Okay, Jim Shepard is actually a serious literary scholar, and not so much a pop culture personality. He has a family and a brain. I will therefore not be addressing him directly. Here is an excerpt from Jim Shepard's short fiction 'The Gun Lobby' as seen in 'The Atlantic' some time back. You all know 'The Atlantic'?

Chick sells Colts, Walthers, Glocks, Uzis, and Ingrams. He services the Colts and Ingrams himself, with one hand on the manual. He dabbles in Kalashnikovs. His big score was a Schmeiser with the original firing pin, which he turned around in two days for triple his money. He's had poison-tipped darts from the Amazon and a box of curved rubber truncheons said to be favored by the Albanian police. He has squirreled away in his little root-cellar sub-basement some high-end contraband laser sights, a crate of phased-out NATO flash grenades (with the rounder bodies, before they went to the narrow design), and a drop-tank from an F-18. In the sub-sub-basement, in a beer cooler, he has stashed an old scorched liquid-nitrogen canister wrapped in gummy and tenacious biohazard tape. The kids call the sub-sub-basement "Daddy's secret secret room." He's mum on what's inside the canister, which is part of the mystery of Chick.

The attached essay was submitted by a sophomore at Williams College as a creative writing assignment in Jim's class entitled 'More Creative Writing.' The student sent me a copy of the essay, but would not reveal the grade he received. Jim Shepard's dog is named after a tree.