The reader will find scattered through the text of this book, like lovely flecks of onion in the meat loaf, a number of inserts: tiny bits of verse, brief personal anecdotes, and what appear to be news items. Most of the news items are ones I composed, over the years, for the “Bluff the Listener” segment of National Public Radio’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, on which I appear frequently as a panelist. Four of these are versions of items that actually appeared in the news. (Want to guess? Then don’t read the next sentence.) These four involve pie throwing in Canada, the dairy herds of Cuba, copper wires up your nose, and Christ in jeans and T-shirt. If you were a caller on the show and picked one of those items to be real, you would have won Carl Kasell’s voice on your answering machine. All the other items are fictional. If you picked any of those (really?), I apologize. The other parts of this book (with a few, I think, obvious exceptions) strive to be factual. Many of them started out as columns for Garden & Gun magazine. —RB