Encomium for the Jackalope

If you ever pass within 100 miles of Wall Drug, SD, you can't miss references to the venerable jackalope--part rabbit, part antelope, all-American.

Well, I'm not writing on that. So bite me.

No, I direct your attention to the Cenotaph of the Jackalope and, more particularly, its estimable proprietor, Dr. Hermester Barrington. I became acquainted with the good doctor through a mutual friend and confidant, and my life has been distinctly enriched because of it.

"Reclusive polymath" is perhaps the best way to summarize the man. He is a trustee and faculty member of that most eminent redoubt of New England higher education, Miskatonic University, where his specialty is protozoa. (Ah, would that I might be appointed lecturer in exosociology or xenoethnography there...)

Dr. Barrington is also an energetic reviewer of works in wildly diverse genres; you will find abundant evidence of his sagacity and acumen if you search him out on Amazon.com. And, as befitting a bibliophile, he oversees the Malibu Lake branch of the Invisible Library, built largely out of his personal collection of great yet oddly untraceable works of fiction and scholarship.

Seek him out on-line, for I can think of no better guide to the exquisite pleasures of obscure scholarship. Trivia, indeed, Dr. Barrington! Realia, I say.