The news media help out by regularly running heartwarming front-page stories about how a man who was broke and starving won $800 million in his state lottery and suddenly could afford nice teeth and many new friends.

So anyway, the plan now is to run something like this on a nationwide scale, which I think would be great, especially if it keeps the federal government from doing something really desperate to raise money, such as selling drugs or making snuff movies. The only potential problem with a national lottery, as some states have pointed out, is that it might siphon off a lot of poor and stupid from the state lotteries. But if this happens, we could have a bailout system, where the federal government would step in and purchase so many million dollars worth of lottery tickets from the troubled state. I mean, hey, why do we have governments in the first place, if not to help each other out?

I figured out why I’m not getting seriously rich. I write newspaper columns. Nobody ever makes newspaper columns into Major Motion Pictures starring Tom Cruise. The best you can hope for, with a newspaper column, is that people will like it enough to attach it to their refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit.

So I have written a suspense novel. It has everything. Sex. Violence. Sex. Death. Russians. Dead Russians. Here’s what the newspaper critics are saying:

“A very short novel.”-the Waco, Texas, Chronic Vegetable “This is it? This is the entire novel?”-the Arkansas Dependent-Statesperson “Not enough sex.”-the Evening Gonad

No doubt you motion-picture producers out there would like to see the novel these critics are raving about, so you can send me lucrative film offers. Here it is:

Carter Crater strode into the Oval Office. He looked like Tom Cruise, or, if he is available, Al Pacino.

Behind the desk sat the president of the United States. To his left, in the corner, stood the secretary of state. Crater sensed that something was wrong.

“Unless we act quickly,” the president said, “within the next few hours the world will be blown to pieces the size of Smith Brothers cough lozenges.”

Crater frowned. “We had better act quickly,” he said.

The president looked thoughtful. “That just might work,” he said. “Use whatever means you consider necessary, including frequent casual sex.”

In the Kremlin, General Rasputin Smirnov frowned at Colonel joyce Brothers Karamazov Popov.

“It is absolutely essential that the Americans do not suspect anything,” Smirnov said.

“Yes, agreed Popov.

Smirnov frowned.

“Shouldn’t we be speaking Russian?” he asked.

Popov looked thoughtful.

“We should at least have accents,” he said.

Suddenly, it struck Crater: The Oval Office doesn’t have corners.

Some 2,347 miles away in East Berlin, a man and a woman walked briskly eastward on Volkswagen-kindergarten-pumpernikel-strasse. Talking intently, they did not notice the sleek black Mercedes sedan, its windows tinted almost black, as it turned off Hamburgerfrankfurterwienerschnitzelstrasse and came toward them from behind, picking up speed until, traveling at 130 kilometers per microgram, it roared into a parked garbage truck.

“Too much window tint,” the woman said.

Some 452.5 miles away, Crater had sex.

“Ach,” said General Smirnov. “Zees American agent, ve must keel heem.”

“Dat’s de troof,” agreed Popov. “Les’n we do, he gon’ mess up de plan to blow up de worl’.”

Crater handed the microfilm to crack intelligence expert Lieutenant Ensign Sergeant Commander Monica Melon.

She studied it carefully for about 15 minutes. Finally she spoke.

“There’s something written on here,” she said, frowning, “but it’s really teensy.”

Smirnov frowned at Popov.

“Blimey,” he said.

In the darkened room, Crater could see the shadowy figure who threatened to destroy the world, who had led Crater on this desperate chase across nine continents, a race filled with terror and death and women whose thighs could have been the basis for a major world religion, and all leading to this moment, Crater and the shadowy figure, alone in the gloom. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Crater reached for the light switch. He flicked it on. The shadowy figure turned, slowly, slowly. At last, Crater could see the figure’s face.

It was a big surprise.

“Good job of saving the entire world, Crater,” the president said. “But I have one question: How did you know Miss Prendergast never heard the cathedral bell?”

“Easy, sir,” answered Crater. “You see, Lord Copperbottom is left-handed, so the gardener couldn’t possibly have taken the key from the night stand.”

“I never thought of that,” said the president. He frowned at the names coming up out of the floor and drifting toward the ceiling so the audience would know who had played what parts.

“Hey,” the president said. “These names are backwards.”

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the defense of Western Europe. It keeps my mind off this rash in my right armpit. When I think about it, I reach the point where all I want to do is quit my job and move to an isolated cave so I can devote full time to scratching myself. Eventually it reached the point where I threw caution to the winds and went to an actual skin doctor. I was hoping he’d give me one of those hand-held garden implements with the three sharp prongs. I forget what you call them, and say: “Dave, I want you to rake this implement across your rash every 10 seconds or as needed.” But no, he gave me some wimpy little white pills and came up with a bizarre treatment program under which—this is the truth—I was supposed to try to grow a new rash. Really. He thinks my rash is caused by a rash-causing chemical that large corporations put in deodorants, apparently out of sheer hatred for the consumer, and to test this theory he wants me to rub some of this very same chemical onto my arm and see if I develop a new rash. I’m not going to do it, of course, because (a) I don’t even want the rash I brought him in the first place, let alone a new one, and (b) if he thinks I’m stupid enough to deliberately rub rash-causing chemicals on myself, his next move will b to ask me to rub them on my family and friends.

Sometimes you have to wonder what’s happening to the medical profession. A recent edition of the Weekly World News, which I feel is probably the best newspaper your money can buy in a supermarket, carried a story headlined “HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANT.” The story concerns an operation performed by doctors in Communist China who got hold of this unfortunate man with a large brain tumor, and they treated him by amputating his head and replacing it with one they got from a person who had lost his body in a factory accident and consequently died. I would very much like to know how the doctors explained this operation to the patient (“The only possible side effect we can foresee, Loo Ping, will be some neck stiffness, plus the fact that you will have the head of a dead factory worker.”)