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It was late Friday night when Walter Miller, one of my regular reads, posted the latest installment to the continuing saga that ostensibly is his life. I've written about Miller before, and now he's written about me -- well, he's mentioned me prominently, anyway.

His bi-monthly updates have been coming late for some time now and I check in daily in hopes of a new one. In his early June update, he quoted his Grandfather's most recent girlfriend (now former girlfriend) as she threw them out of her trailer: "Git on out, you transmogrified hallucinations of Job and Jezebel!" Curious as to the origins of that somewhat familiar line, he asked his readers for help in identifying the book and author from which it was culled.

Without even reading the rest of his update I went directly to my favorite search engine and began searching for that phrase. I soon found the first part of William Faulkner's "Spotted Horses." I then immediately emailed the information to Walter before returning to his latest episode. The actual quote, by the way, is: "Get up, you transmogrified hallucinations of Job and Jezebel," which -- as I think Dave Barry will surely agree -- would be a really good name for a band.

And, of course, after reading the rest of Walter's latest I went back to read "Spotted Horses." It's an amusing little story in three parts. The link at the end of Section I that says "Go to Section II" is 404, but I've managed to track down copies of Section II and, the conclusion, Section III. When a story has a character named Flem, you just have to see what happens...

So, anyway, after a couple of days went by and I didn't hear anything back from Walter, I figured that my answer got lost in that sea of similar pieces of email in his in-box, which were not the first. I forgot all about it and went back to just waiting for the next update, only slightly curious as to the response he got to his query. Imagine my surprise, then, when eleven days later I received what I expected to be a consolation email, but instead read, in part:

"CONGRATTULATIONS! You were the first one to answor corectly, and so i woud like to give you credit on my next update. What part of the world are you in? I seem to think you are in England, but I may be wrong. I read your homepage abbout how you said that you read my page with a voice synthezisor. I wondow how all the typoes come out. Also, does the synthesizor "scream" when i type Granfather's quotes in all-capitol letters? Just wondorring. Thanks for writing."

Answering his questions I wrote back, in part:

"I'm not sure how you got the idea that I was in England, perhaps you read the piece I wrote about my friend in Penzance... Actually, I am in Wausau, Wisconsin, a small but very nice town of about 60,000. You were right about the speech synthesizer though. Sometimes I have to go back and spell out a misspelled word to figure out what it is but most of the time I can tell what it's supposed to be. Your spelling doesn't bother me at all, in fact, I am one of those who believe you should continue being intransigent about using a spell checker. While I hear Grandfather's quotes in a slightly higher pitch, indicating uppercase, I'm sure that it is not even close to the screaming you must endure."

And there you have it. That's how I managed to get Walter Miller to not only mention my name, but also got him to provide a hyperlink to my homepage --something he does very rarely. Thanks, Walter. The only down-side, though, is that I earned this dubious recognition not as a writer but for being a resourceful and efficient researcher. If anyone out there wants to pay me to do that sort of thing, I'm still looking for a job.

Now, if only I could get Carl Steadman to link to my page. Then, I'd be a fringe member of that less-than-exclusive cyberlebrity club. But I'd settle for a part time job writing stories about lost dogs.