You may have noticed that the yellow pages of the new Verizon telephone directory are crawling with lawyers. Before you find anything else in there, you are likely to trip over an ad for an attorney.

The largest type on the front page promotes a Lancaster law practice. An ad from a different office covers the entire back cover. The book's spine promotes a law firm in type twice the size of "Lancaster" and four times the size of "Verizon." The first page inside the front cover and an attached flap carry lawyer ads.

And 52 of 592 yellow pages - 9 percent - contain advertising for attorneys. That's as compared with one page for auctioneers the next group in alphabetical order - and 18 pages for automobile parts, dealers and repairs, one of the more expansive runner-up groups in the directory.

Many of the attorney ads are substantially larger than ads for other listings. Nine of them are double-page spreads, including an outstandingly overwrought advertisement showing a guy screaming into two phones at once, apparently in an effort to ward off bill collectors before he settles down and summons the law office to provide "Bankruptcy and Debt Counseling."

Advertising lawyers to the rescue!

There are also 14 single-page ads, including one with a striking photo of a fashionably-dressed and clearly determined woman and man arm wrestling on what appears to be a lawyer's well-appointed desk. The caption reads, "There at the moment of life's drama."

Advertising lawyers for every miscue!

Unsurprisingly, most of the biggest advertisers specialize in personal-injury cases, although offices promoting medical malpractice and bankruptcy law are beginning to swell the ranks.

It may be instructive that the doctors who are being sued and the bankers who pursue bankruptcy cases have taken only 25 and 2 pages of ads respectively. Follow the money.

The Scribbler

has tracked the growth of attorney ads in phone books (hey, Jack, get a life!) since 1990. In that year, lawyers occupied 12 yellow pages. That number jumped to 26 in 1993 and 40 in 1998. Last year lawyers bought 47 pages of ads.

You can see where this trend is headed.

It is headed smack into another modified lawyer joke:

What do you call 100 lawyers weighted down by telephone books at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

"Warts, follow the corpse'

    Feedback:

Scott Gable read the Nov. 5 column about the diesel automobile modified to run on vegetable oil and weighed in with his own story. He singlehandedly converted his car to run on straight vegetable oil.

To top that, Scott says, his wife drives a car powered by Biodiesel, a fuel that requires no alterations to the car's diesel fuel system. The Gables make this fuel from vegetable oil in the basement of their Lititz home.

Beats turning wine into vinegar.

An anonymous watchman on the wart patrol provides another way to get rid of unwanted skin protuberances. If you know someone who just died, spit on your warts three times and say, "Warts, warts, go away and follow the corpse."

"I'm not sure if there's more to the saying," says the correspondent, "but it worked for me years ago."

"Follow the corpse"? Sounds like an ambulance chaser.

Delores Snader of East Earl says one grandma cooked chestnut leaves and hog lard into a salve to heal sores and the other grandma mixed warm Vicks and hog lard to be smeared on the chest to cure croup.

Also, "Neighbor Katy would take petals off lily flowers - the white ones that bloom in July - put them in a Mason jar and pour whiskey over them. She used it as a poultice on sores and stings."

OK, what do you have when you mix 100 lawyers with veggie oil and hog lard?

Some exceptionally slick lawyers. ---

The Scribbler's snail mail address is Lancaster New Era, Box 1328, Lancaster Pa. 17608.

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