To make things easier for all of us, please notice this Important Notice About Notices. You may have noticed the increased number of notices for you to notice. We notice that some of our notices have been noticed. On the other hand, some of our notices have not been noticed. This is very noticeable. It is noticed that the responses to the notices have been noticeably unnoticeable. This notice is to remind you to notice the notices and respond to the Notices because we do not want the noticed to go unnoticed.

-- NOTICE COMMITTEE FOR NOTICING NOTICES

It is so cold, we had to chip the dog off the fire hydrant this morning!

A friend of mine told me about a notice he found on his motorcycle. It read, approximately:

Do not drink the battery fluid. Our lawyers made us say that. We also recommend you do not chew on the tires while the motorcycle is in motion.

I was microwaving something the other day, and it had this notice on it:

WARNING: hot when heated.

Has anyone here seen the November issue of Harper's? There's an excerpt from a new book by one Richard Wallace, a child psychotherapist (God help them), who proves ineluctably that Jack the Ripper was none other than Lewis Carroll.

Golly.

Like many of our sublimest loons, Wallace is obsessed--nay, besotted--with anagrams, rendering the first verse of "Jabberwocky" as:

Bet I beat my glands til, With hand-sword I slay the evil gender. A slimey theme; borrow gloves, And masturbate the hog more!

And there's more in this throbbing vein--much more--and all darkly encoded in the children's books. Can this be coincidence? the doctor asks, trembling. And strokes his beard.

Browsing the 'Net, I found the following demure reply:

Dear Editor,

We enjoyed Richard Wallace's revealing "Malice in Wonderland" reading from your November issue. It soon became clear to us, though, that the author was trying to hint at something...perhaps even unburden himself of a great weight. He seemed obsessed with anagrams. Could that be some kind of clue? Sure enough, the very first paragraph of his article contains a grisly confession, thinly veiled in an anagram.

Rearranging the letters of:

This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland.

we arrive at:

The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder.

P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too.

Painfully obvious once you spot it, isn't it? Off with his head!

Francis Heaney,
New York, N.Y.

Guy Jacobson
Bridgewater, N.J.

Grin. Hope it's published.

ONLY IN MERRY OLDE ENGLAND (actual trial)

A young woman who was several months pregnant boarded a bus. When she noticed a young man smiling at her she began feeling humiliated on account of her condition. She changed her seat and he seemed more amused. She moved again and then on her fourth move he burst out laughing. She had him arrested.

When the case came before the court, the young man was asked why he acted in such a manner. His reply was:

When the lady boarded the bus I couldn't help noticing she was pregnant. She sat under an advertisment which read "Coming Soon The Gold Dust Twins", then she moved under one that read "Sloans Liniments remove Swelling". I was even more amused when she sat under a shaving advertisment which read "William Stick Did The Trick". Then I could not control myself any longer when on the fourth move she sat under an advertisment which read "Dunlop Rubber would have prevented this accident."

He won the case.