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Show Stories You Can't Tell By RUSSELL BAKER N.Y. Times News Service Biff is not his real name. Nor do the incidents related here have any connection with events in the life of the man whose real name is not Biff. I want this clearly understood on account of a recent court ruling that 1 can be sued to the eyeballs by the man whose real name is not Biff if I publish a thinly disguised account of events in his life which rubs him the wrong way. LET IT be perfectly clear then: Hardly anything any-thing I shall now recount actually happened. What did, in fact, happen to Biff was extraordinary, extraor-dinary, but, aware that lawyers are ready to seize my estate and, after extracting a third for themselves, give the rest to the man whose real name is not Biff, I wouldn't print a word of that story though wild horses tried to drag it out of me. This reminds me of another party no relation rela-tion to Biff who keeps telephoning. He says he knows who is committing the baffling discotheque dis-cotheque murders and wants to tell me. "Why me?" I ask. "Why not tell the cops and put an end to these ghastly butcheries?" WELL, IT seems if the killer finds out who squealed "he has a very short temper." my caller says he is likely to butcher the informer after the nuisance of his trial and a year or two in the jug are ended. "But if I tell you," my caller says, "as a journalist you will be honor bound to keep my name out of it." "DON'T YOU dare tell me the name of the discotheque butcher!" I yell at him and hang up in terror. Every time he phones, I have a sleepless night imagining what the courts would do to me if I printed the butcher's name and refused to tell any lawyers who had slipped it to me. For that kind of crime you can spend more time behind bars than the discotheque butcher, who will probably be out on appeal while you're celebrating your birthday next winter by watching the guards search the cake for hacksaws. SPEAKING OF hacksaws, I'd love to tell you this hilarious story about a man I know. You would absolutely die laughing. I guarantee it. I saw the thing happen. Actually saw it happen. You wouldn't believe the absurdity that a man with three hacksaws can commit. Nobody told me the story. I saw it. It's important im-portant that I make it clear that nobody told me, because if anybody had told me, that person per-son could go to prison for a long, long time. The thing is, you see, that the fellow in the hacksaw story works for the CIA, and Congress has just passed a new law: Reveal the identity of somebody some-body in the CIA, and off you go to the federal pen. THIS IS WHY I'm not going to tell you this riotous story, which you'd love. In fact, I wish I'd never mentioned it. I probably wouldn't have if it weren't so hard to find something you can print in a newspaper these days without risking imprisonment or a multi-million dollar lawsuit. I did pick up a fantastic story the other day, but I've forgotten most of the details. It was incredibly complicated and, of course, I didn't take any notes, so it's all a muddle in my memory mem-ory now. |