Mephisto Balz (Big-Tyme Gamez) is a long-time student of modern games, sports, pastimes, hobbies, recreation, hanky-panky and hokum.  He has written the classic Don’t Take Your Eye Off Balz! (Gimlet Press 1987), a vast collection of his brief columns from such sources as Hobbies, House & Garage, Eusophia’s Cuisine Digest and many other magazines. At the present, he is our U.N. representative to the World Council on Games Using Funny Counters.  He lives in Bucks County, PA, and manages a small publishing firm (Koch & Balz, Inc.) on a former indigo plantation.

Jim E. Deane (The Dime Store) is fondly remembered for a few fleeting early TV appearances on such klassick sitcom romps as Leave It to Bugger, Papa Knows Nought and My Friend Irmegard and for mere minutes in big-screen teen catastrophes like Humongous! and Revolting, without a Clue.  He drove his 1955 Spyder Superleggera GT Alfredo-Romee into a stubborn elm tree a mile and half outside Goshen, Indiana, in 1957, thus earning pop culture immortality for no reason at all.  This essay was exhumed from some ancient Deane effects discovered a few years ago and shows he wasn’t just a mumbling oaf with a skull full of souse or brawn (Polish head-cheese to you).

Rev. Jack Dungoode (Inikwities of the Internet), fulltime preacher with the Church of Gob (certificates from Duluth Bible U. and Unionized Theocratic Institute), travels on the lecture circuit, appears on such TV showcases as the Pile of Power and Gerry Fellwell’s Home Jubilee and has written an inspirational best-seller available at Xtian Bkstores everywhere—I Found God, but Who Lost Him in the First Place? (New Pestilence Press, 2006).  Best known as longtime radio spokesman for Stuffgut Hevvy-Doody Dubble Trusses.

Professor Loose (Frosty Mug Lecture Series No. 001) (true identity protected), during thirty years in pursuit of intellectual and sensual gratification as well as a living, has trod the byways and nether plains of America, extracting data (details withheld) from Mother Nature / Father Earth; has, since early on, honed the finer sensibilities of the idealized hippy hero as he quested upon misty mushroom pastures, laid down a righteous beat with his bongos and put paint to canvas, stocked his nimble mind with the wisdoms of many ages, and let his sundry women go as easily as they have come. The Professor's wildly varied experiences and his willingness to casually share from the store of his observations without overdue rigor or oppressive documentation-- his willingness to be wrong if he's wrong, among friends downing a pitcher-- recommend him highly as our inaugural Frosty Mug lecturer.

Willis Quick (Richard Poole Among the Orders) graces again the electronic pages of jpt, with an episode from the middle of his first detective novel, The Process of Murder (1985).  It reveals our dauntless sleuth fuddled both by the beauties of England and by the twisted mystery revealing itself to him on a vast XVIIIth century estate, wherein we learn much about the neoclassic sensibility and its magic way of enhancing nature to exalt a specific place.  As Lancelot “Capability” Brown might say, “This has many capabilities in it for our delectation!”

Elmo Tanker III (Hit Parade) is the grandson of famed pop-novelty artist (whistling, muttering, kazoo, musical saw, taro root and keyless velocipede) Elmo Tanker, whose million-selling Flubber Records disc “Heartless” (1947) is still played by desperate DJs driven to pointless exhibitions of unearned nostalgia.  Our jpt Tanker is an executive with Save-a-Life Medical Home Emergency Radar Beacons who researches and writes on antique pop culture in his spare time.  He aims to produce and direct a made-for-TV docudrama on his grandfather’s utterly humdrum life as a musically illiterate hack.

Eustachia Toob (Decadent French Poets), daughter of Bobo Toob (“Boy Evangelist of the Prairie”) and equally famous A. Nell Toob, a tireless crusader against Demon Rum and the evils of bigamy.  In her salad days, Ms. Toob scribbled for Scribner’s, Collier’s, Vanity Fair and other hi-octane weekly mags, broadcast show biz gossip nitely from “21” on the Red Network and appeared in Mack Sennett two-reelers as a bathing beauty.  She was once hailed as “Empress of the Short-Short Bodice Rippers” in honor of her many serio-comic scanties for Liberty magazine (reading time = 6 minutes).