‘On Shallowed Ground’ or, to give it its full title, ‘On Shallowed Ground including Dr Barker’s Scientific Metamorphical Prostate Health Formula® and Other Stories, Poems, Comedy and Dark Matter from the Center of the Universe’. A collection of intelligent, witty and thought provoking work by the former President of the company that invented the L'egg (that’s a pair of pantihose in an egg… yes, really). A science teacher at Walt Pilcher’s high school once hurled a six-foot African spear in class destroying a bookcase and many books. One of the lessons the young Walt took from this was simple: You can’t make this stuff up. It has informed his writing ever since. Walt, with two of his fellow pupils, was the first to establish the true length of Chain Bridge across the Potomac River in Washington DC in BTS units. No mean feat as BTS is the Bathroom Tissue Square and the bridge came in at several thousand of them. With a fellow student at Wesleyan University, Walt co-presented a weekly radio show called To Be Announced. With their studies rarely allowing time for preparation, the show was well-named. It featured amongst other things sketch comedy, phony interviews and rousing marching music. Pythonesque but long before Python, the show’s resident futurist predicted the end of the world (various dates all long gone) and Walt himself recreated a lunar eclipse in the studio. Note from the author: It’s a wandering minstrel, this book. It’s an eclectic (look it up) collection of short stories and fictional non-fiction pieces with poems and songs salted throughout. Most are recent but a couple of them go back to the 1970s. I’ve updated the language in those because no one had heard of the Internet, smartphones, or a mouse you keep on your desk back then. To those of you saying, Wow, it took this guy 40 years to write a book, I say, Okay, and how long did it take Moses? Forty years in the wilderness and he’s a perennial best seller. Quality takes time.