Book excerpt: Revenge of the Sardines: Side-splitting hilarity one moment, sighs of nostalgia the next, tears of sweet sympathy the next - it's all here in this collection of stories from the popular author of The Whole Nine Yards and The View from Planet Kerth. Faithful readers have asked for this volume for years, and finally here it is- more than 150 tales that you will find hard to put down. And then, once you have finished them all, you will want to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Along the way you will meet unforgettable characters- the sweet babysitting granny with a weakness for beer and professional wrestling, the returning snowbird who misdialed the trash collection company and almost scheduled a lap dance, the barbecue chef whose grill neared escape velocity, and of course those long out-of-date sardines with a gastronomic migratory choice to make. A master of the personal essay for more than 30 years, the stories of TR Kerth have delighted readers in publications nationwide. As a current columnist for both the Northwest Herald (Illinois) and the Naples Daily News (Florida), his stories bridge the gap between the rollicking humor of a Dave Barry and the wistful nostalgia of a Garrison Keillor. EXCERPT I was sitting with a group of people one day when, out of the blue, somebody said, "You know, if you ever want to act in an adult film, you can find your perfect porn star name by combining the name of your first pet with the name of the street you grew up on." And thus our porn star names were born. All of them were pretty good- Fluffy Paulina, Thumper Harlem, Tabby Thatcher, good, solid, porn star names to stir the blood and fire the imagination. Well, all of them except mine, which would have been Mickey 75th Court. That would be a lousy porn star name anywhere in the world. Except maybe France. But the best of them all belonged to my buddy Bill. His porn star name would be Thunder Lockwood. But wait a minute. Thunder? Bill's first pet was named Thunder? I have known Bill for 35 years, and I know pretty much everything there is to know about him. His childhood was a lot like mine- too many people living in a too-small Chicago home. He grew up in a one-bedroom West side apartment, in which were housed his parents, his brother, and himself. And, apparently, some sort of beast named Thunder. I had images of a black stallion with a snow-white streak on its forehead clattering up the creaky wooden stairs each evening for its bag of oats before bedding down next to the radiator by the toilet, but Bill shook his head. "Nope," he said. "Thunder was a goldfish." Thunder%u2014the goldfish? "Well," he said, "when a poor city kid asks his dad for a stallion, he's going to have the perfect name picked out already, right? And when Dad comes home with a goldfish- well, you name him Thunder, right?" Apparently nobody told Thunder that he was a fish, for he lived a life span more suited to a thing with hooves- seven or eight years. And when he died, he was not given that swirly watery ceremony so commonly used to send a city fish to its eternal rest. No, Bill buried Thunder in the earth he longed to gallop over, fins of fury flashing, foam-flecked flanks glistening gold in the evening sun blazing over the prairie. And that got me thinking of Mickey, the springer spaniel that was my first pet, a dog who thought he was a bird...