Philo has had a happy childhood, growing up along the Big Sur coastline in Pine Bluff, California. Life takes a turn for the perverse, however, when his hippie father, Harley, discovers the chemical compound for Blissful Living Love-Radiance of Infinite Divine Being. As self-experimenting Harley soon finds out, the new drug has some undesirable side effects: specifically, it turns people into roosters with an ungovernable lust for trees. When Harley escapes to the sensuous pleasures of the forest, vowing to never set foot on the ground again, Philo finds a surrogate father in Captain Nitt-Witt--the ancient, eccentric creator of the infamous folk art castle known as Nitt-Witt Ridge. During a summer apprenticeship with the Captain, Philo learns to practice Zen meditation and the manly art of trout fishing. But when a sanctimonious robo-rooster decides to wage a terrorist campaign against the citizens of Pine Bluff during the annual Helldorado Parade, it falls to Philo and the Captain to put an end to the violence by confronting the twisted family mystery that lurks behind the killer's chrome-plated beak."Crash Gordon delivers this unprecedented and extraordinary Zen koan-like novel with a voice as confident and alluring as the ancient Greek philosophers, but with much more humor.... Featuring an unpredictable cast of characters, this short but bittersweet psychedelic semi-autobiography is considerably more grassroots and elemental than anything by Richard Brautigan and is hipper, trippier, and trendier than Jakucho Setouchi. Listen... the flaming "crotch-o-lantern" is not the craziest thing you'll read about in this book, nor are the exploding canines, or the befeathered chrome-metallic serial-killer.... For all of these things and more I think you, yes you, should purchase a copy of Nitt-Witt Ridge today and devour it. In the process you'll become--something more than you were!"--The Alternative

A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana--the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film. The holiday film "A Christmas Story," first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Miracle on 34th Street," This edition of "A Christmas Story" gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker's shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father's pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg l& the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie's duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie's unstoppable campaign to get Santa--or anyone else--to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid"? The pieces that comprise "A Christmas Story," previously published in the larger collections "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories," coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.

The second edition of A Dictionary of Tocharian B includes substantially all Tocharian B words found in regularly published texts, as well as all those of the London and Paris collections published digitally (digital publication of the Paris collection is still incomplete), and a substantial number of the Berlin collection published digitally. The number of entries is more than twenty per cent greater than in the first edition. The overall approach is decidedly philological. All words except proper names are provided with example contexts. Each word is given in all its various attested morphological forms, in its variant spellings, and discussed semantically, syntactically (where appropriate), and etymologically. New to the second edition is the assignment, where possible, of the examples of the word's use to their exact chronological period (Archaic, Early, Classical, Late/Colloquial). This dating provides the beginning of the study of the Tocharian B vocabulary on a historical basis. Included are also a reverse English-Tocharian B index and, another innovation to this edition, a general index verborum of Indo-European cognates. Douglas Q. Adams, PhD in Linguistics (1972), University of Chicago, is currently professor emeritus at the University of Idaho. His publications have been largely devoted to explorations of the lexicon and morphology of Proto-Indo-European and, particularly, of Tocharian. He was co-author with James P. Mallory of Queen's University, Belfast, of The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006).