Subject: Once upon this time at Band Camp

This is from a Washington Post Invitational contest -- Readers
were asked
to combine the works of two authors, and to provide a suitable
description
of the merged book. The prizewinners:

"Machiavelli's The Little Prince" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery's
classic
children's tale as presented by Machiavelli. The whimsy of human
nature is
embodied in many delightful and intriguing characters, all of
whom are
executed.

"Green Eggs and Hamlet" - Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust
a dagger
through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could
not do
that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her
to a
nunnery.

"Where's Walden?" - Alas, the challenge of locating Henry David
Thoreau in
each richly-detailed drawing loses its appeal when it quickly
becomes
clear that he is always in the woods.

"Catch-22 in the Rye" - Holden learns that if you're insane,
you'll
probably flunk out of prep school, but if you're flunking out of
prep
school, you're probably not insane.

"2001: A Space Iliad" - The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane
10-year war
against the Greeks after falling victim to the Y2K bug.

"Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi"- Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to
prove
Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India
on a raft
from Polynesia.

"The Maltese Faulkner" - Is the black bird a tortured symbol of
Sam's
struggles with race and family? Does it signify his decay of
soul along
with the soul of the Old South? Is it merely a crow, mocking his
attempts
to understand? Or is it worth a cool mil?

"Jane Eyre Jordan" - Plucky English orphan girl survives
hardships to lead
the Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship.

"Looking for Mr. Godot" - A young woman waits for Mr. Right to
enter her
life. She has a loooong wait.

"The Scarlet Pimpernel Letter" - An 18th-century English
nobleman leads a
double life, freeing comely young adulteresses from the prisons
of
post-Revolution France.

"Lorna Dune" - An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the
daughter of
a notorious rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as
a giant
worm jockey in order to impress her.

"The Remains of the Day of the Jackal" - A formal English butler
puts his
loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to
join a
plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.

"The Invisible Man of La Mancha"- Don Quixote discovers a
mysterious
elixir, which renders him invisible. He proceeds to go on a mad
rampage of
corruption and terror, attacking innocent people in the streets
and all
the while singing "To Fight the Invisible Man!" until he is
finally
stopped by a windmill.

"Of Three Blind Mice and Men" - Burgess Meredith has his limbs
hacked off
by a psychopathic farmer's wife. Did you ever see such a sight
in your
life?

"Planet of the Grapes of Wrath" - Astronaut lands on mysterious
planet
only to discover that it is his very own home planet of Earth
which has
been taken over by the Joads, a race of dirt-poor corn farmers
who
miraculously developed rudimentary technology and regained the
ability to
speak after exposure to nuclear radiation.

"Paradise Lost in Space" - Satan, Moloch, and Belial are
sentenced to
spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil
scientist,
and two annoying children.

"The Exorstentialist" - Camus psychological thriller about a
priest who
casts out a demon by convincing it that there's really no
purpose to what
it's doing.