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S i d e b a r
The Good, the Bad, and the Odd
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 10
 December 2004 
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Every year Sophia Institute Press receives some two hundred unsolicited manuscripts and proposals. The editor’s desk serves as a clearing house for the banal and brilliant—and occasionally, the very odd. Here are some of the more entertaining proposals we’ve gotten over the years:
- Shanghaied, a 700-page "non-fiction account" of an ex-Marine’s struggle against the Vietcong, Pygmy headhunters hired by the CIA, escaped Nazi officers living in an underground bunker in his neighborhood, and North Korean torture artists. Later he is forced to parachute barefoot into Cambodia.
- The Adventures of Sprite and Sparkle, a story in which two anthropomorphic raindrops visit the major events in Jesus’ life (a book for adults, mind you). The author assured us that he had Steven Spielberg ready to sign on to the movie rights.
- A book called Meditations, filled with 200 pages of stream-of-consciousness poetry centered mostly on violent, vulgar homosexual themes. We later discovered that the author was a resident of a home for the mentally disturbed located about a mile from our office.
- An untitled work by a Massachusetts man exposing a conspiracy between the government and TV networks to control citizens’ minds using microwaves. Later I spoke with the man on the phone, and he was the very model of lucidity. Makes you wonder.
- A housewife’s account of how God multiplied the pork and beans she was serving to her family for dinner one night, and other domestic miracles.
- More predictions about the Second Coming and the end of the world than you could read during the entire Three Days’ Darkness.
—T. M. A.
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