Cute, but aside from the last bit I'm not sure what the point is. People aren't birds.

And while my little Kansas Family test is, of course, intended humorously, if you mentally throw a few examples at it, it works surprisingly well.

BTW, thanks for the Thurber link. I love Thurber--if the only thing he had ever written was "The 13 Clocks," which ranks right up there with "The Princess Bride,"* he would still be one of my favorite authors.

* Out in a shiny new edition, with some new stuff. Speaking of favorite authors, this whole thing was written so masterfully that it was only last year(!!), after reading the new edition with the new material, that I suddenly flashed on the fact that the entire thing was totally fictional!

Not just the obvious fiction of the fairy tale itself, but all of the background in the book! The late Morganstern, Florin, Gilder, the Florin attorneys, the agents, the deleted parts of the book, his crappy son Jason, his divorced wife Helen, and all the other autobiographical details; were pulled completely out of Goldman's head. A quick check on the Net confirmed that those two countries never existed. Had I given it a moment's concious thought it would have occurred to me that the two countries were named after coins, but I sailed along for years on the surface of the book, never bothering to dig deeper. Heck, do YOU know every last dinky dukedom in Europe? I only found out this year that my ancestors hailed from a European armpit called Bessarabia. And, of course, most people probably knew that it was all fiction and assumed I did too, so the subject never came up with my friends. Okay, Sherlock Holmes I ain't.

When this finally came to me, I, at the same time, felt like a complete fool and was as delighted as a little kid who sees someone pull a rabbit out of a hat. To be able to paint a fake reality so completely--not the actual Princess Bride story of course, but the surrounding Morganstern background--was fabulous. William Goldman is a god.

The very good news about this, of course, is that that bastard Goldman can write the rest of "Buttercup's Baby" any time he feels like it. I may camp on his doorstep until he does. And it damn well better have a happy ending.