CLAUDE DUNCAN
 City Editor

 Whether it has implications for net ban-era fishing is doubtful, given the quirkiness of the 1920s ruling. But the mullet does indeed have a gizzard. A biologist did indeed testify at the Florida trial that only birds have gizzards. The three men arrested for off-season mullet fishing were indeed found not guilty. Since only birds have gizzards. 

 The mullet is a peculiar fish in other ways, too. It is structurally akin to a barracuda but with a rabbit's vulnerability and naiveté. Mullet can thrive in fresh, salt or brackish water, which is why you see them jumping in shallow Phillips Inlet. The mostly vegetarian bottom feeder sometimes will bite a hook, but apparently just for the heck of it. In any event, mullet are too-much maligned as "trash fish" or "road kill." 

 People who know and love mullet are not a peculiar folk. They are just Mulletheads. Mulletheads do not take the name as an affront - as they might, say, "fishhead." Rather, the moniker is more like Deadheads, the peripatetic Grateful Dead loyalists, or Jimmy Buffet's Parrotheads. They are a firmly entrenched brotherhood populating the gulf coast roughly from Gulf Shores, Ala., to Sarasota.  (Our only amendment to Claude's article would be, he needed to travel a little further South along the coast to Matlacha FL. and "true home of the mullet", a comment from one of our Matlacha Mariners.

 As an Alabamian might travel that state sampling the subtle distinctions among barbecue joints. 

 Mulletheads are cowboys of a sort. Some even refer to mullet as "cattle of the ocean," which do not move so much in schools as in "herds." They "graze" on algae and sea grasses. When two or more boats strike their nets on a school of mullet, they are "circling the wagons." 

 Mulletheads are not just good sports. Some are athletes. Woody Bruhn is the Dale Earnhardt of mullet-tossing - a three-time champion of the famed Flora-Bama Mullet Toss. 

 Mullet-tossing ain't beanbag. "When you're throwing mullet, dammit, it's rain or shine!" one contender tells Michael Swindle. Even Bruhn, whose 178-foot toss remains the world record, worries that he's peaked at age 26. "I don't think I'm gonna toss next year," he confides. "When you're in competition you have to stay too sober." 

 Swindle's Mulletheads: The Legends, Lore, Magic, and Mania Surrounding the Humble but Celebrated Mullet is "a vivid and delightful book," according to the noted author and former Harper's editor Willie Morris. It is at least that. It also is a life-slice look at the coastal Panhandle, where natives of a better nature long ago learned to accept and respect mullet even if they wouldn't want their daughter to marry one. Mullet, as Morris notes in a jacket blurb, is "that feisty underdog amongst seafood." 

 Swindle is a New Orleans-based writer who has contributed to most of the nation's prestigious newspapers. He introduced New Yorkers to the mullet culture in a 1997 Village Voice article. His new book covers the waterfront, so to speak. America should be grateful. 

 I have only two problems with it. 

 First, at 120 pages it is very tempting - in fact, fairly irresistible - to read it at one sitting. That is a mistake unless you have a photographic memory, for there is much to learn and savor from this little book. Best read it a few pages or a chapter at a time, then put it down to recollect in smiling tranquility. Otherwise you risk forgetting something, which is a crime. But then, it is inconceivable that anyone will read it only once. 

 The other concern is that bookstores will put the book in the "Sports/Fishing" section. The publisher recommends as much. The book certainly includes some practical fishing tips, but it is so much more. There are enough mullet recipes to qualify the work as a cookbook, enough laughs to place it in the humor section, enough road trips to mullet festivals to qualify it as a travel book. Put all this together and it goes, for sure, in the bookstore's "Southern Culture" section. It is a shame that people who don't peruse the "Sports/Fishing" section may miss out.

 At $12.95 it is pricey for a paperback its size. But if a Mullethead knows anything, he knows his wife won't miss the money.