Well there you go. With my Extremely Reliable Anonymous Source, Lumpy the Mongoose, out recovering from a chicken-related illness, all I can come up with on my own is a rotten little story about Zeus with a lightening bolt coming out of his butt. Earth shaking, yes, but up to the standards of The Rat? Absolutely not. Complete trash, that was. I would apologize, but as a rat, it's above me.

Some of you have asked over the last few months, "Who the hell is Lumpy? What is a rodent hanging out with a mongoose for, anyway? And what is his real name?"

Excellent questions, all.  Lumpy the Mongoose is in fact his real name, for starters. You might ask, "Pesky! How the hell can he be anonymous if you repeatedly use his real name!" Well, the answer is simple. Lumpy embraces his anonymousness as a state of mind. He believes  he is anonymous, and therefore, for all practical purposes, he is. It doesn't matter what I do or say. I could buy ads on network TV showing scantily clad women shouting his name, but he'd still be anonymous. Go ahead, look him up in the phone book. He's not there. Why? Because he's anonymous, that's why! Now stop asking that question.

As for a rodent hanging out with a mongoose, well, stranger things have happened. He's a very non-confrontational mongoose, I can assure you.  None of that eating rodents nonsense some other mongooses have gotten mixed up in. He's quite content to satisfy himself with store-bought eggs and cheetos.

Lumpy started life as a very small mongoose living near Hana, Maui. One day a tourist saw him, thought he was cute, and packed him away in her purse. Several days later, poor little Lumpy found himself in California, covered in lipstick and gum wrappers, wondering what he would do with himself so far from home with no education or talents to speak of. So he decided to be a journalist.

Lumpy's first assignment was with the San Francisco Chronicle, a venerable institution that had recently been taken over by the Hearst Corporation.  Lumpy worked there for a few weeks before his penchant for Citizen Kane jokes got him fired. He then did a stint with the San Jose Mercury News, a publication known for its high-tech reporting. Lumpy did fine for a while, but then got himself sucked inside a nanovacuum (a nano-sized Hoover vacuum cleaner developed at Stanford University), and the Mercury editors, not being able to find him for an extended period of time, terminated his contract.

Eventually, Lumpy escaped the nanovacuum with the help of a subatomic nanovacuum technician. Soon after, in desperate need of a field reporter, I hired Lumpy for the Lumpy sum of sixty bags of cheetos and a baker’s dozen farm fresh eggs a week.  He has been my Extremely Reliable Anonymous Source for a year now, and overall I’m quite pleased with his performance. In his desire to present all sides of a given story Lumpy often reports several completely contradictory versions at once, and his bribery skills are superb. He has sources in every possible place, and when he doesn’t, he’s very good at making new ones up.

So here’s to Lumpy, now drawing worker’s comp for a chicken-related accident. Come back soon, my friend, before that damned snake slips in to fill the gap.

7:24:15 AM