'Pritchard is everything I want'

Thanks to this BoingBoing post, I find a pice of fiction on Salon (fiction on Salon? since when? who knew?) with a theme I roundly endorse.

Martin was a mouth breather. Jim lacked ambition. Rennie's head was too big. Craig licked my face like a dog.

But Pritchard. Pritchard is everything I want. And I'm not going to apologize about the way I met him.

That said, I do like licking people's faces like a dog.

The story, The Perfect Man by Lauren McLaughlin, joins a very small list of works prominently featuring my last name, including James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walty Mitty" and the 1987 Kevin Costner-Gene Hackman thriller No Way Out in which the name was attached to the bad guy's repellent assistant. In fact, the name is almost always used for a character who is either evil or (as in Thurber) a pretentious windbag.