We run across truth in the strangest places. Sometime back it was revealed that a major university offers a course on Donald Duck comic books. These particular comics were created by Carl Barks. From the early 1940s until his retirement in 1966, Barks produced some 400 comics about Donald Duck, his stingy billionaire Uncle Scrooge, and three frenetic nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

In one classic series, the rich uncle's billions nearly have driven him crazy. Everybody is asking him for money, and Scrooge is gulping nerve medicine by the bottle. In an attempt to save his sanity, Scrooge parachutes with Donald and the nephews into a remote, agrarian village named Trala-La, a parody of Shangri-La, the utopia in James Hilton's novel, LOST HORIZON.

But Scrooge makes the mistake of carelessl…