{"id":2359,"date":"1982-11-11T14:05:32","date_gmt":"1982-11-11T14:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/?p=2359"},"modified":"2021-02-27T18:33:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-27T18:33:02","slug":"secret-field-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/secret-field-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Field Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

I cannot search the field guide on 12treasures.com or other as id like (in one waterfall for all iterations of any certain phrase e.g. “shadow”) so im transcribing it here so i may search match case; i couldnt find this resource anywhere.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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MA\u00ceTRE D\u2019EAMON
\nTaboo d\u2019h\u00f4te<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From the wine racks to the coatcheck room, from the sanitary hand-drying machine in the restroom to the basin of melting mints by the cash register; from the \u201chave it our way\u201d roughage window to the garbage-gobbling clown can in the parking lot, the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon calls America\u2019s many elegant eateries his home away from home.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon sees to it that when you arrive at a restaurant, the parking lot is full, but a smiling young man is there to take your car. When you escape the restaurant some hours later, the smiling young man is not there. Neither is your car. That is the work of the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon, whose highest calling is to give his victims an evening they will never forget. When you enter a restaurant to celebrate your anniversary (after planning the occasion for weeks), it is the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon who concocts a mix-up in the reservations. It is he who arranges for you to wait at the bar for an hour with three intoxicated salesmen until the captain says, \u201cOh, have you been waiting long? We should have a table for you any minute.\u201d Forty minutes later, you are seated. The mysterious stains left on the tablecloth by the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon give you something to talk about until your waiter gets back from the dentist. The Ma\u00eetre has kindly seen to it that you
\nare seated right by the kitchen door, so you have a chance to see how real dishwashers smoke marijuana. (Look at the cook. Did you know they worked with\u00a0their shirts off?)<\/p>\n

At last your dinner arrives. You do not recognize it, thanks to the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon. It was under his influence that you ordered what looks like a briquet from the bowels of Mordor\u2019s Mount Doom, and a frozen something from icy Lapland. Dessert? Coffee? A liqueur? Just the bill? Very well. The Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon has seen to it that the restaurant does not take credit cards. A check? The restaurant does not take checks. Cash? It does not take cash. Krugerrands. The restaurant takes Krugerrands. As you are leaving, the D\u2019eamon inspires your waiter to tell you how much the staff enjoyed watching you eat with all the wrong cutlery. You exit the restaurant to the gales of the busboys\u2019 laughter and the sight of the captain\u2019s palm, patiently waiting for his tip. No inconvenience is too great for the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon, so long as it is more inconvenient for you.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Ma\u00eetre is un-American. He is unspeakable, uncivilized, inhuman: the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon is French. Arriving in America with Lafayette, he first conveyed his lack of manners to Jefferson\u2019s butlers in Monticello. From there, he moved north to the capital, where he currently inflicts a fourstar array of annoyances on devotees of Michelin and McDonalds alike.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: You will find this creature wherever you find hammered copper coats-of-arms on the walls, tufted naugahyde dining nooks, unlimited salad bars, the piano stylings of Hugh LaGoon, sink-sized brandy snifters, a wine list as big as a family Bible, and a waiter whose hair has been painted on \u2026 by the Ma\u00eetre D\u2019eamon himself.<\/p>\n

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SWEATSYLPHS
\nAthletarum supportatae<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Once upon a time, these physical phitness phiends plagued only the (otherwise idle) rich. Their exclusive haunts were then-restricted Athletic Clubs, the gymnasiums of well-endowed universities, and elite health spas; so it was commonly believed that the creatures\u2019 earthly mission was to tempt and taunt the inbred and overfed into working up the only honest sweats of their lives. Lately, however, members of the middle class, and even people with jobs, have begun to break out in sneakers and head bands and can be seen staggering and hyperventilating through the dawn-lit streets, the whole world their treadmill, jowls flushed, eyes blank, obviously bewitched and utterly in the power of some sinister supernatural force\u2014the Sweatsylphs.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Sweatsylphs feed on human ergs, units of energy released by burning calories. (Among their favorite meals are scrambled ergs, ergs benedict, and erg rolls.) As their miserable mortal victims trot, bend, squat, run, jump, clean and jerk, dive and paddle, haul and crawl in order to grow slim, Sweatsylphs hover above them, chuckling and growing ever more plump and happy.<\/p>\n

Sweatsylphs discourage our interest in team sports\u2014after all, fullbacks and outfielders sometimes get a chance to stand around, enjoying themselves \u2014 and encourage us to go \u201cone on one,\u201d in games where personal shame and hostility drive us to heights of excessive activity\u2014or, better yet, to \u201ccompete only with ourselves,\u201d in ligament-straining, lung-busting, mindless orgies of exhibitionistic exertion. To the Sweatsylph, the only sight sweeter than a squash raquet is a running track a sixteenth of a mile in circumference.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Sweatsylphs are Greek and, like all Greek Sylphs, were notoriously sylphish about their sylph-improvement programs. The first of them were nourished by the smoke of the earliest Olympic flame and by the acrid fumes arising from the field below, where oiled and naked youths struggled to heave a pie plate for distance while barbarians were breaking down the gates.<\/p>\n

In America mortals tended to avoid physical exercise, exertion, or activity of any kind\u2014hence the popularity of the industrial revolution, spectator sports, televised spectator sports, and then the epidemic of video games. Things were looking bad for the sweat-starved Sweatsylphs. But a desperate public relations campaign, waged with the help of their fellow wicked sprites, the West Ghost and Elf Alpha, has convinced us all that we will be flabby and unloved unless we start running twenty miles a day, fueled only by turnip juice and our mantra. So we run and grow thinner and grimmer, and the Sweatsylphs are fat and sassy again,<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Look for a Sweatsylph where a yacht owner buys a rowing machine or drives five hundred miles in search of the perfect jogging suit, and when the funeral of a tennis court cardiac-arrest victim is attended by plump survivors, all bravely fighting back their smiles.<\/p>\n

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PREPS GHOUL
\nStupidissimus scholarum<\/h3>\n

RANGE: These most class-conscious of all sprites haunt private school reunions, society weddings, ski resorts, regattas, hunt club balls, squash, racketball, and bankruptcy courts; that is, wherever the alumni of expensive boarding schools are likely to be found.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Preps Ghouls like to get under the (upper) crust of the well (white)-bred. It is they who sprinkle dandruff on the shoulders of every navy blue blazer, dab a seagull dropping on the peak of each yachting cap, add a splash of hollandaise to every old school tie, spill a too-too embarrassing Bloody Mary stain on every white pleated skirt, and insert a bit of spinach (from the quiche) between the teeth of the hostess in the reception line. The favorite trick of a Preps Ghoul is to assume the form of the former class nerd (whose name you simply cawn\u2019t remember), let it be known that he has done very very well, and then . . . not recognize you! When tormented by excessive Preppy manifestations\u2014an outbreak of madras, monograms, and duck prints, for example\u2014try the Caulfield Maneuvre: put a red hunting hat on backwards and have a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Preps Ghouls hail, of course, from England, where private schools are called public schools (because they aren\u2019t) and are all named (appropriately) after impossibly tight collars (Eton), or inflated pigs\u2019 bladders (Rugby). The original Preps Ghoul attended the latter institution, and wrote the book, Tom Brownie\u2019s Ghoul Days. The Yankee Preps Ghouls\u2019 ancestors came over (steerage) on the Mayflower, to New England, where they hoped the Puritan work ethic would apply only to the working class. Here, they tended the ivy and climbed with it. They can now be found throughout America, wherever the parvenu rich don\u2019t want their offspring to have to compete in examinations against the children of the intelligent.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: You will find the Preps Ghoul loitering about wherever balding blond people of either sex look\u2014and laugh\u2014like their horses.<\/p>\n

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THE WEST GHOST
\nNarcissus Pacificus<\/h3>\n

RANGE: You will find the West Ghost anywhere you go looking to find yourself\u2014from the organic taco stands of Chula Vista to Ken Kesey\u2019s contented cattle ranch in Oregon. In search of cool, the W.G. occasionally drifts as far north as the goose-bumpy nude beaches of Vancouver. From the Rocky Mountain High Sierra clubs to the Hodaddy-clotted breakers off Catalina, in the waterbedrooms and extremely bored rooms, touching, relating, sharing, taking lunches and giving phone, the West Ghost does his thing, always here, always now.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The West Ghost lures his victims out to the earthquake perilled, partially reclaimed desert, with rumors of gold and legends of promiscuity. Once they are on his surf and turf, he implants in the sun-stroked minds of his prey the notion that a soak in a barrel of sweat with a coven of fellow Californians is a pleasant way to spend a couple of days. He enables one to enjoy listening to an entire game on the car radio while driving to and from the stadium. He inspires palimony disputes after the break-up of group marriages. He implants dozens of absolutely outrageous ideas for High-Concept situation comedies in the Perrier-addled noggins of his proteg\u00e9s. In return for feeding him five pounds of ocean temperature raw sea urchin, he\u2019ll slip you the home phone number of a studio exec at Fox. He gives you a sunburn where the moon don\u2019t shine.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The West Ghost\u2019s trendy\u2014and ever-changing\u2014appearance materializes out of a dense, deadly, drifting smog, composed of the exhaust of Okies\u2019 model Ts, steam released by the 750-foot papier-m\u00e2che volcano in Disneyland, a mist of genelethal insecticides, smoke of a thousand movie moguls\u2019 cigars and the incinerated dreams of ten thousand Midwest bottleblonds, vaporous exudations of beached whales mingled with the reek of hair oil, salad oil, sun-tan oil, snake oil, extremely crude oil, oiled palms, and oil of LA.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The West Ghost is invisible when viewed through sunglasses. Thus, it can be seen only by recent arrivals from the East, which explains the look of terror on their pale faces as they dodge from shadow to shadow down the palm-lined sun-blasted boulevards. The West Ghost is rilly, rilly, like, into his California life-style, y\u2019know?<\/p>\n

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THE PILL GRIM
\nPrudens pudenda<\/h3>\n

RANGE: There is scarcely a human activity into which this prig-let does not stick her (blue) nose, sniffling for smut. She can be found, an expression of self-righteousness on her puss, snooping through your mail, your past, your motives, your laundry, your files, your habits, and your keyhole.
\nSuspicious of any pleasure, however slight, the Pill Grim haunts the offices of district attorneys up for re-election, antivice vigilante covens, and gatherings of any group whose Majority assumes the title of Moral (the better to suppress both sugar and spice).<\/p>\n

HABITS: Infused with the Goblinoid equivalent of the Protestant work ethic, the Pill Grim keeps busy sharpening the blue pencils and scissors of censors, bleeping talk shows, and ripping open plain brown wrappers so that the postman, at least, knows what kind of pervert you secretly are. The name tells you all you need to know: \u201cPill: an objectionable person; a bore\u201d (OED). Grim: a venerable name among Goblins . . .\u201d (Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, page 205.) Hence, Pill Grim: a boring, objectionable old Goblin.<\/p>\n

One of this grim Grim\u2019s nastier tricks is to knock that sensible creature, Conscience, off her perch, and to usurp her place. Then the Pill Grim will fill you with shame at the sight of sex and enable you to see sex everywhere. Yet lust is not the Pill Grim\u2019s only obsession. Wine, candy, music, sleeping in, second helpings\u2014even the circus is all looked down on, as is anything else that looks suspiciously like fun. Recently changes in public and private morality (the work of creatures like The West Ghost and the Evil Neck-romancers) appeared to endanger the Grim. People of all ages, nude except for the earphones of their Sony Walkmen, were rumored to be leaping into hot tubs, swilling champagne, shamelessly massaging themselves and each other, necking in or on parked or moving automobiles, indulging in a wide variety of coed contact sports and dancing. Fun or not, all these activities appear to be so to the Pill Grim. But the crafty Pill Grim has turned this to her advantage. Across the land, a generation of snappily-attired, sex-manual-reading would-be hedonists now writhe, in an agony of guilt, because they aren\u2019t getting enough fun! Well done, Pill Grim!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Long before the decently clad figurehead of the Mayflower had occasion to frown sternly at the New World\u2019s wantonly naked cliffs and the shockingly undisciplined surf off Plymouth, certain troll-black, no-nonsense Fairy forerunners of the Puritans had preceded them thither.
\nThese sourpuss Spirits, scandalized by the endless merry dancing, tunepiping, teasing, tickling and giggling of their fellow English hobgoblins, founded the famous Dull Jack (all work, no play) Colony, and were the ancestors of the present day Pill Grim. The Pill Grim found much to admire in the conduct of the Shakers, an early American religious sect sworn to chastity and carpentry. The Shakers pursued their ideals with such fervor that today there are plenty of hard, straight-backed chairs and few Shakers. The Pill Grim has had to turn her attention to the remainder of American society.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: You don\u2019t spy on the Pill Grim\u2014you counterspy. In fact, the emotional state commonly diagnosed as paranoia is often simply an acute awareness of a Pill Grim\u2019s Progress<\/p>\n

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FREUDIAN SYLPHS
\nPes in orae<\/h3>\n

RANGE: This embarrassing sprite can pop out anywhere, but the more delicate the situation, the more likely her materialization. She frequently appears during introductions to important and sensitive strangers, and one finds oneself uttering, \u201cThe pleasure is neutral, I\u2019m sure.\u201d At testimonials: \u201cHow can you ever thank me enough?\u201d Or on any occasion when you would most like to keep your feelings to yourself and just make small talk: \u201cWell, hello! I have been looking forward to mating with you!\u201d Funeral parlors are among her favorite haunts: \u201cMy feet are killing me\u201d; \u201cHonestly, I could have just died\u201d; \u201cThat\u2019s a dead issue\u201d; and \u201cSorry we were late, but we were buried in traffic.\u201d These are just a few examples of her handiwork.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Not for nothing is the Freudian Sylph also known as the Truth Fairy. She cruelly deceives you into believing that you can untie your knotted tongue by putting your foot in your mouth. Herewith follow some examples of her work\u2014no need to describe the company in which she caused the following utterances: \u201cIt was a pretty lame excuse.\u201d \u201cFat chance.\u201d \u201cCall me a cockeyed optimist, but\u2026\u201d \u201cOf course, it was a bald lie!\u201d and \u201cWell, they say love is blind \u2026\u201d Sometimes the Freudian Sylph makes actions speak louder than words, as when she inspires the hostess to murmur a seemingly innocuous \u201cSweets for the sweet\u201d before passing the nuts to an outpatient or a shrimp to a little person. A human being plagued by these creatures often feels a deep-seated compulsion to pay large amounts of money to a self-proclaimed Exorcist (or Therapist) for the privilege of stretching out on a Naugahyde divan and raving on about his or her dreams. The Sylphs themselves are extremely diminutive and thus feel no need to be shrunk.
\nHISTORY: Freudian Sylphs are among the most recently uncovered of preternatural beings, the first of them having emerged, unbidden, from the mouth of a Viennese neurotic in this century. They breed like Gypsies (as one would doubtless observe, in the company of a Roumanian), and spread like cancer (to change the metaphor to one regrettable but inevitable in the presence of a chemotherapy patient). The Sylphs arrived in America hidden away in the corners of the very interestingly shaped carpet bags of immigrant psychoanalysts. They have been especially active in the political realm, and have inspired many a revealing gaffe\u2014for example, the Senator who meant to say, \u201cAll these nice bright faces\u201d or the Congressman who explained, \u201cI\u2019m in favor of restoring the graft.\u201d Among their recent masterpieces was the statement by a U.S. diplomat that the Arabs and Jews should settle their differences in a Christian manner.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: A Freudian Sylph looms, and prepares to pounce, wherever the well intentioned socialize with the vulnerable, wherever a sudden intimation of lust or hostility would do the most harm. One becomes aware of a personal visitation by the creature when, as the words leave one\u2019s mouth, one has the sensation of having stepped into an open elevator shaft. In her wake, the Freudian Sylph leaves twitching clusters of mortals, humiliated, exposed, blushing furiously, and improvising violent coughing fits.<\/p>\n

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THE SCREAMING MIMI
\nInfans infernas inflictus<\/h3>\n

RANGE: These tiny terrors are actually \u201cchangelings\u201d\u2014wicked creatures which the fairies swap for human babies. Screaming Mimis infest public places: churches, fine restaurants, and the occasional concert. Their earpiercing shrieks are inevitable on any public means of transportation, as well \u2014trains, buses, planes, and (especially) elevators. Although hideously audible and appallingly visible to strangers, the Screaming Mimi appears to members of its own family as a sweet chirping cherub.<\/p>\n

HABITS: It is a curious paradox that while the birthrate of American infants declines, the Screaming Mimi population is booming. Perhaps this is because the minuscule monsters are most commonly seen and heard by the \u201cchild-free.\u201d The more child-free adults there are around, the more the Screaming Mimi will be seen\u2014and feared. The Screaming Mimi\u2019s full throated howls of outrage, boredom and frustration are especially upsetting when they occur, as they most often do, in outrageously boring and frustrating situations. (See \u201cRange,\u201d above). For shamelessly expressing what the rest of us actually feel, Mimi draws a lot of dirty looks.<\/p>\n

To all but its mother, the most horrible aspect of the Screaming Mimi\u2019s behavior is its vampire-like quality. Believe it or not, those haunting, unearthly, nocturnal wails signify the creature\u2019s desire to fasten its mouth upon the breast of a mortal woman and extract the life-giving fluids!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: This fiend-in-infant-form first appeared in the cradles of Olde England. This may account for the Anglo-Saxons\u2019 preference for the companionship of dogs and their habit of belaboring the buttocks off their offspring with flails, canes, and stout oak cudgels. To the thatch-brained serfs of Britain, the Screaming Mimi was known as a \u201cChangeling.\u201d In America, it is often diagnosed as hyperactive. Numerous Screaming Mimis yowling in the homespun cribs of the thirteen original colonies inspired Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and other pioneer patriarchs to explore the West. Anything to get out of the house.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: In addition to its characteristic noise, a certain odor is often an indication of the Screaming Mimi\u2019s presence. It\u2019s a sort of ammonialike aroma, alone or accompanied by a dark, heavy sulphurous scent not unlike that of English cooking.<\/p>\n

This Screaming Mimi needs Changeling. Mother wishes the stork would take her back.<\/p>\n

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THE JOKE FIEND
\nNumerous non humorous<\/h3>\n

RANGE: The Joke Fiend mainly works men\u2019s clubs and variety shows, occasionally opens for rock acts, but is often to be found in bars, restaurants, and living rooms; wherever more than one or two are gathered together to tell funny stories (or \u201ccute ones\u201d as they are often called), the Joke Fiend performs his malevolent schtick.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Joke Fiend literally possesses its poor victim, amateur and professional alike, and makes him tell jokes. The creature is particularly remarkable for its lack of a sense of humor, as should be obvious from its name. Its idea of a \u201chot one\u201d is to coax the social misfit to tell a joke completely inappropriate to the company: Ikey and Izzy jokes at bar mitzvahs, Rastus and Mandy jokes at Urban League cocktail parties, Pat and Mike stories at the Police Brotherhood meetings, and jokes with any sex at all in them to Ms. magazine editors.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: When asked by noted comedian Henny Youngman to explain its origins, the Joke Fiend (for once) refused to speak\u2014invoking, we are to suppose, a gag rule. The Joke Fiend is believed to have been first sighted in America by Washington Irving during a trip to the Catskill Mountains in 1838. Mr. Irving was researching his Rip Van Winkle. The Joke Fiend was playing the Lounge.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Wherever squirt flowers, light-up bow ties, hand buzzers, whoopee cushions, dribble glasses or Shriners\u2019 conventions can be found, there also is the Joke Fiend.<\/p>\n

*J. F., corny as Kansas, visits Henny Youngman for good material.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

HOUSEHOLD UNFAMILIARS
\nCalamitates materfamiliae<\/h3>\n

RANGE: First apartments, charming old houses, quaint summer cottages, experimental solar living modules, completely remodeled kitchens, dens that need some work, unfinished basements, north-lit studios, semi-equipped lofts and secure subterranean bed-sitters.<\/p>\n

HABITS: In any household with which you are unfamiliar, there you will find the Household Unfamiliars. Be it your first apartment or your last nursing home, these devilish sprites are there with a litany of liabilities: Putting the light switch on the wrong side of the door, mysteriously adding or subtracting a step from the stairs in the dark, blowing the bathroom door locked behind you, shifting ankle-breaking furniture while your attention is elsewhere, jamming windows open or closed, exchanging handles on the shower controls, breaking knobs off in your hands, and stacking pyramids of head-thumping canned goods on unstable shelves in innocent looking closets.<\/p>\n

All these pranks and more are the work of the Household Unfamiliar\u2014 but his special province is the refrigerator, where he moves as soon as you start to feel at home. Ostensibly, his job there is to turn the light off when you open the door and on when you close it, but he further diverts himself by lending to your costly imported beer a skunk-like odor, tempering your cheese to a gem-like hardness, and spilling dill brine into the yogurt. He specializes in unscheduled defrostings and freezer burns.<\/p>\n

Old wives\u2019 tales have it that open boxes of baking soda and herbal bouquets deter the Household Unfamiliar from his activities. But as any housekeeper can tell you, you are just as likely to find a spilled box of baking soda and a broken bouquet of herbs commingled on top of the mousse.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: As might be assumed from the Household Unfamiliar\u2019s preference for the chilly regions of the refrigerator, this creature came to us from Scandinavia, a direct descendant of that Nordic domestic pest, the Kobold. Thus, however neatly you box, store, cap, and wrap your foodstuffs, these \u201cfrigidaredevils\u201d believe that what you wish to find when you open the door is a smorgasbord. During the course of the Household Unfamiliar\u2019s food scattering experiments, that great American dish, chow mein, was invented.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: In the fridge: green spots on the bread, ketchup spots on the ice cream, and gravy spots on the lettuce. In the rest of the house: brown spots on the bathroom ceiling, yellow spots on the mattress, and indelible spots on the laundry.<\/p>\n

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SCRUBUBUS
\nSanitas furioso<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From the space-age plastic sheen of the vinyl-tiled floor in the germ-and-mildew-free basement, to the gleaming unclogged galvanized raingutters and sanitized chimney on the well-scrubbed roof. . . amongst the velvet-bagged untarnished silverware, the neatly stacked and daily-dusted china, the square-cornered piles of plush and fluffy towels . . . in contour corners . . . Pasteurized commodes . . . Everywhere a nosey neighbor or critical in-law could pry, peer, sniff, or stroke with the fingertip of a white glove\u2014in every germ-free nook and sterilized cranny of the paranoid nightmare of the American home.<\/p>\n

HABITS: These wretched household creatures torment housewives into frenzies of lustration by leaving thumb prints, dust motes, fly flecks, stains, smudges, spots, and smears on the household furniture, utensils, hardware, and dry goods. The poor haus-frau, her brain softened by the hysterical importunings to hermetic hygiene on television\u2014it is no coincidence her favorite shows are called Soaps\u2014is incited to further paroxysms of ablution by the Scrububus\u2019 mystical incantation:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll Joy! Shout Jubilee! Bravo! Yes, Bon Ami, Behold Dawn Vanish Like Magic! Cheer Bold Fantastik Future Era! Banish Sea Mist So Fast, Vigilant Arm and Hammer! Whish, Comet! Dazzle! Twinkle, Beacon! Sparkle! Cascade, Tide! Duz Pride Gain Favor? Preen, Fleecy, Brite, Downy, Snowy Dove!\u201d<\/p>\n

HISTORY: As everyone knows, \u201cBrownies\u201d are the helpful household spirits of England and Scotland, and many tales are told of their domestic kindnesses. But when the first immigrant Brownie reported for duty in the first American kitchen, the (Puritan Pilgrim) housewife saw only an insalubrious brown smudge besmirching her spotless white tile, and clubbed him with a bar of lye soap. Our national obsession with high-gloss disinfected surfaces is the Brownies\u2019 revenge.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Spotters, indeed! Out! Out! OUT!<\/p>\n

*The Scrububus, that Mother\u2019s Little Helper, keeps places like Iowa squeakyclean.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

THE GARDENGOYLE
\nHorror cultus<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Wherever paper seed packs, faded to indecipherability, look down from weathered popsicle sticks upon rows of deeply disturbed topsoil; near window boxes enriched by alkaline pigeon droppings, roof gardens watered by acid rain, and where elderly but energetic horticulturists minister to necrotic carrots in stony vacant lots, there strolls the Gardengoyle.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Summer after summer, pest and pestilences descend on the backyard gardens of America: rabbits with the destructive abilities of warthog troops, for example, or moldy blights that wither green and growing things like a blast of the midsummer sun on Serengeti. Yet spring after spring, Americans root up foul-smelling compost heaps, break fork tines on adamantine topsoil, and wear out countless layers of epidermis plying absurd backward hoes allegedly designed to make the work go easier.<\/p>\n

And it is the Gardengoyle who wickedly inspires these people to believe that this year will at last mean success for their little garden because whatever the Gardengoyle did to it last year is simply too horrible to occur twice in the same patch on the same planet in the same century. The Gardengoyle is a master of blights and a smut monger. He is adept at the distribution of cutworms and beetles. Where the gypsy moth pitches its tent, you may find the Gardengoyle, seeking shelter from the hail storm he has just caused to beat sprouting produce into mouldering ratatouille.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Gardengoyle hails from the region of North Africa formerly known as the Saharan Garden, now more widely known as the Sahara Desert. He helped out in the New World Garden at the Plymouth Colony, where yearly crop failures made the poor Puritans so hungry that even turkey tasted good to them. Later, the Gardengoyle took a special interest in Oklahoma and the surrounding states, where a succession of disastrous droughts gave the simple religious folk of the region an abiding taste for water, which many are hard put to understand.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The careful hoe-towing seeker of the Gardengoyle may have some luck as he is a large, frisky green spirit resembling an ambulatory shock of corn and is to be found most often amongst the small, withered brownish rust-slighted vegetables in his charge.<\/p>\n

*The Gardengoyle is an agro-vation from Omaha to Miami.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

SAUCIER\u2019S APPRENTICES
\nCuisinart gratia artis<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Four-star French restaurants, executive dining rooms, diplomatic pieds-\u00e0-terre, country club kitchens, even The Average American Home\u2014 wherever pretentious food is being prepared (or attempted), these wicked imps can be found, and the more haute the cuisine, the higher the jinks they\u2019re up to. They inhabit the oven, for extreme heat does not bother them as they perform ritual cake deflations inside. Nor do they mind the refrigerator\u2019s cold, as they gnaw away at the cellophane, all the better to \u201cfreezer burn\u201d those treasured filets. Chances are, your kitchen is full of them\u2014n\u2019est-ce pas?<\/p>\n

HABITS: Like good chefs everywhere, the Saucier\u2019s Apprentices know that preparation is so important. Thus, hours before the cooking is to begin, they are busy in the kitchen, blunting the knives, bending the spoons, jamming the blender, blowing out the pilot light, hiding the butter, and souring the cream. They are never happier than when a perfectly normal mortal decides to \u201creally get into cooking,\u201d and to that end acquires numerous, indecipherable recipe books and elaborate expensive utensils\u2014preferably electric and dangerous. A classic Saucier\u2019s Apprentice technique (or \u201ctrue\u201d) is to spill tomato sauce on a metric conversion table, which can result in some amazingly good concoctions accidentally being whipped up by the Apprentice\u2019s victim, who thereafter must guess at the proportions, should he or she ever wish to make the dish again. Malfunctioning scales, timers and thermometers? Off-speed Cuisinarts, lukewarm ice cream makers, pasty pasta? If your gourmet meal looks slightly unreal, blame the Saucier\u2019s Apprentice.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Many believe that Saucier\u2019s Apprentices are of French extraction, but anyone who has eaten in England knows better. They are, in fact, Hob Goblins, (first described in the Julia Childe Ballads) the legendary spirits of the British fireside, who burnt the cakes for King Alfred and whose hideous names have been given to so many British dishes: Bubble and Squeak, Banger, Toad in Hole, Pig in a Blanket, etc. An aristocratic member of the family is to this day responsible for all runny omelettes: Will o\u2019 the Whisk. Confined at first to the kitchens of the very rich in America, the Saucier\u2019s Apprentices have become dangerously active in recent years with the malevolent help of the Mind Boggles, through whose channels they introduced the blasphemous rites of foreign cooking into the hearts and kitchens of the formerly naive and hamburger-happy homemakers of the United States. Many a harmless Shake-and-Baker has thus been Bearded in her den, transformed into a veal-boning, Hollan-dazed, stir-crazy, woked-out, long order kook.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: If you have shell fragments in the scrambled eggs, lumps in the gravy, charcoal toast, oil slicks in the soup, concrete croissants, silly millimeter-high souffl\u00e9s, a julienned index finger and a well-done thumb, then you have Saucier\u2019s Apprentices infesting your kitchen. Send out for Chinese.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

HANDIMANTICORE
\nArs amputat artas<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Down in the basement workshop, where Dad\u2019s soldering his fingers together. Up on the roof with Sis, who\u2019s installing the weather vane lightning rod FM antenna in a thunderstorm. Out in the garage, where Junior is checking for fuel line clogs, with the aid of his Bic. Up in her den, where Mom\u2019s slant-stitching her nose to a dirndl hem. In, on, and around the home, wherever Americans conclude that there\u2019s
\nno point paying a professional to do this, when for just a little more money they can screw it up themselves\u2014 Handimanticore, the handy manti, is lending a helping hand.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Handy Andy is an unselfish fellow. Having inspired a mortal to attempt domestic arts and crafts, he often turns his victims over into the waiting area of another malevolent spirit\u2014 The Gardengoyle, The Saucier\u2019s Apprentice, or the Household Unfamiliar. Together, then, these merry fairies watch, as toes fly up out of the lawn mower, the vacuum cleaner ingests the drapes, and a grease fire erupts in the
\nkitchen. For years, economists and sociologists have wondered, why does the American worker, having waged and won a bitter battle for shorter working hours and longer vacations, choose to spend his or her precious leisure time (not to mention his or her salary) pursuing activities that look very much like work? These so-called experts have overlooked the effects of Handimanticore. Often this Do-It-Yours-Elf rides from house to house on his (appropriately named) Hobby Horse. Sometimes, he arrives in a kit. But however he gets across the threshold, the Handimanticore instantly transforms the old homestead into a beehive of activity\u2014 its atmosphere abuzz with the snarl of fatal power tools, aflash with the short circuiting of electrical equipment, and afog with debilitating glue fumes. Handimanticore\u2019s secret is that he writes the instructions for do-ityourselfers, and he does so employing ancient, mysterious, incomprehensible, eldritch, elvish runes.
\nIn the event that a mere human should decipher these easy-to-follow directions, Handimanticore has another trick up his sleeve\u2014there is no widget screw A 113 b (Fig. 27)!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: From the depths of the Black Forest (where the manufacture of slippers that forced people to dance till they dropped was a cottage industry), Handimanticore made his way to our shores not long ago by means of a steam-powered, radio-controlled, twenty-six-thousand piece 1\/32 scale model raft. Settling in Maine, he quickly concocted and widely dispensed a dangerous illusion known as Yankee Ingenuity (pat. pend.), which has caused the world no end of mischief. As his name suggests, Handimanti has many relatives, among them Humpty Dumpty, the steeplejack\u2019s friend; Tutti Frutti, the Italian master of home ice cream making and self-taught ballet; Fuzzy Wuzzy, who oversees the cabinet structure in newly emerged nations; Ricki Rouie, the Taiwanese supervisor of easy-to-assemble solid-state wall-size televisions; Harum Scarum, who presides over the installation of Arabian burglar alarms; and Oakie Doakie, still teaching do-it-yourself Model-T maintenance on the road to Californy.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Collapsing furniture. Raw bread. An unfinished, life-size paint-by-numbers version of Guer-nica. Disintegrating quilts. One third of a yacht, in the attic. Unravelling tur-tlenecks. A snaggle-toothed patio. Crooked wallpaper and lumpy vases. If you can find a man with wood shavings in his hair, an incorrectly buttoned shop apron, and charcoal where his eyebrows used to be, ask him where to find the Handimanticore. In all likelihood, he will point you in the right direction with his blue, swollen, throbbing thumb<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DEVIL DOGS
\nRegurgitations<\/h3>\n

RANGE: These sweet-seeming but deadly creatures dangle from chipped metal racks in snack bars, bodegas, truck stops, movie theater lobbies, corner candy stores, fast-food franchises, neighborhood delis, superettes, souvenir stands, luncheonettes, cafeterias, national historic sites, drugstores, and ball park concession stands. They are also found in glove compartments, on the dessert tables of summer camps, scrunched beneath the Luke Sky-walker thermos bottle in a Star Wars lunch bucket, and as \u201cimpulse items\u201d in the vicinity of any cash register. Their bright and glamorous paper garments clutter the gutters, line the highways, and tumble out of every trash basket in the land. Devil Dogs are, curiously, never found on shopping lists, but invariably make their ways into shopping carts. They are the spirits of junk food.<\/p>\n

HABITS: To be more precise, Devil Dogs are the shock troops of the Junk Food Army. They assault the body\u2019s natural defense system\u2014those rows of taste bud emplacements, which protect us against the ingestion of hardware, potting soil, and between-meal snacks. Once the Devil Dogs have knocked out this Siegfried Line of Good Taste, wave upon wave of allied synthetic chemical bud-numbers invade \u2014 cheese-food-flavored thingies, sour-cream-and-onion-dip-flavored gizmos, prefab burgers with nonbiodegradable sauces, petroleum-byproduct drumsticks, bubble-gum-flavored ice cream, peanut-butter-flavored popcorn clusters, and those nasty, mind destroying, multicolored sugar nodules known as jelly beans.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Sugar Plum Fairy was an early emigre, a rich Russian brownie who thrived among the wild sugar beets of pre-colonial America. When George Washington was inaugurated, all the nearby fairies invited each other to attend\u2014except the Sugar Plum Fairy. The attendant good spirits wished George luck and courage and truthfulness\u2014but then the enraged and unwanted Sugar Plum Fairy appeared, cursed President George and all Americans with a sweet tooth, and set a pack of Devil Dogs upon them, to hound them forever. (As a boy, Washington, overcome with sugar-lust, ate all the cherries from a tree in his backyard. This, naturally, rotted the teeth out of his noble head, but the resourceful lad then chopped down the tree, to fashion from it the wooden false teeth for which he is famous. The rest is history.)<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Tar breath; love handles; a belt and suspenders; zits, wens, and blackheads; pitted green fangs, dilated pupils, seizures of undirected energy, furry tongue; belching; flatulence; \u2018roids\u2014if these are your symptoms, or the symptoms of someone you love, don\u2019t be ashamed. Remember, junk food addiction is not a disease\u2014merely the result of demonic possession by Devil Dogs. And help is as close as your nearest carrot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE BACKYARD BARBACREEP
\nConflagratio suburbia<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Since hanging plants and other decorative foliage in the kitchen are often sensitive to smoke, many folks find it advisable to do their cooking out back, where all the trees and bushes (that spoiled the view) have already been cut down. Here, beside the great brick burger forges, cast iron weiner crematoria, and vast superheated kilns for the incineration of steaks, spuds, corn cobs, and sausages, the Backyard Barbacreep dances like the blue flame atop a decorative Hawaiian garden torch; and by his eerie light, we see bottles of bland condiments, fearful utensils of barbarous making, ribaldly inscribed paper napkins, frosty pitchers of fruitflavored sugar-free fluids, and terrified children, cowering women, and strangely garbed grown men performing the savage fire-lit rites of marinade.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Barbacreep defies nature\u2014under his spell, the flash point at which charcoal ignites is raised to that of asbestos. Combustion can be achieved only after the ritual libation of several gallons of high octane fuel, after which the whole hibachi goes up in a fire storm, transporting many pounds of prime chuck, an awning, and your eyebrows into the Great Beyond. He puts mustard clots in the nozzle of the squeeze bottle; he lends to catsup the consistency of Kool-Aid; he loosens the cap on the salt shaker; he inspires the dog to heroic steak snatches\u2014if possible from the hands of the boss\u2019s wife; he causes deck chair collapses, eye-smarting wind shifts, midge plagues, dive bombing pigeons, fork gorings, second-degree grease burns, pool cramps, flash floods, and indigestion.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Barbacreep\u2019s ancestors were the horned and furryhaunched Satyrs of ancient Greece, who unwillingly used to participate in many a goat roast in Arcady. Today, their descendant wreaks his vengeance upon all who eat meat on sticks, on picnickers, campers, hikers, scout troops, and everyone else who contrives to cook out of doors.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The Backyard Barbacreep is never far from half-baked franks composed of fly eggs, rodent hair, and earwig mandibles; nor from singing aunts; or stinging ants. He is often accompanied by raccoons, ravenous in-laws, and the occasional bear. Look for him in summer, leering over hedges and fences, hungrily sniffing the air for the scent of kerosene and singed human flesh.<\/p>\n

*Backyard Barbacreep is a red-hot Texas tradition. Come an\u2019 git it, before it gits you!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

TEAM SPIRITS
\nRosa petrus a.k.a. canis calidus<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Despite their reputation for enormous importance, Team Spirits are harder to see than a dab of hair oil on a baseball travelling at 95 mph between a pitcher\u2019s hand and a catcher\u2019s glove. Learned experts (which sports writers always are) maintain that Team Spirits can be found even in the Major Leagues, but for the most part, they grace (or plague) amateur clubs, college, and farm teams. They feed off success and grow or shrink with a team\u2019s achievements. Team Spirits are most noticeable by their absence\u2014it is invariably observed that a losing or strife-torn team has \u201clost its Team Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

HABITS: Team Spirits, although invisible, can influence the outcome of most sports events. They can nudge a knuckleball over the corner of the plate, and, by spreading their wings and lowering their flaps, transform an arrogant pitcher\u2019s fastball into a hanging curve, or \u201cgopher ball.\u201d Likewise, they can cause a long flyball to remain suspended in the air above the fence until caught and steer a slow bunt to either side of the foul line. Team Spirits inspire basketball players to take swan dives onto the parquet. Cheered on by a Team Spirit, an out-of-position hockey player will lunge to catch a puck with his teeth, and a soccer player will interpose his head between foot and ball \u2026 for Team Spirits most often abound wherever large groups of people gather to watch smaller groups get their exercise for them. When a basketball spins for thirty seconds around the inner lip of the rim and then shoots out like a champagne cork, that\u2019s the Team Spirit (who never gets called for goaltending) doing her thing. Likewise, a field goal attempt bouncing off both uprights and the crossbar before dropping down on the wrong side, and a puck coming to rest right on the goal line are both the handiwork of Team Spirits.\u00a0However, these tricks are whimsical. An angry Team Spirit can shatter a\u00a0baseball bat and direct a sharp shard of oak into the neck of anyone within a hundred feet of the batter\u2019s box. Many players try to win the good will of the Team Spirit by such time-honored rituals as swinging three bats simultaneously, spitting frequently, or smuding black stuff beneath their eyes. Managers and coaches seek the Team Spirit\u2019s favor by the ancient rites of kicking dirt on the umpire\u2019s shoes, looking sleepy at crucial moments, and looking anxious and intent when nothing is happening on the field.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: All Team Spirits are descended from the legendary Will Toowin, who in old England once defeated Robin Goodsport on the enchanted playing fields of Eton. It was Will Toowin who invented the beanball and inspired Ty Cobb to sit on the bench sharpening his spikes while the other team\u2019s shortstop watched in terror. Team Spirits are related to such other malevolent ephemera as The School Spirit, The Self Image, and The Company Man.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Team Spirits inhabit exclusively the locker rooms of winning teams, for whose successes they are given (or take) all the credit. According to some West Coast managers, they do not associate with Nice Guys, who finish you-know-where.<\/p>\n

* Mr. Irvin and the Team Spirit, who introduced him abruptly to many an outfield wall.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

STYLUS DEVIL
\nDiablo repeata degroova<\/h3>\n

RANGE: A Stylus Devil comes with every phonograph sold in America. This ear-bending imp is to be found under the machine\u2019s tone arm, hanging in a position convenient to steer minute flecks of ash, hair, and other rubbish toward the needle. If seen, the Stylus Devil will usually run up the tone arm with such great speed that the surprised viewer will \u201caccidentally\u201d drop the arm onto the record, causing the slam and scream of a stylus sliding across the disc and leaving a deep scratch in its wake. This, if anything, is music to the Devil\u2019s ears.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Stylus Devil is a most malicious member of a larger group of demons known as the Stereogres, those two-faced folk who pass their time destroying our listening pleasure: tempting components to become incompatible, causing static wow, flutter, etc. The Devil\u2019s own greatest delight is to cause a phonograph record to stick and, when the listener approaches, to cause it to play normally. We may take some solace in knowing that occasionally they laugh so hard at their own cleverness that they fall off the tone arm and come to grief on the needle. Their mashed forms resemble balls of dust.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Stylus Devil appears to be a native American fairy, although creatures of similar habits have been sighted as far away as Germany, Japan and (increasingly) Taiwan. His first appearance may have been in the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Alva Edison, where his birth was announced by a great howling of neighborhood dogs. Even though he has no history to speak of, the Stylus Devil nonetheless has many relatives, including The Tape Worm, who enjoys snagging cassette tapes into Gordian knots, and the Video Bugger, whose peculiar joy it is to depress the \u201crecord\u201d button before you screen your incredibly rare bootleg outtakes from \u201cMr. Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: It is virtually impossible to sight a Stylus Devil. They are, however, reported to be averse to the music of \u201cSplattered Boots,\u201d an Australian New Wave band, and can be scared off with a sledge hammer, which is unfortunately hard on sensitive turntables.<\/p>\n

*When it comes to repetition, Stylus Devils set the record set the record set the SKRAAWK!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

THE BOOGIE MAN
\nFelus frigida<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Uptown and \u2018way across the tracks is where he\u2019s at, they say, but if you have to ask, man, you\u2019ll never find the way.
\nHe\u2019s wailin\u2019 in a cellar, kinda low and mean and sweet. He\u2019s singin\u2019 on the river. He\u2019s dancin\u2019 in the street. You hear him in the moonlight, but you lose him in the dawn, and anyplace you get to man, he been there\u2014 but he gone!<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Boogie Man is Dixieland. The Boogie Man is funk. The Boogie Man is po\u2019 folks, makin\u2019 beauty out of junk. Invented half the slang you use and every dance you do. He turns your whole world colored (like black and tan and blue). He teaches you the shimmy and the swingin\u2019 Lindy hop, then puts you jitterbugs uptight with rock\u2019 n\u2019roll\u2019 n\u2019bop. He move so cool, his threads so fine, that everyone appear a silly
\nimitation of the way he looked last year. He made you want to blow like Bird, or shuffle like Ali. Invisible and Beautiful, Unsuppressible and Free!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: African roots, man. Lion pride. Savannah, jungle, mountainside. Blood pulse drumbeat. Electric bird. Music. Ghost. Feeling. Word. Grandfather spirit, tall as a tree, follow the slave ships over the sea. Alive in the seed, alive in the flower, mystery family, history and power. Rainbow wearer, cakewalker, blues shouter, jive talker, soul brother, fire preacher, dream teller, truth teacher. Hey, Yankee Doodle up on your pony, that feather in your hat\u2019s a phony, \u2019cause the coolest feather (or ain\u2019t you heard?) shines on the wing of the jungle bird!<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Too white puppets tryin\u2019 to dance in too tight, too bright neon pants. Sweatin\u2019 cool in a clubfoot step so square when it was hip to be hep. Finger snappin\u2019 jazz collectors, pale eyed middle class defectors, lookin\u2019 to score on a credit plan some soul from the soulful Boogie Man.<\/p>\n

*The Boogie Man\u2019s still getting down, when you\u2019re just getting up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE MIND BOGGLES
\nVideoticus neilsonian<\/h3>\n

RANGE: The \u201cvast wasteland\u201d is the dark domain of the Mind Boggles. They travel at the speed of light, on waves of air, and it is virtually impossible to prevent them from entering any room of your home or favorite bar (especially since they have lately joined together in enormous conspiracies, or \u201cnetworks,\u201d the better to numb the brains and harden the hearts of mankind).<\/p>\n

HABITS: There are many types, or stations, of Mind Boggle, each named after the sort of wicked spell he (or she) casts: the Eye-Glazers, the ThoughtRotters, the Credibility-Stretchers, the Wit-Wilters, the Trash Vendors, and the Trivia-Transmitters, to name but a few. Their system is diabolically simple. They find a poor, bored, lonely mortal\u2014often a mere child\u2014and in vampirelike fashion, drain him of all willpower, commonsense, intelligence, and taste. They then work their magic to have this mental and moral degenerate appointed Vice-President of Programming for a major television network. He, in turn, contaminates thousands, who themselves go on to high-paying jobs in the broadcasting profession. . . . Sex and violence, the two ingredients essential to any fairy tale, fill the air when the Boggles are at work. But while the weddings with frogs and bloody decapitations found in classic fairy stories are suitable for children, on television they become sniggering double entendres and bloodless car wrecks, which only adults can understand. Mind Boggles are repelled by the normal, natural scent of humans, and much of their time and effort is spent inducing \u201cbromidrosophobia,\u201d that is, the morbid fear of bodily odors.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: This most evil of Goblins (for it\u2019s your soul they\u2019re gobblin\u2019), Mind Boggles are descended from simple hobgoblins, the chimney corner creatures who used to inspire people to stare into the fire, watching the flames \u201cmake pictures.\u201d This required, unfortunately, imagination, the deadly enemy of all goblins. (From their point of view, radio was not much of an improvement, as it also demanded some mental activity on the part of the audience.) Now that Boggles can zip along cables, bounce off satellites, and zoom right into your face, they couldn\u2019t be happier. It just goes to show you the benefits of working through the proper channels.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Mind Boggles gain access to their victims by means of a glass-fronted box located in the home. Weird, flickering light and unnatural voices emerging from this diabolical machine are signs that the Mind Boggles are at their insidious work.<\/p>\n

*An Ohio Mind Boggle, whispering seductively, \u201cDo not adjust your mind<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE SOPHOMORE JINX
\nGaudeamus ignaras<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From the tables down at Morry\u2019s to the place where Louie dwells, to the ivy-cluttered bastard-gothic bastions of Eastern privilege, to red brick cow town colleges, to the sprawling and over-endowed diploma mills of the sun belt . . . this rah-rah imp, this flask-swigging, cheer-leading, pennant waving frat-rat-sprite is the Biggest-Manikin-on-Campus\u2014a real varsity drag.<\/p>\n

HABITS: While his slightly younger relative, the Teen Angel, keeps the adolescents of every generation in a perpetual state of fifties rocker-rebellion, the Sophomore Jinx sees to it that, on campus, it\u2019s always the roaring twenties. \u201cScratch today\u2019s most ambitious business school sorority sister, and find a flapper,\u201d says the Sophomore Jinx, in whose eyes, and by whose hands, the ROTC trashings of the late sixties were only panty raids with placards, and under whose influence a frat-row game of Dragons and Dungeons is but today\u2019s variation on a goldfish swallowing party. Inspired, nay, possessed by the Sophomore Jinx, last fall\u2019s meek and persecuted frosh becomes the most snottily discriminating of pledge judges and the most sadistic of hazers. The Sophomore Jinx is this so-called School Spirit who removes your name from the dean\u2019s list and appends it to the petition for nude touch football, the list of nominators of the pro-Soviet student council rep, and the roster of volunteers for the homecoming all-drag chorus line show and annual midterm beer-and-shot drinking contest. After tampering with your alarm clock consistently, so that you have overcut every course by Hallowe\u2019en, the Sophomore Jinx wraps your naked body in a vintage raccoon coat and sends you out there, crazed with visions of John Belushi, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and cheap gin, to streak the nation during the televised half-time show.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Alma Mater for the Sophomore Jinx is said to be that most legendary of college towns, Heidelberg; though the left bank of the Seine also claims him as an alumnus, as might both great English universities, with their traditions of Boat Night undergraduate idiocies. By charter, the Jinx is granted absolute power over the mind and body of a student only during his, or her, second year of study. Here in America, he has cleverly created Junior College, University, Graduate and Post Graduate Schools, in order to have four separate shots at you as a sophomore.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: On campus, the Sophomore Jinx is as ubiquitous as herpes, except in lecture rooms, laboratories, and the library. If not immediately at hand, he can be easily conjured by rendering, loudly, a chorus of the school fight song or, as often happens, tapping a keg.<\/p>\n

*The Sophomore Jinx, krazy kampus kutup, kancels klasses and kareers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ELF S. PRESLEY
\nGreilus marcas<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Elf S. Presley is a union card carrying member of the Spirits of Show Biz, who accompany performers on the road. Whether the venue is a snotty concert hall or a grungy night club, a cavernous stadium or the high school gym, Rock\u2019n\u2019 Trolls like Elf S. are present backstage wherever tickets are being scalped out front.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The squeal of feedback, a dry ice machine miscue, the off-key plonk of a guitar string snapping, a dead mike during a vocal; all these misfortunes may usually be attributed to the tireless labors of a Rock\u2019n\u2019 Troll like Elf S. Presley. Techies and roadies accompanying a band on tour struggle unceasingly and unsuccessfully against such creatures, and experienced road managers attempt to placate them with bribes ranging from caviar kebabs (expensive sturgeon roe skewered on toothpicks) to bottle caps brimming with the costliest of vintage champagnes. This policy of appeasement often has no effect, or worse, the caviar-stuffed and champagnebloated sprites are often stimulated to greater than usual excess. In one instance, such a sated and inebriated Spirit of Show Biz was responsible for the collapse of an entire discotheque interior during its two hundredth playing of \u201cDisco Inferno\u201d by the Tramps (foreshadowing the decline in popularity of flashing lights, white suits, and bad lyrics).<\/p>\n

Elf S. personally selects the washed-up comic or utterly derivative local rock group who invariably opens for the headliners and sees to it that the main attraction arrives several bore-dom-and-mayhem filled hours late. He invented Festival Seating, open-air concerts without rain dates, and the charming glow-in-the-dark necklaces which glow in your face for hours. He has toured with REO Speed-wagon, Peggy Lee, the Grassroots, and is known to be discussing a stint in Vegas with Welsh crooner Tom Jones. His biggest pleasure is encouraging the popularity of dead rock stars over live ones.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Like most creatures with a piece of the show biz action, they are of Italian descent, distant relatives of the Phantom of the Opera. The first to make the transition from classical to pop music was the fearful Phil Spectre,<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Rock\u2019n\u2019 Trolls like Elf S. are even harder to see than the headliners they accompany. They are faster than a promoter with a box office bag and, when they want to be, transparent as a cold bag of greasy chicken. If you are lucky, you may catch a glimpse of one grinning stage left, as an amp blows up stage right.<\/p>\n

Mr. Elf S. Presley of Tennessee\u2014he loves that legal tender.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PRE-REVOLUTIONARY WARLOCK
\nNostalgia americanna<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Ye Olde Antique Boutiques, garage sales, behind the bushes beside well-marked historic trails, landmark gift shops, graduate seminars, culture loops, behind glass cases in the court house, neatly stacked on the library lawn, at Ladies\u2019 Club Lectures (illustrated with slides)\u2014wherever Americans dredge the shallow waters of their Nation\u2019s History for rusty artifacts and a sense of tradition.<\/p>\n

HABITS: By most Fairy standards, or indeed by most civilized human standards, American history is not yet long or rich enough to be of more than passing interest. Yet the Pre-Revolutionary Warlock possesses many Americans with the notion that they can discover, and indeed purchase, a past for themselves. Thus, he has sponsored and fostered such groups as The Daughters of the American Revolution, The Daughters of The Confederacy, The Sons of The Pioneers, The Daughters of World War One, The Daughters of the Korean Police Action, and The Illegitimate Offspring of Veterans Against the Vietnam War. He sends us out on archeological digs around the summer house, where we learn that nearby once lived Indians, whose culture consisted of the manufacture and burial of small flints, which may or may not be arrowheads. He leads us on grade school field trips, where the sniff of a\u00a0 powder horn, the heft of a Bowie knife, or the sight of a surviving bison sets off a lifelong obsession with Americana. The spell cast by the Pre-Revolution-ary Warlock often lasts into our adult lives. We long to live in dilapidated eighteenth-century shacks. surrounded by Ethan Allen cobbler\u2019s benches, pewter chamber pots, quaint quilts by crazy Quakers, warped and wormy butter churns, coon skin fedoras, candle molds, kerosene lamps, wagon wheels, scrimshaw back scratchers, and other mementoes of simpler times, when white men were men and everybody else knew their place. The fact that almost every artifact surviving from early America is now under armed guard does not deter the Pre-Revolutionary Warlock from inspiring us to collect historically significant stuff. After all, says he, \u201cHistory is happening all around us, right now!\u201d as well as, \u201cThis could be worth a lot of money some day!\u201d So, we buy, sell, save, revere, and treasure newspapers from the day Kennedy was shot, backstage passes to Eagles concerts, \u201cAll the way with LBJ\u201d buttons, \u201cDump the Hump\u201d bumper stickers, green Coke bottles, Billy Beer tins and other priceless reminders of \u201cthe way we were.\u201d<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Pre-Revolutionary Warlock is himself of lowly, albeit French, ancestry and came to the New World in hopes of bettering his condition. And he has done so: His ancestor was a little \u201cLa Fayette,\u201d a smallish Fay who took the form of a humble French weremole. He would doubtless have rocked back on his hind quarters and flung out a paw in salute at his progeny\u2019s achievements. The Warlock\u2019s greatest achievement, so far, has been the oversubscription to the Franklin Mint\u2019s Bicentennial limited offering of a lifesized, sterling silver reproduction of Lincoln\u2019s distinguishing wart.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Look for the Pre-Revolutionary Warlock wherever the humorous sign \u201cWe Buy Junk\/We Sell Antiques\u201d is displayed.<\/p>\n

*The Pre-Revolutionary Warlock cherishes tradition. Polishes it. Auctions it off.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

THE PHILHARMONIC ORC
\nCacophonous gloriosas<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Enormous chandeliered mausoleums named after extinct robber barons are the customary haunts of these myopic Neanderthals, but they may also be seen\u2014and heard\u2014on Public Television, FM radio, wine-bar Muzak systems, BMW cassette decks, and wherever gouty millionaires doze in red plush seats beside their buxom spouses.<\/p>\n

HABITS: The Philharmonic Orc high-browbeats the citizenry into
\nbelieving that he and only he has the right to make loud noises\u2014or, for that matter, any noise at all. To this end, he has created an inefficient dinosaur of a noisemaking machine, the Symphony Orchestra, to which respect, homage, and bucks must be paid. He hushes you with a lordly hiss, should you chance to cough during a pause in his machine\u2019s noisemaking. His victims leap to their feet shouting \u201cbravo\u201d (for men) and \u201cbrava\u201d (for women) during other pauses. He reserves for himself the right to be first clap in and last clap out. He is the moving spirit behind the granting of vast sums of public money to subsidize art forms which are patronized largely by persons with vast private wealth. If music be the food of love, the Philharmonic Orc is providing food stamps for the upper class. He has insidiously hornswoggled us all into the certainty that only music composed before 1900, as interpreted by seven dozen of his monkey-suited thralls, is serious.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Philharmonic Orc claims kinship with both the Phantom of the Opera and the emigr\u00e9e Sugar Plum Fairy. He also maintains an unholy marriage of convenience with the Culture Vulture. For reasons difficult to fathom, the Germans, Italians, Russians, and French all proudly claim him as their own. Like the Vampire, a similarly attired, decadent and aristocratic monster, the Philharmonic Orc came comparatively recently to the New World\u2014but he wasted no time inspiring the nouveau riche of the Main Line, wild frontier, and Barbary Coast to erect (by public subscription) Opery Houses, those gauche and gilded temples sacred to his cult.
\nThese days he is more likely to cause the construction (by tax deductible donation) of a square-mile-sized, pre-stressed concrete neo-fascist styled, totally unnecessary acoustical joke called The (fill in the politician\u2019s name here) Center for the Performing Arts.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: An overture (con brio) of clinking crystal and silver cigarette cases snapping; a pizzicato of popping collar buttons; an arpeggio of uncultured pearls; a scherzo of stomach noises; a continuo of muted flatulence; a crescendo of self-satisfied sighs; a diminuendo of sucked dentures; and a coda of sonorous snores.<\/p>\n

*The Philharmonic Orc makes passionate Overtures to bankers and their wives.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

CULTURE VULTURES
\nPatronia matrimonia allimonia<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Commonly found in art galleries and recital halls, these ghastly ancient female creatures also frequent vernissages and poetry readings, and occasionally stray into lofts and garrets in their relentless search for human prey. They infest grant committees and awards councils and often lurk behind the mastheads of small literary publications. How any given Culture Vulture can attend so many simultaneous openings, unveilings, lectures, meetings, and wine-and-cheese parties is a mystery; it has been conjectured that they travel from place to place on \u201cold bat\u201d wings.<\/p>\n

HABITS: It is the horrible nature of the Culture Vulture to maintain herself in a state of eternal middle-age flush by ceaselessly draining the creative energies of young actors, dancers, sculptors, composers, writers, and artists. (Those who feed exclusively off writers are called \u201cInkubii,\u201d artists are afflicted with \u201cPaintergeist,\u201d and musicians get \u201cHarpies Simplex.\u201d) The Culture Vulture can sometimes be found in the company of her fellow patrons, the Philharmonic Orc and (when there is nothing else to do) the Torontogre. Young geniuses are lured by the apparent interest, affluence, and generosity of the Culture Vulture into unnatural relationships, and then discarded upon the slag heap of last year\u2019s trends. The Culture Vultures are eternally hungry for new \u201ccreative\u201d blood. Thus, they perpetually create new \u201cartistic\u201d movements, fashions, trends, and schools, thereby transforming perfectly normal craftsmen, clowns, and idiots into \u201cartists\u201d whom they can discover, fuss over, celebrate, and then deposit in the trash with Op Art, Theater of Cruelty, twelve-tone music, nonfiction novels, hi-tech sculpture, and other used up passions. Not all Culture Vultures are female\u2014 but even the ones who aren\u2019t pretend to be.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Even the youngest of today\u2019s Culture Vultures (commonly known as \u201cGroupies\u201d) are descended from the \u201cFuries\u201d (then disguised as \u201cMaenads\u201d) who so loved the performances of the Greek singer-songwriter Orpheus that they tore him into little pieces.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The shrill, crooning voice and mechanical laugh are dead giveaways, as are the rattle of bracelets, the ubiquitous, untasted glass of white wine, blue cheese breath, lipstick on the teeth, and knotted wads of darkened cartilage on the elbows. Culture Vultures are among the easiest to identify\u2014and hardest to avoid\u2014of all unearthly creatures. Culture Vultures swoop down from Connecticut, to feed on dying art forms<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PASSING FANCIES
\nEphemera hoopla hula<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From the drawing board to the boardroom to the assembly line to the ad agency to the supermarket shelves to the house next-door to your own house to the closet to the attic to the garbage dump to the antique store to the museum.<\/p>\n

HABITS: A Passing Fancy seizes your imagination and possesses you with a lifelong, burning desire to purchase and own something you\u2019d never known existed the day before yesterday and probably will forget the day after tomorrow. Many of them are quick and clever little tailors and cobblers, who virtually overnight can raise (or lower) every hemline, widen (or narrow) every lapel, sew buttons on (or snip buttons off) every collar in the land. They frequently raise or lower the heels of women\u2019s shoes, causing many a ludicrous stumble. Like many other Fairies, the Passing Fancies are passionately fond of music and dance and can invent an entirely new and totally popular beat, sound, and step in the wink of an eye. They are mischievous: thanks to Passing Fancies you might go to bed with a full head of long flowing locks and awaken with a shaved skull and a safety pin in your nose. These spritely creatures have been known to trick grown men into cultivating droopy, lugubrious mustaches and wearing scarlet knee-length shorts. Through the years, Passing Fancies have bent, bloated, stretched, and flattened the bodies of female victims; singed, knotted, and streaked their hair; and naughtily inspired them to smear their eyes, mouths, and cheeks with grotesque and colored gorp. They are, obviously, extremely capricious toward humankind, tempting mortals to squander their riches on pastimes, garments, and accessories often demeaning (consider the muu-muu) or dangerous (witness hang gliding). But Passing Fancies are also incompatible with one another, so that an invading troupe (like the Preppies) will invariably force into exile a dominating force (in this case, the Punkers) who had, themselves, driven out a previously popular group (the Discos).<\/p>\n

HISTORY: In France, they were the Modes, in Germany, \u201cZeitgeists,\u201d in England \u201cU\u2019s\u201d (and \u201cnon-U\u2019s\u201d). In America, the immigrant Fancy families joined together to form the powerful Conspicuous Consumption Syndicate (a leisure service of monopoly capitalism) and practiced the restrictionist art of TM on their products and the language. These three divided the world\u2014the French Modes assuming responsibility for fashion, the Zeitgeists for opinions, and the \u201cU\u2019s\u201d for etiquette\u2014and inspired in all Americans the fear of being caught dead with last season\u2019s cuff-widths, manners, or principles. Although their life spans are notoriously brief, Passing Fancies can be revived. One such group, even now infesting restaurants and shops on both coasts of America, is known as Elf Nouveau.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: If you listen closely, you can hear the hustle and bustle of Passing Fancies expiring (or reviving) in whatever dark corner of your home to which you have consigned your mood ring, lava lamp, disco cassettes and Walkman, skateboard, Smurfs, quad speakers, yo-yos, coonskin caps, Topsiders, Rubik\u2019s Cubes, and Mork suspenders.<\/p>\n

Are the expressions \u201cin,\u201d \u201chip,\u201d \u201cwith-it\u201d stillin, hip, with it? Go ask a PassingFancy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

TEEN ANGELS
\nJuveniles delinqu\u00e9s<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Under hot rods, barstools, and appreciated. On motorcycles, telephones and crying jags. In back seats, record stores, and really, really serious trouble this time. Beneath strange hats, the class average, and the age of reason. Behind the wheel, the couch, and in their homework.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Teen Angels possess the bodies of all Americans between the ages of 12 and 21. They inspire in every adolescent the hallucination that the universe is a technicolor tragedy in Dolby Stereo starring themselves. They trick athletic young men into writing verse and academic young women into getting contact lenses. Wimpy math whizzes flex and pose in private before mirrors; working-class louts stare moodily into bus station photo machines. A formerly grave and sober girl-child develops a soul-consuming passion for the third guitarist from the left in a band named after a veterinary operation; a clean-cut suburban cub scout becomes the fanatic devotee of some Central American mystic agrarian reformer. With the onset (or threat) of puberty, their victim\u2019s attention span shrinks to that of a brain-damaged moth\u2014save for the uncanny ability to meditate, for days, on possible modifications to the mudguards or sideburns.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: There is no record of Teen Angels\u2014or teenagers, for that matter\u2014having existed before the 1950s. Prior to that time, in America as in the rest of the world, mature children simply passed into irresponsible adulthood. But, following an epidemic of ballad-celebrated grad-night auto wrecks, romantic bike crashes, lovelorn beach drownings, sensitive, misunderstood switchblade massacres, and an incident involving a level crossing and a high school ring, America was as jam-packed with Teen Angels as a fifty-cent-beer-and-extra-slice-night at a pizza parlor featuring a free concert by the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has already spotted most Teen Angels quite nicely, thank you. A typical Teen Angel, on location in rock\u2019n\u2019rollin\u2019 Encino, California.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DAEMON RUNYON
\nSeptem adeste undecim<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From the two dollar Show window at an off-the-beaten track to the Chicago Commodities Exchange; from the jai alai frontons of Miami to the dog tracks of Tuscon; from jumping contests of celebrated frogs to the Sacred Heart basement bingo game around the corner; from the cock fights of El Barrio to the free floating crap games of the nation\u2019s Holiday Inns\u2014 wherever the urge to push your luck burns a hole in your soul, you will surely find the Daemon Runyon: the low rollers\u2019 companion and archenemy of Lady Luck.<\/p>\n

HABITS: He draws your attention to a surething long shot in the Racing Form\u2014where he has previously inserted a typo. He whispers random numbers in a card counter\u2019s ear. He helps you draw to an inside straight if anyone else is holding a flush. He is small enough to ride a tossed coin and stand it on end and tall enough to slam dunk home the shot that helps the Lakers beat the spread . . . and you. He\u2019ll steer you to a sucker the morning after he\u2019s blown his roll. He lets you win from welshers and makes you loose to Mafia dons. He\u2019s the one-armed bandit who trips the filly in the home stretch, slides your chip off the double zero just before it hits, tips the heat to your bookie\u2019s address before you can collect, and drowns you in the office pool.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Daemon is a descendant of the Fadas, those glittering creatures native to the French Riviera. His motive for immigrating remains obscure (for Europeans are as easily tempted as Americans to punt the patrimony on a long shot), but come he did, to work his scams and cons from the beaches of New Jersey to the Sands of Vegas. His first recorded act in the New World was to greet Columbus and tout him it was seven-to-five he had hit the Indies. He later gave Custer the same odds against the Sioux. With his parimutuel friends, Jack O\u2019Diamonds, \u201cAuntie\u201d Up, \u201cThree Card\u201d Monty and \u201cOld Snake Eyes,\u201d he caused havoc on the river boats of the old Mississippi. Daemon\u2019s biggest sting was in 1929, when he called all the bluffs, broke the bank, and left Uncle Sammy sitting at the table in his red, white, and blue underwear.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The Daemon Runyon can be seen riding a cab to the track, and the bus back. He sits on the shoulder of a fat man weeping in an all-night coffee shop. He smells of cheap cigar smoke and bar rye. He sounds like the slap of a flush-busting card on green felt. He tastes like finger nails. He feels like the simultaneous breaking of your heart, your bank account, and your leg.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ELF ALPHA
\nDiacteticus insanias<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Health food stores, juice bars, guru ranches, Buddah camps, slimnasiums, vegetariums, macrobiotic discount outlets, mucus-free dinner theaters, high-fiber swap meets, organic tofu hatcheries, biodegradable potthrowing encounter groups, human potential nude rug-hooking bees, holistic urinary retention seminars, and homeopathic open-air write-your-ownceremony closed-bag funerals.
\nHABITS: Elf Alpha is the nagging voice which tells you that if it tastes this good, it must be bad for you\u2014and that if it tastes this bad, it must be good for you. Frequently, he enters your home\u2014and your life\u2014hidden away in a harmless looking bottle of Flintstones One-A-Day Vitamins. Before you know it, you are scouring the beach for iron-rich seaweed, browsing on cottage cheese mold, and sipping clotted ewes\u2019 milk, in the naive and blasphemous belief that such a vile and wretched diet will enable you to live forever. He promises to improve, restore or initiate your love life, if you will only quit smoking, eat ditch weed salads, and learn to wiggle your ears. He suggests applications of yak excrement for receding hair, bat guano as a breath freshener, and daily total immersion in a tub of parsnip juice, after which you can throw those unnecessary eyeglasses away!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Elf Alpha is descended from that legendary American folk hero, Johnny Appleseed. But while his famous ancestor planted a delicious, nourishing, and natural food source across the continent, Elf Alpha has arranged for the nationwide importation, distribution, and ingestion of viletasting \u201corganic\u201d vittles scorned and despised even by the third-worlders who cultivate them. His closest living (if you can call it living) relative is the odious Mung Goblin. Elf Alpha has most recently been living (and working) in Southern California, in harmony with the Sweat-sylphs, Passing Fancies, and (intermittently) the West Ghost.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: A victim of Elf Alpha\u2019s malpractice exhibits such ghastly and glaring symptoms that he is as hard to miss as a leper on the swim team: eyeballs the color of saffron, complexion like stale tofu, blackstrap molasses breath, a body hairless as a tortoise egg, and limbs as thick and sturdy as dandelion shoots. Look to the victim\u2019s withered shoulder, a frequent perch of the Elf Alpha, where the latter squats in a full lotus position and whispers, \u201cEat it raw!\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PHANTASMA GLORY
\nMiraculum novem dies<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From your secret daydreams through your fondest ambitions, all the way to the top of the glittering heap and back down to dim, grim obscurity, the Phantasma Glory manages careers. And although she specializes in such of the exacting, exhausting performing arts as havingyour-picture-taken, she has also made superstars out of economic advisors, greengrocers, diet doctors, and self-absorbed, vainglorious, shallow, and ambitious ladies and gentlemen from all walks of life. She is everywhere, flashing like a strobe.<\/p>\n

HABITS: As even a William Morris agent knows, the actual manufacture and exploitation of a celebrity is easy. The difficult part is motivating an ordinary citizen to undergo the simple but excruciatingly painful and boring process. That\u2019s where Phantasma Glory comes in. In conspiracy with her fellow media-elves, The Hounds of News and The Mind Boggles, Phantasma Glory lures the starlets out of the corn fields, the expert commentators out of the ivory towers, the pop singers off the street corners, the fat kids onto the ledges\u2014 all into the blinding, brainless, and alltoo-brief blaze of the spotlight. Answering her casting call, cowboys run to Hollywood, morons in the stands take their shirts off for the cameras, dancers study voice, poets give readings, and the cowboys leave Hollywood for Washington. But unlike the crowds of fans, the business managers and the interviewers, the Phantasma Glory does not desert the formerly famous. Take a look at that punched-out contender, that burnt-out disco queen, that guy sitting in the ruins of his barrel at the foot of the falls. Still smiling, aren\u2019t they? Because the Phantasma Glory still hovers near them, singing softly, \u201cFame . . . you\u2019re gonna live forever \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Phantasma Glory is a direct New World descendant of the Rhine Maidens, the Nymphs of that German river who guarded a fabulous hidden treasure and lured many a hero to his doom. (Richard Wagner, an egomaniacal, perfect example of fame-addiction, wrote an opera about them.) They betray their Rhine Maiden origins by two of their favorite Siren calls: \u201cTake the plunge,\u201d they whisper, and \u201cGo for the gold.\u201d In the United States, they have done some of their best work urging folks to give everything they\u2019ve got for a shot at the Vice-Presidential nomination.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Look for the Phantasma Glory in places frequented by her victims: open casting calls, cable tv studios, passing through the Guinness Book Of Records, thumping guitars in the park, attending film school, or sitting alone in their rooms, practicing their autographs. The Phantasma Glory beckons you to the Coast. If you\u2019re on the Coast already, to the Other Coast.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

KINDERGUARDIANS
\nLusos angelii<\/h3>\n

RANGE: Out from between parked cars, on thin ice, inside abandoned refrigerators, atop slippery roofs, near fresh excavations, on the edges of reservoirs, and around buildings under construction; in any of the dangerous spots kids aren\u2019t allowed to go, the Kin-derguardians stand sentry.<\/p>\n

HABITS: As anyone who has ever been a child, or watched one, knows, the statistical chances of any infant reaching the age of majority are nil. But, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Kinderguardians, some make it\u2014 despite a slapstick sequence of terrifying near-misses. The Kinderguardians deflect that eye-bound BB pellet and steady the pot of boiling water teetering over the toddler\u2019s head. Their magic transforms the sidewalk beneath a falling tot into a trampoline. They blow kites away from high tension wires, and miraculously clear busy intersections for the passage of runaway bikes, trikes, wagons, soapbox racers, sleds, toboggans, and skateboards. They short-circuit power tools before tiny limbs are severed, extinguish the fuses on hand-held cherry bombs, and endow denim coveralls with the consistency of steel plate, thus protecting their charges from bruises, scrapes, and spilled acid. They see to it that forks don\u2019t fit in wall sockets, that Drano is digestible, and that the rogue polar bear at the zoo gently accepts a sugar cube from a child\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The kindly American Kinderguardians are descended from those kindly German household spirits, the Kobolds. Germans, fairy and mortal alike, despise human beings, but are sentimentally fond of dogs, fatty sausages, red cabbage, and children. A quick scan of the Grimm Brothers\u2019 stories reveals the awful scrapes from which children escape and the unspeakable ends to which adults all come. In America, where children are feared and neglected like many other living things, the Kinderguardians have had their work cut out for them. They guided Huck Finn\u2019s raft down the river, between banks crammed with murderous grown-ups, and even kept Billy the Kid alive till he passed puberty. And it was they, dear reader, who kept you from flying through the windshield that crazy time so many years ago after the dance or the basketball game or whatever it was . . . We can hardly remember ourselves,<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: We know that the Kinderguardians have been doing their work when we see a baby waddle unscathed from a train wreck, a sixyear-old climbing unchewed from the \u2018gator pond, an infant giggling between the rungs of a fallen ladder, or simply a bouncing baby boy or girl, bouncing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PALTRY GEIST
\nTorments minutissima<\/h3>\n

RANGE: These days, an all-too-common phenomenon in the attics and cellars of American homes (especially those owned or rented by hard-up, freelance writers) is the presence of Poltergeists. Uncanny ghastly special effects directed by these diabolical spirits are epidemic. Paltry Geists, smaller and less celebrated than their cousins the Poltergeists, haunt the rest of the house, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc., and while their pranks are not nearly as spectacular or saleable to Hollywood as those of their relatives, they can be every bit as effective in driving normal citizens over the brink, into howling, gibbering, wild-eyed insanity.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Let us consider a morning in the life of a mortal plagued by a Paltry Geist: your mysteriously reset alarm goes off two hours early or an hour late. If it is a clock-radio, it blasts Van Halen (you like classical) or the 1812 Overture (you like rock). Somehow, your arm got tucked in under you in the night and is now totally numb. As circulation returns, you have the sensation of being flogged with a bouquet of porcupines. Invisible hands cruelly manipulate the hot and cold shower controls\u2014doubtless the same hands which presoaked the towels, used up the last of the toilet paper, and now knocks the toothpaste tube cap out of your fingers and wedges it perfectly into the drain of your (broken) sink. Some malevolent force has made off with a sock from each pair and knotted your shoelace with a wicked Sea Scout\u2019s skill. In your effort to undo this knot, you break (a) a fingernail and (b) the shoelace. The phone rings. As you dash for it, you bang your shin sharply on a mischievously rearranged bit of furniture. The caller is, of course, a wrong number. Whatever spirit now curdles the milk as it enters your cup of coffee has also hidden your car keys. You get up to check your coat for them and smell toast burning\u2014but why go on?!!<\/p>\n

HISTORY: While every nation in Europe at one time boasted its population of mischievous \u201cLittle People,\u201d the remarkably petty and tedious nature of the Domestic American Paltry Geist strongly suggests their Swiss origin. The Paltry Geist is descended from the fair people known as the Severan, merry pranksters of the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps who enjoyed putting the horse on the roof and punching holes in bags of flour. Upon their arrival stateside, they befriended an indigenous Trickster Spirit, known to the natives as Coyote. In the lore of many tribes, Coyote was held responsible for the practical jokes (famine, tornadoes, and later, anthropologists) which the Indians suffered. Between them, Paltry Geist and Coyote sprinkled flies in the buttermilk of many a pioneer housewife, spilled ink on final drafts of the Federalist Papers, and, in general, caused the random irritability for which the American personality is internationally famous.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: A full-fledged attack of Paltry Geists once temporarily impeded the presidential aspirations of candidate Richard M. Nixon. By blunting his razor and hiding his anti-perspirant on the day of his televised debate with JFK, they caused him to come across as a furtive slum-lord suffering delirium tremens. According to fairy historians, the way to tame a Severan was to remain calm and smiling despite his antics. Similarly, the Paltry Geist expects you to be able to \u201ctake a joke\u201d with Zen-like good humor. As an alternative, you can always burn down your house.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DJINN RUMMY
\nAlcoholus anonymous<\/h3>\n

RANGE: This creature can be found or, with patience, acquired, wherever less-than-fine wines are sold. It sometimes can actually be ordered by name in unfashionable liquor stores. Like the worm in the mescal bottle or the bison grass in Polish vodkas or the snake in certain French spirits, Djinn Rummies are more often talked of than actually sighted by Americans. Tramps and hobos are said to be most familiar with their whereabouts.
\nHABITS: The Djinn (pronounced \u201cgin\u201d) Rummy has a great and famous power. It can take away three wishes from whoever is lucky enough to find it. The wish for a job, clean clothes, and a place to sleep are the three most commonly removed wishes. The Djinn Rummy can be most entertaining to those who come to know it well and can make them laugh at things other people can\u2019t hear or see and thus don\u2019t think are funny. In payment for its services, this most sartorially splendid of fairy folk exacts a price: in exchange for gifts conferred, it demands every vestige of human dignity.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Djinn Rummy originated in the Middle East, where merchants longed to export their herbal opiates to the lucrative European market. But the French were happy with their wine, the Germans with their beer, the English with their mead, etc. An Arab wizard, Akbar the Unspeakable, conjured the Djinn Rummy and infused the demon (and a very rum demon he is) into a butt of sack with which Richard Coeur de Lion was returning from his crusade. This single act of supernatural treachery accounts for the hangovers which we suffer to this day and for the increasing number of dope-sucking morons to be found everywhere in the non-Arab world,<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: One of the easiest of fairy folk to spot in private, the Djinn Rummy can be found at the bottom of one\u2019s third bottle of domestic off-brand port. It is usually preceded by a circuslike procession, often featuring stately elephants of unusual colors and giant spiders. It is most commonly sighted in depressed urban surroundings. Djinn Rummy of Kentucky might be aristocratic\u2014Bourbon Blood, y\u2019know!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

THE FILTHY HOBIT
\nFumidus sordidus squalor<\/h3>\n

RANGE: The Filthy Hobit is everywhere, but he prefers areas officially or socially designated NO SMOKING, confined spaces such as elevators and men\u2019s rooms, all public means of transportation, hospital rooms, small restaurants, crowds, and your place.<\/p>\n

HABITS: A spark, a flash, a puff of smoke . . . the promise of pleasure, the thrill of strong desire and, afterward, a lingering presence, and a sense of unfulfillment. . . irradicable traces left behind, one lung chests, sudden losses of health, homes mysteriously burning down . . . these are the works and pomps of a most odious fairy creature. To nonsmokers, the Filthy Hobit is a nuisance, especially to nonsmokers with a white shag carpet, a sensitive pet, or the sort of allergies that might (or might not) be symptoms of severe sexual repression. Offended by the insalubrious heap of butts, the fetid breath, the stench of a Cuban cigar, the asphyxiating cloud of. a pungent pipe, and the scorch mark of the veneer, they believe themselves to be the principal victims of the Filthy Hobit. How wrong they are! The Filthy Hobit is the true bane of the (somewhat shortened) existence of his own devotees, the Smokers. It is they who, unable to locate an ashtray, must befoul their cuffs and pockets, they whose teeth and fingers turn amber in deference to his filthy ways, they who halfway through the greatest film ever produced, concert ever performed, exhibit ever staged, or love ever made, become distracted\u2014nay obsessed\u2014by the thought of having a cigarette. And it is the Hobit who always hides the ashtrays, who inspires his addicted legions to light the wrong end of a filter tip, and who makes matches disappear. It is he who inspires his victims to use the gas stove and burn their eyebrows off. The Hobit it is who deludes the chronic cougher into believing there is one left in his or her pack, until he or she gets home, and there isn\u2019t, and he or she spends a sleepless night searching behind sofa cushions, foraging through the trash for a butt with a drag or two left in it. . . .<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Filthy is an indigenous American creature, known to the native tribes as To-Ba-Ko, which we might translate as Dragon, the Tragic Puff. Outraged at the Europeans\u2019 treatment of his native friends, he has carried out a four-century-long campaign of revenge, by afflicting upon their descendants wheezes, mattress fires, withdrawal symptoms, catarrh, yellow fingers and cancer.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The desperate look in the eyes of a man patting all his pockets, or a woman turning her pock-etbook inside out. A pile of ash in the corner of a window sill\u2014like a house-flies\u2019 crematorium. A waste basket bursting into flame. And a hollow, bitter laugh that sounds, curiously, not unlike a coughing fit.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ALIBI ELF
\nNolo contendere<\/h3>\n

RANGE: From your first bed wetting and that broken heirloom vase, through hooky, dented fenders, broken curfews, parking violations, prima facie evidence of adultery, broken contracts, missed dental appointments, late payments, and the final bed wetting, Alibi Elf is there, to get you off the hook with a plausible explanation. Sometimes.<\/p>\n

HABITS: If one\u2019s conscience functions as a judge, then Alibi Elf may be said to be everybody\u2019s personal defense attorney, his briefcase bulging with extenuating circumstances and cover stories. He provides the dog who ate the homework. He has a large stock of readily available malfunctioning watches, sick friends, bus and plane schedule irregularities, terrible splitting migraines (the worst you\u2019ve ever had), and (during the World Series) expired elderly relatives. He is not, himself, very reliable, and sometimes sends one of the junior partners around to handle the action. These \u201cPoor\u201d and \u201cLame\u201d Excuses can, at best, get you out of alimony proceedings with only a severe tongue-lashing or can plea-bargain a spanking offense down to \u201cyour room without dinner.\u201d Like any successful lawyer, Alibi Elf is not concerned with matters of objective innocence or guilt, but so dazzling are his powers of justification and rationalization that he often inspires his clients with enough self-pitying self-righteousness to brazen out the case, despite mountains of damning evidence. \u201cI didn\u2019t know it was loaded!\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t remember!\u201d; \u201cI was drunk!\u201d; and \u201cI can\u2019t help it, I\u2019m a Taurus!\u201d are among his typical motions for dismissal.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: Alibi Elf is originally a Fay of French origin and was responsible for helping to establish his homeland\u2019s curiously labyrinthine legal systems before emigrating to the New World. When the first British general lost the first conflict in the Revolutionary War, Alibi Elf was there to help him explain to his superiors that the disaster was the result of \u201cfaulty intelligence,\u201d when the real faulty intelligence then, as now, was that of the officer in command. Over the years, Alibi Elf has been of great service to military men, but oddly not to cadets, who in most cases are taught to exorcise this creature with the simple phrase, \u201cNo excuse, sir.\u201d Likewise, Alibi Elf has been of assistance to politicians (with varying degrees of success). It was he who prompted several \u201cAbscam\u201d defendants to explain to incredulous juries that they were attempting to entrap the FBI agents from whom they had taken bundles of hundreds. Alibi Elf keeps very busy in Washington, issuing cover stories through press agents he has inspired and offering explanations and amplifications \u201cnot for attribution.\u201d These follow on the heels of each policy disaster or personal scandal. \u201cSorry about that\u201d and \u201cthe President misspoke himself\u201d are two fairly recent examples of his work.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: The look of outraged innocence in the eyes of an alleged perpetrator is an almost certain sign that he (or she) is busy consulting with Alibi Elf, especially if it is accompanied by the words, \u201cI won\u2019t dignify that accusation with a reply.\u201d Explanations that begin \u201cFrankly\u201d or \u201cIn all honesty\u201d are inspired by his counsel and are, therefore, neither frank nor honest. Mortals calling upon the aid of this supernatural spirit do so, as might be expected, in a time-honored, ritual manner. They assume a facial expression of absolute candor and proceed to testify\u2014with their fingers crossed.<\/p>\n

*As legal aid to New Hampshire\u2019s Dan Webster, Alibi Elf once helped beat the Devil.
\n**Under the spell of the Mira Chimera, we wonder things like, \u201cHow do I look from the back?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

MIRA CHIMERA (ON THE WALL)
\nBella donna<\/h3>\n

RANGE: This glimmering, glittering, glamorous, but highly elusive spirit is believed, by some, to be extinct. She can only be seen in a mirror, and her many devotees pursue the sight of her in charm schools, makeup clinics, slimming gyms, mud spas, health farms, beauty parlors, tanning salons, and nose job boutiques. Hints to her whereabouts are sought between the glossy covers of fat fashion magazines full of skinny fashion models, and there are frequent reports of near-sightings after the prescribed ritual applications of paints, oils, powders, unguents, and lotions before the looking glass.<\/p>\n

HABITS: Mira Chimera, like many a bewitching Fairy of ballad and song, offers the promise of romance, wealth, and power to whosoever sees and captures her. Specifically, she inspires the belief (in Americans of all sexes) that obedience to her harsh and arbitrary demands will result in an improvement in their \u201cimage,\u201d thus guaranteeing a long and delightful life. \u201cFame and fortune can be yours,\u201d she whispers, \u201cand may be as close as your vanity table!\u201d (Failing that, there is always the operating table . . .) The cultivation (or defoliation) of a mustache, a simple sandblasting of shoulder freckles, the loss, gain, or strategic relocation of a dozen pounds\u2014 perform any of these, she suggests, and charming, vivacious and successful Mira Chimera might be staring back at you! To a foxy East Coast lady, she might appear as a magazine cover; to a West Coast starlet as a movie poster; to a Midwest woman as a catalogue picture of an all-electric kitchen . . . provided (she implies) they (respectively) grow wild and rampant eyebrows, have their ears trimmed, and paint all their extremities fire engine red. Men, too, fall victim to her wiles, and have been known to believe that, were it not for a receding hairline, they might rule the world. (This fantasy often leads to a diabolical infatuation with the Devil Toupee.)<\/p>\n

HISTORY: The Mira Chimera is a winged fairy of the Spanish Hadas, an exotic creature of surpassing charm. She always has been appalled and dismayed by human unattractiveness, and it has often amused her to suggest to mortal men and women that there is something they can do about it. In America, she has been responsible for the marketing of all manner of patent medicines and mail-order beauty aids, not the least famous of which were the celebrated wooden dentures which George Washington whitewashed nightly. It has been her habit to whisper contradictory beauty hints to alternating generations, so that children and parents look even more absurd to each other than is natural. \u201cTape \u2019em down,\u201d she commands one decade. \u201cHang \u2019em out,\u201d she instructs the next. \u201cGrow it long.\u201d \u201cChop it off.\u201d \u201cCurl it up.\u201d \u201cStraighten it out.\u201d \u201cPaint it.\u201d \u201cWash it.\u201d \u201cFlash \u2019em . . . hide \u2019em . . . put a feather in it . . . beat it with a stick. . .\u201d<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: Reports of the Mira Chimera\u2019s complete disappearance from our world are doubtless premature. She was said to be lost forever with the passing of long white gloves. She was supposed to have vanished with the hoop skirt. She was mourned when the movies learned to talk. She fled in tears when Bernice bobbed her hair . . . but her dedicated followers sometimes glimpse her still, reflected, if only for a moment, in the smoked windows of a passing limo . . .<\/p>\n

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THE LEPRACHAUNMAN
\nMelancholia extremis<\/h3>\n

RANGE:<\/strong> Three a.m. Rainy Sundays. Strange, cheap hotels. Near-empty saloons. (If you find yourself sitting in the near-empty saloon of a cheap hotel at three a.m. on a rainy Sunday, he\u2019s got you for certain.) The Leprachaunman\u2019s correct mailing address is Bleak House, Lonely Street, Slough of Despond, Valley of Despair, Bluesville, State of Depression 00013.<\/p>\n

HABITS:<\/strong> It is customary to attribute your typical Irish blatherskite\u2019s \u201cgift of gab\u201d to his having kissed the Blarney Stone. Like others of his kith and kin, he is invisible to all but the particular mortal he has singled out for his attentions. He has a soothing, sympathetic way about him. Faith, but he feels nearly as sorry for yourself as you do! And isn\u2019t it but he appreciates what a special class of individual you are: full of promise and potential, shamefully misunderstood, hard done by, but bearing up bravely. Here, have another of those. Make it a double. Sure, he\u2019s just the company that misery loves! And what, you may well ask, does the Leprachaunman do with the dull, gray, soggy, tattered little souls he collects from his victims? Well, in the old days, he\u2019d wad them together, into something that looked like a ball of used Kleenex, and sell them for screenplays or one act plays. Today he peddles them, one by one, as country and western hits.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> There\u2019s nary a need of a professional genealogist to tell us that he emerged, nodding thoughtfully and keening softly, from the soggy Celtic Twilight. He\u2019s as Irish as treason and learned his soul-stealing craft in the land where many possess the power to transform both whiskey and beer into whine. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O\u2019Neill are a pair of his notable victims, but there\u2019s scarcely a Jesuit high school in the New World as hasn\u2019t graduated a poet or two into his clutches.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> He can be found backstage at the closing night of any play, oozing out of an envelope in the wake of a rejection slip, standing a round in the gin mill nearest the unemployment insurance office, offering his smarmy, unctuous condolences: \u201cI\u2019m sorry for yer trouble. . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DON FAUN
\nVeni vidi visa<\/h3>\n

RANGE:<\/strong> All points of entry on the American border: airports, docks, bus stations, highways, byways, and goat paths, secret tunnels, unpatrolled deserts, and small holes in fences known only to himself.<\/p>\n

HABITS:<\/strong> Don Faun provides counsel and inspiration to such members of the tired, poor, and huddled masses as persist in yearning to breathe free, even though the quota has been filled. He whispers nautical bearings in the ear of a Haitian tillerman and helps him steer his overloaded dinghy to a safe landing on the Florida strand. He assists Iranians in pronouncing those difficult English words, \u201cIyama stewdant.\u201d He guides uncarded farmhands across the Rio Grande and into the employ of leather-skinned but tenderhearted lettuce ranch ramrods. In return for smuggling an immigrant into America (and getting him established in the small filthy headshop business), Don Faun insists only that his clients show him respect and remain faithful to the folkways of their homelands\u2014that is, that they continue to eat with paddles, wear grotesque hats, or, in some cases, linger in ignorance of most fundamental rules of hygiene. Many newcomers to these shores further honor their patron, the Don, by becoming, once safely settled in the new country, fiercely demonstrative patriots of the land they left.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> For centuries, Don Faun capered merrily in the woods around the walls of Rome, assisting waves of Goths and Vandals in obtaining looting permits. He himself stowed away with the fleet of Corsican Folletti, when those earth spirits of old Italy were forced to flee their police-ridden homeland. He is a friendly, godfatherly type, who has helped generations of immigrants find their way to his adopted country. A creature of great power and resourcefulness, one of his greatest triumphs came when, rather than smuggle every native of Texas into the U.S.A., he simply arranged for the annexation of the territory. He acted similarly in the case of Alaska, personally lobbying William Seward to purchase that frozen wasteland and thereby earned the undying gratitude of the Eskimos, all of whom were eager for citizenship. Don Faun currently has his eye on Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> If you are reading this in the United States, you don\u2019t need to find Don Faun. Across our borders, Don Faun helps fill up the Melting Pot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

EVIL NECKROMANCERS
\nInfidelitates minimissimae<\/h3>\n

RANGE: These wicked fomenters of domestic strife are sometimes found in the kitchen during house parties and often in the back seats of taxi cabs. They like the dark corners of bars near the office, parks in summer, and overnight business trips. There are males (Valentinii) and females (Vampirillae) of the species, and they lurk and strike wherever one member of a couple is a little late getting home.<\/p>\n

HABITS: It is the mischievous, obnoxious, and downright perilous nature of these seductive creatures to leave suspicious traces, scents, hints, and clues of illicit dalliance on or about the persons of their innocent and unsuspecting victims: a blond hair on the lapel of a chap married to a brunette; the smell of strange after-shave in a young bride\u2019s hair; a carefully planted matchbook from an exotic night club; a phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin; unaccountable credit card receipts\u2014and of course, that old favorite, lipstick on your collar. Fairy wooing of mortals is traditional; there are, for example, many folktales about the tragically impossible love of mermen for princesses, and mermaids for princes . . . but the object of an Evil Neckromancer\u2019s affections is not even offered a life of bliss in a city beneath the sea. Those who bear the mark of the Evil Neckromancer just end up having to sleep on the couch.<\/p>\n

HISTORY: To the trained eye, the victim\u2019s symptoms (lipstick on the collar, hickies on the throat) are evidence that Evil Neckromancers are decadent, distant relatives of central Europe\u2019s dread Nosferatu. (The more direct descendants of that blood-sucking clan, still undead in the New World today, practice the occult rites of personal management.) The era now known as the Boring Twenties was the heyday of the American Neckromancers, who came flickering out of Hollywood in the guise of \u201cSheiks\u201d and \u201cVamps,\u201d appearing as tempting visions before hithertofore innocent American couples seated in darkened movie houses. They caused the hideous practice of \u201cnecking\u201d to spread across the nation like a beard rash on a maiden throat. During the forties, many a gallant serviceman on leave came home to his sweet patootie only to find disquieting evidence insidiously left by the Neckromancers: strange cars in driveways, ten-gallon hats, pipes smoking in ashtrays, and huge pairs of unfamiliar boxer shorts hanging from bedroom doorknobs. Fortunately for the future bliss of America\u2019s tootsies (and fellas), most servicemen accepted their tootsies\u2019 honest explanation for those evil \u201cartifacts\u201d: \u201cI just don\u2019t know how that got there.\u201d<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS: You don\u2019t spot a Neckromancer; a Neckromancer spots you. And unless you enjoy screaming, door-slamming, bag-packing rages, protestations, and recriminations, you are advised to ignore the Neckromancer\u2019s handiwork at all times.<\/p>\n

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TUPPERWEREWOLVES
\nTedium domesticum<\/h3>\n

RANGE:<\/strong> Tupperwerewolves are little-known members of the larger group of supernatural beings known as shape shifters; it includes such monstrosities as the Werewolves (of London), the Were-bears (known to the American Indians), the Were-foxes of China and the Ready-to-Were wolves of modem \u201cshopping centers.\u201d Tupperwerewolves, like these others, are human until, under special circumstances, they are involuntarily transformed into unbreakable plastic receptacles. Tupperwerewolves are found in many American homes. They are stainless and heat resistant and come in a variety of colors. They are said to last a lifetime, and, for all we know, may be immortal.
\nHABITS: Almost every American has met and conversed with a Tupperwerewolf, but due to the blandness and insipidity of the creature, few are able to distinguish it from a perfectly ordinary bore. Spending part of their time as plastic containers and the rest as suburban, semi-sentient life, Tupperwerewolves are remarkable in both forms for their quality of complete for-getability.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> The Tupperwerewolves originated in Holland, the boredom capital of the world. In the guise of thick, ugly pottery and plates, they were venerated by the simple-minded Dutch, who gave them places of honor upon grotesquely carved cabinets in the comers of their kitchens. (It has been argued that the word \u201cElf\u201d is itself but a corruption of the Dutch word \u201cDelft.\u201d) After arriving in America, Tupperwerewolves adopted a more resilient form, and lurk to this day in many a suburban kitchen, inspiring trivial kaffeeklatsch conversation.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> As stated above, a Tupperwerewolf is almost indistinguishable from a normal human bore. However, if you find yourself, in a domestic social situation, listening to someone too boring to be real, chances are he (or she) isn\u2019t! There are ways to find out. In both human and plastic forms, Tupperwerewolves are dishwasher safe. A trip through the rinse cycle is a quick way to test the nature of your tedious newfound friend. A less vigorous method is to ask the suspected shape shifter if he (or she) is \u201cafraid of spotting or streaking.\u201d Tupperwerewolves generally are. In whatever form, Tupperwerewolves are unbreakable. Bores who have survived head-on collisions with commuter trains or recent surgery are probably Tupperwerewolves. These creatures do not crack or shatter at extreme temperatures. Bores of your acquaintance from desert or permafrost regions are probably Tupperwerewolves. You can throw a party and find out.<\/p>\n

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THE LEFT WING SYMP AND THE
\nRIGHT WING TROG
\nPox populi, Sinister dexterque<\/h3>\n

RANGE:<\/strong> These two highly political, argumentative and totally symbiotic creatures prefer to stalk such public forums as the podia of awards ceremonies and the sidewalks in front of embassies, but they may also be found in humbler settings, such as state chambers, barbershops, and the corridors of detox centers in depressed urban areas.<\/p>\n

HABITS:<\/strong> By means yet unknown, these inseparable creatures shape the opinions of the opinion shapers. It has been suggested that through water fluoridation, the Symp lures young folk to the Left, while the Trog summons their elders to the Right with a stern clarion call, in a deep, daddy-like voice. It was once believed that the Trog-Symp was a two-headed creature, its twin (and empty) skulls joined at the nose, the better to exchange glares. In fact, they share a heart (half-hard, half-bleeding) and not one mortal protege of either is entirely uninfluenced by the other. Thus, the radical Liberal, protesting one governmental agency\u2019s invasion of his files and telephone, has much in common with the extreme Conservative, objecting to another governmental agency\u2019s attempt to register his rifle and audit his tax returns\u2014for both are moved to lodge their principled complaints with the same (and yet another) governmental agency! There is nothing more pleasing to the Symp-Trog than the sight of two mortals defending to one another\u2019s death each other\u2019s right to disagree.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> Resembling as they do the traditional \u201cWinged Victories\u201d of France and the radical \u201cRed Cap\u201d Foletti of Italy, these contrary conjoined creatures were clearly born of mixed French and Italian parentage in the Old World. Before emigrating to the New, they divided their time between homelands, laying the groundwork for the astonishing number of strongly opposed and universally despised political parties which to this day succeed each other in their respective European capitals. Arriving late to the New World by the standards of the first fairy emigrants (there was so much to do in the homelands), these politics-loving creatures reached America on the Mayflower. Upon landing at Plymouth, the once-persecuted Puritans, erstwhile disciples of the Left Winged Symp, were confronted by prospects of vast power and real estate, and instantly converted to the side of the Right Winged Trog. At the Constitutional Convention, the Trog inspired John Adams while the Symp supported Thomas Paine. When Adams eventually assumed the Presidency, the Trog cheered; the Symp convinced Citizen Tom to split for France. Since then, the Trog-Symp has inspired Americans to take belligerent and opposing sides in civil wars, their own and other people\u2019s (Spain, Vietnam, Ireland, El Salvador. . .). A consensus is commonly supposed to emerge from the colliding and often paradoxical opinions advocated by the LWS\/RWT. Who can quarrel with a two party system? And if, instead of a consensus, a pork-barrelling stalemate results, who can deny that a two-headed, bipartisan beast is yet superior to the four-headed fairy of this kind which haunts Canada or the one with the thirteen-way split personality that is the scourge of Mexico?<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> Both the Trog and Symp hibernate between elections, living off their store of little-known facts. Periodically, they emerge to view the issues, but return to their hole immediately, if they see even the shadow of doubt. At election time, they emerge and lend candidates not just the courage to confront the issues but the stamina to recite them endlessly. Look for signs of them wherever slogans such as \u201cWho needs a slogan when you can have a promise?\u201d are heard.<\/p>\n

This Symp-Trog hails from North and\/or South Dakota, but can never agree on which.<\/p>\n

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THE PENTAGORGON
\nDraconis militarisibus<\/h3>\n

RANGE:<\/strong> Marching upon the land, or burrowing (like moles) beneath it; upon the sea and under it; up in the air and full of it, this most bellicose spirit patrols the war room, the boardroom, the ward room, the sword room, the barroom, and the powder room of the Pentagon. She has also been sighted (and cited) behind the throne, inside the velvet glove, between the lines (and well behind them), under deep cover, lobbying in the lobbies off the corridors of power, and attending the occasional clandestine strategy conference, deep in somebody else\u2019s jungle.<\/p>\n

HABITS:<\/strong> Operation Self-Perpetuation.
\nCode Name: Bloat.
\nEyes Only.
\nA: Strategy: Military expenditures shall increase by triple the rate of inflation and\/or in direct inverse proportion to perceived and\/or potential National Security threats.
\nB: Tactics: Infiltrate and snafu existing defense projects by altering design specifications and off-lining production schedules, to insure vast cost overruns and eventual production of obsolete and inefficient ordnance equipment; utilize leaked media exposure of critically obsolete and inefficient ordnance equipment to justify immediate requisition of greatly increased military appropriations, etc., etc.
\nOptimal Scenario A (Hardware): Commission nuclear-powered helicopter-submarine-scout-craft, to secure aircraft carrier bottoms from subversive encrustations by insurgent crustaceans.
\nOptimal Scenario \u0392 (Software): Obtain Congressional Grant for (CIA front) Costa Rican Aural Medicine Institute; surgically deafen indigenous population to facilitate utilization of area as secret rocket testing target.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> As its name suggests, the Pentagorgon is of Greek ancestry\u2014 Spartan, to be precise. She served as military advisor to the forces laying siege to the city of Troy and recommended the fabulously difficult fabrication of an enormous and realistic dead rat on wheels, stuffed with Argive guerillas, to be left at the Trojan gate. Although the ruse was apparently unsuccessful, the Pentagorgon achieved her objective of prolonging the war another twenty-one years. The Pentagorgon has an aversion to the sights, sounds, and smells of actual combat. Her interest (and hence the interest of the mortals in her thrall) is strictly in the financing, development, deployment, and maintenance of weapons. In her capacity as Military Advisor to the U.S. of \u0391., she has recommended the pig iron plating of Civil War barges, the manufacture and testing of many wonderful nuclear weapons, the spraying of defoliant into the wind, and is at present urging the Powers That Be to arm patriotic American dolphins with nuclear warheads\u2014a national sense of porpoise, she calls it. The Pentagorgon\u2019s proudest American achievement was the battle of the Alamo, a gory encounter which resulted not only in the obliteration of the American defenders, but caused what seems like a three-hundredfold increase in military spending on a per annum basis from that day to this.<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> A speech about the urgent need to up the megaton-nage; a prattle of slogans, a rattle of sabres, a flutter of flags, and a clatter of drums; a bluster of orders, a cluster of corpses; a gold star and a ribbon where your arm used to be.<\/p>\n

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THE WOOLY BULLY<\/strong>
\nPatriolicus jingoissimus<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
RANGE:<\/strong> This loudly, proudly nationalistic sprite is usually encamped down at the American Legion Hall, although in times of international crisis\u2014 like a war or the Olympics\u2014he is frequently found on the barstool next to you and\/or behind the wheel of a taxi. He also occurs in National Park Service trailer campsites and infests phone-in radio shows.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
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HABITS:<\/strong> Although he is really very tiny, the Wooly Bully can puff himself up to enormous size, not unlike the bullfrog. He can also imitate that inflatable amphibian\u2019s popping eyes and grumpy, bellicose croak. The Wooly Bully is a nature spirit: that is, he\u2019s melodramatically proud of America\u2019s geographical grandeur and seductively suggests to us, as we gaze in awe at the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, or the Everglades, that any country with landmarks like these couldn\u2019t possibly, ever, screw up its economic or foreign policies. He can be devious, as well, and has been known to hide in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. When swallowed, he creates that well-known lump in your throat at the climax of a John Wayne movie. He\u2019s the spirit of patriotism. He loves to rattle the little sabre he carries but is mostly harmless as a child. (He can\u2019t resist a parade or fireworks display.) The Wooly Bully is only dangerous when found in close proximity to the Right Wing Trog and the Pentagorgon, with whom he shares an affinity for invasions of small Caribbean islands, embargoes of socialist dictatorships, and meetings of the Trilateral Commission.<\/p>\n

HISTORY:<\/strong> It is assumed that the Wooly Bully is of Teutonic origin, that he is descended from the blustering warrior dwarves so dear to Wagner, and that possibly his name itself is a corruption of Wuhlarbeit, the German word meaning \u2018agitator,\u2019 \u2018irritation,\u2019 \u2018pain-in-the-neck.\u2019 The Wooly Bully first appeared in America shortly before the turn of the century, emigrating from the Old World in the company of East European diplomats. He quickly adopted the patriotic fervor of his new land, however, and served as company mascot for Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s Rough Riders. That is why, while cutting a swath through other people\u2019s homelands in the name of National Security, Manifest Destiny, and Hearst newspaper circulation, T.R. would rally the troops by shouting, \u201cBully!\u201d<\/p>\n

SPOTTER\u2019S TIPS:<\/strong> When Old Glory unfurls in the wind and the band plays Sousa, you will feel the Wooly Bully running up and down your spine. It tickles. Enjoy it. He\u2019s only dangerous when armed.<\/p>\n

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I cannot search the field guide on 12treasures.com or other as id like (in one waterfall for all iterations of any certain phrase e.g. “shadow”) so im transcribing it here so i may search match case; i couldnt find this resource anywhere. MA\u00ceTRE D\u2019EAMON Taboo d\u2019h\u00f4te RANGE: From the wine racks to the coatcheck room, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2359"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2361,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions\/2361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jaaronanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}