What nice kids do on their holidays

A review of "Benny Breakiron: Uncle Placid" 

Benny is the nicest and cutest little boy in town, the kind of child who is every grandmother's dream. He lives in a small town somewhere in Belgium. What nobody knows is that Benny has a secret identity. He's actually as strong as Superman! This serves him well when his uncle at the secret service, Placid, is assigned to guard an envoy from the rich principality of Fürengrootsbadenschtein (probably a parody of Liechtenstein). The envoy's job is to pick up printing plates for the small country's enormous money supply. Naturally, every crook in Belgium wants to lay his hands on the plates and start the world's most lucrative counterfeit operation. While Placid is a sharp shooter with a black belt in karate, not even the secret police can stop the bad guys for long…unless little Benny (who is on summer vacation) intervenes and starts a little mopping-up operation.

I admit that the first “Benny Breakiron” album, “Madame Adolphine”, was more entertaining than this one, which is a more straightforward car chase/truck chase/plane chase/train chase kind of story, with the criminal elements never far behind our heroes. The stiff, unsympathetic and midget-like diplomat from Fürengrootsbadenschtein is the comic foil of the story, but his silly complaints became annoying after a while. But then, I suppose Placid and Benny were just as annoyed as I was, LOL.

The creator of “Benny Breakiron” is Peyo, the same man who gave us and the world the Smurfs. Indeed, this edition of “Uncle Placid” contains a lot of ads for said Smurfs. In the end, I give little Benny's quest to save the money-supply of a non-existent principality three stars.

Magical mushrooms

Most dry, scientific reference works will forever remain...well, dry, scientific reference works, stashed away in some obscure archive of a university library.

And then there's "The Genus Psilocybe" by Gaston Guzman, subtitled "A systematic revision of the known species including the history, distribution and chemistry of the hallucinogenic species". Weirdly, the book is published in the small and sleepy European principality of Liechtenstein, not southern California!

As already mentioned, this is a super-scholarly book, definitely not for the layman or general hippie-reader. But sure, it really does deal with Psilocybe, a worldwide genus of mushrooms mostly known for its "psychedelic" species. The book contains identification keys, black-and-white drawings, photos (some in colour) and very technical species presentations. There's a list of vernacular names of the hallucinogenic species. There is an introductory section on these species, but unfortunately it looks like a long list of references.

Still, I don't think it's a co-incidence that this very technical work has three reviews on Amazon, while most other books of this type has none!

Huston?