. Riptree (Believe It—Or What?) was the world-famous proprietor of his cartoon-factoid empire for five decades, from three-a-day vaudeville to three-color TV.  Single-handedly (he drew left-handed), Riptree disseminated more bizarre disinformation than the Nixon, Reagan and both Bush administrations combined and made a tidy private-enterprise fortune doing so.  Hurray! Says jpt to the free market of lies and surrealized logic, and long may it wave!

Maurice Speculum (On Quantifying) is a guest lecturer and quondam researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Nanotechnology in West Harbor, with many publications in his CV, including those in journals such as New Math Weekly, Zeitgeisting mit Klaus, Polly’s Math Revue and Big Number Gazette.  His immediate ambition is to retrain as a sous-chef and sommalier at the Food and Beverage Institute of Colorado.

James Thumper (The Night the Chicken Coop Blew Up) is the well-beloved geezer and violent curmudgeon from all those years at The New Yawper magazine, best known for fueling a few cheap Danny Kaye movies and scrawling increasingly larger blurry cartoons over many walls and objects in Gotham Town as his eyesight deteriorated. He contributed some words to the language—“mittyism,” “thumperism,” etc.  This MS. was recently uncovered in the Reject Pile Archive of the Thumper Collection, University of Northeastern Ohio at Hoople, on the back of a hound dog doodle.

Lewis Unserwasser (Unsafe at Any Time) is a respected investigative reporter for the Morturary Gazette,  Rocky Mountain Standard, Women’s Worn Daily and other organs.  He has collected his most famous pieces in a volume, Fire! Fire! Fire! (Gnu Aldine Press, 2003).  He is currently finishing a definitive exposé of the Wolfman Jack phenomenon.

Vasta Waastland (Kwala-Tee-Vee) is a world traveler and frequent guest on local cable channels everywhere.  She has studied the impact of television on unborn children at the Svenska Norska Finnduddie Institutskja and has written the definitive book on self-propelled wooden boats north of the Arctic Circle, Sgrunsjunte eyo Oomfaala (Presska Danzo-Swedinska, Cobenhavn, 2002).

jptArchive Issue 5

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The Journal of Provincial Thought

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jptArchive Issue 5