Blogging about Books

I recently added a few dozen books at the Kindle Store. (I’m now up to over 3,400 titles there). These include the works of Ouida (Louise de la Ramee) individually and as a single mulit-book file; and similarly the works of Frances Hodgson Jewett and John Ruskin. I also posted 18 novels by Georg Ebers (a German novelist who was also a scholar, the best-known egyptologist of his time). I plan to do a multi-book file of his works soon. In addition, I finally finished The Complete Poetical Works of Coleridge, with an active table of contents that links to each and every poem.

To find a book of mine at the Kindle Store, search for
samizdat
followed by the author’s name or the title. Or got to my Kindle page http://www.samizdat.com/kindle where you can browse through a list of authors and click to go to the Kindle Store with my offerings for that author as a search result.

This week’s Kid’s Book of the Week is Andersen’s Fairy Tales.
And this week’s Ebook of the Week is The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
Next week the Ebook of the Week will be a novel by Henry Fielding, and the Kid’s Book is be The Governess by Henry’s sister Sarah (that’s reputed to be the first in English written for children (according to Wikipedia).

FYI — I recently got an email from a customer who has the new Kindle DX. (I was surprised because at the announcement, Amazon said they expected to start shipping in August.) This customer tells me that he sees a formatting problem in about a dozen of my multi-book files. This problem — strange un-hypenated word breaks at the end of lines — does not appear on my Kindle (one of the originals). I have edited the files he pointed me to and uploaded to the Kindle Store new versions at should take care of that problem. If you have seen anything of that kind, please let me know so I can deal with it and also so I can determine if this problem is unique to the DX. (It would be troubling if the DX handles file formatting differently than the Kindle 1 and 2).

That same customer sent me a wishlist of authors that he’d like me to create multi-book (works of…) files of. Another customer has asked for active tables of contents for a couple of large books by John Calvin. I’ll be working on those over the coming week. Suggestions are always welcome.

Meanwhile I have updated my CDs with collections of books in .doc or .rtf format, with internal links. Why should that matter to Kindle owners? Because these are huge multi-book files with internal links to make it easier to navigate. These are my most popular files at the Kindle Store. You can open such a file in Word, save it in .html, then open the .html file in MobiPocket Reader (free software), which will convert it to .prc. Then you can copy the .prc file to your Kindle over your USB cable. That sounds complicated, but you can actually do it very quickly, with no technical knowledge, and by doing so you can get some great collections of books on your Kindle.

The CDs I’m talking about are:

*American Authors has 611 books grouped as 66 files — works by American authors, regardless of the subject matter (fiction, non-fiction, religion and children’s books). Here I have added works of Laura Lee Hope (Bobbsey Twins), Mary Baker Eddy, Anna Katharine Green, O. Henry, William Dean Howells, Grace Richmond, Jonathan Edwards, Ellen White, Albert Payson Terhune, Charles Spurpeon, Margaret Sidney, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Kendrick Bangs, Emily Dickinson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Theodore Drieser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, eleanor Porter, and Charles Spurgeon. It also includes an 11-book files of Black American Classics. The Dickinson has links to each and every poem she wrote. The Lincoln has nearly 2000 links. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/amau.html

*British Authors (English, Scottish and Irish) includes 643 books grouped in 50 files. Here I just added works of Gilbert and Sullivan, John Bunyan, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), Thomas De Quincy, George Gissing, Kenneth Grahame, William Hazlitt, William Hope Hodgson, Anthony Hope, D.H. Lawrence, E. Nesbit, Saki (H.H. Munro), and John Synge. I also added two multi-book files of cook books from before 1800. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/britishauthors.html

*World Authors (books originally written in languages other than English) includes 300 books grouped in 46 files. These books are all in English translation, except when otherwise noted in the table of contents. This CD includes several large and important works that are very difficult to navigate without internal links: Richard Burton’s 16 volume translation of The Arabian Nights, the 20 volumes of The Talmud, The Tanach, and Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Acquinas. I just added works by Martin Luther, Philip Melancthon, Emanuel Swedenborg, Olive Schreiner, Aristophanes, Alexis de Tocqueville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thucydides, Plutarch, Marcel Proust, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Barcuh de Spinoz, and Joanna Spyri. I also added a multi-book file of Classics of Judaism. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/woau191bogri.html

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

Drood by Dan Simmons

Little Brown, 2009, 775 pages, softcover

reviewed by Deane Rink, deanerink@hotmail.com

Deane Rink, writer, producer, and project director, is a voracious reader with very eclectic tastes. He sends us short, provocative reviews, introducing us to fascinating books that otherwise might pass
unnoticed. He has worked for PBS, National Geographic, the American Museum of Natural History, Hearst Entertainment, and Carl Sagan. From his involvement in numerous projects about science, he has
remarkable insight into present-day scientific endeavors and their implications, and in-depth knowledge of specialized fields (like Antarctica from his two “Live from Antarctica” PBS productions. But he also
savors provides illuminating commentary on literature, fantasy, biography, and popular fiction. Links to Deane’s other reviews. You can reach him at deanerink@hotmail.com

The trouble with unreliable narrators is that there are many ways to be unreliable.  A narrator can be self-delusional (The Catcher in the Rye), or brilliant but completely demented (Pale Fire) or unaware of the
jumble of consciousness (Finnegan’s Wake).   The narrator’s purpose might be to reduce his own culpability (Lolita), or to demonstrate the naiveté of adolescence (Huckleberry Finn).   The narrator could be
schizophrenic (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) or retarded (Flowers for Algernon).  No respecter of boundaries, an unreliable narrator can surface in literary fiction (The Sound and the Fury) or in dime
store murder mysteries (The Murder of Roger Aykroyd). Films are not immune from this literary trope (The Usual Suspects and Amadeus).  How then must a reader deal with an unreliable narrator who was
one of the first practitioners of this maddening craft?  In Drood by Dan Simmons, the subject is the last few years of the life of England’s greatest novelist, Charles Dickens, and the narrator is his close friend
and fellow novelist, Wilkie Collins, whose novel The Moonstone is one of the prime examples of this literary high-wire act.

Dickens survived a bloody train wreck a few years before his death and the memory of this tragedy (and the unwelcome attention it brought him, traveling at the time incognito with his mistress) fuels Dickens’
imagination.  Collins addresses his story to a “Dear Reader” who lives a century into the future, weaving a tale about his relationship with the Inimitable, which starts out with the two novelists as approximate
equals, but ends up with Dickens garnering all the acclaim, much to the irritation of Collins.  Drood, a dark symbol of evil, first appears to Dickens at the train wreck, and introduces Dickens and Collins to the
demi-monde thriving in the sewers and subterranean caverns beneath the streets of London.  Drood becomes the title character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’ last and unfinished novel.  As envy
and jealousy grow in Collins, a man who cannot function without his laudanum, he decides that his mentor Dickens must die, that his mentor and Drood have hatched a scheme of monstrous evil that will
endanger all around them, including Collins’ frail brother, who is unhappily married to one of Dickens’ daughters.

For anyone not familiar with the renown that Dickens enjoyed those last years of his life, or with his sold-out stage appearances where he read from his novels with such force and drama that the audience was
often swept away with tears, Drood accurately recreates this Victorian world with its love of euphemism and strict social stratification.  As the opium requirements for Collins rise and his dreams increase in
feverish intensity, Collins goes from welcome house guest at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’ country estate, to outcast and pariah.  Collins plots his revenge, enlisting the help of London private detectives and grave
diggers.  He is visited by a doppelganger, another Wilkie Collins who may or may not be real, whose appearance further confuses the novelist and drives him more and more daft.

Wilkie Collins outlived Dickens by two decades, so gets the last word in this fictional tour-de-force.  But by the end of the story, the reader has seen enough to make an assessment quite contrary to the one
that Collins wishes to convey.  Though the genre of taking acclaimed authors and making them characters in other stories is a well-established literary convention, Simmons accomplishes much more in this
leisurely tale.  He gives the reader an accurate portrait of an age, and does so within the limits of the plausible, while simultaneously creating a mystery and horror story set in the past but headed for the future.

Superficially, the two big series from Blizzard — Starcraft and Warcraft — seem very similar, like different versions of the same formula. But when you look closer, you realized that each game must have been made from scratch!

With Warcraft 1, Blizzard probed to see if such gameplay could be enjoyable. With Warcraft 2, they tested their theories about storyline within gameplay.

Starcraft, however, wasn’t a test of the waters, or experiment of gaming capabilities. They must have had it in mind years before it ever released. The backstory was epic in scope. The story itself was engrossing. The computerized opponents were challenging. And Battlenet (the massively multi-player online version of it) was revolutionary. It was more sucessful than any other game in its time, selling millions of copies worldwide. Now 11 years after its 1998 release, people are still playing it avidly and competitively. It’s being treated like chess!

Perhaps Blizzard invested so much time developing Warcraft 3, and World of Warcraft because they wanted to honor their roots, to give their first series more respect, and let it grow into something more than their testing grounds.

But they may have set themselves up for a fall when they finally release Starcraft 2. No wonder they’re taking so long. If they screw it up in how they balance the opposing forces, or in the storyline, they’ll seriously damage their reputatiion worldwide.

This isn’t ‘worldwide’ in the sense of”Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment” (WWE), which occasionally holds events outside the US. This isn’t even comparable to the competitive pressure of baseball’s World Series, where fans from all over watch for days and remember details for years. This is genuine “worldwide”, competing with the biggest and best game development companies in Asia and Europe as well as the US.

This game means more than money to Blizzard. They need every game with the Starcraft name to be a timeless classic, a first-class winning new rabidly enthusiastic fans worldwide, and leaving their rivals far behind for another generation.

Tim Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

(I just realized that a blog item I wrote a few months ago should be included here as #7 in my series “Fuzzy Thinking About Big Questions”)

By doubling each generation, counting backwards, 1000 years ago, about 36 generations ago, you had nearly 69 billion ancestors (that’s 2 to the power of 36). At that time, there were only about 50 million people alive in Europe. So along the way, there was lots of intermarriage, and, basically, everyone of European descent alive today is a cousin of everyone else, and probably in multiple ways.

That means that there were people alive in Europe a thousand years ago who were the ancestors of everyone of European descent who is alive today. In fact, there were probably hundreds, no thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people alive a thousand years ago who became the ancestors of everyone of European descent alive today.

Let’s flip that concept and take into account that people are much more mobile today than they were a thousand years ago. Let’s look ahead a thousand years. In the year 3000, every human being alive on Earth (if the human race survives that long) will be a descendant of people who are alive today, and not just of one person alive today. No, odds are they will be descendants of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people who are alive today. In other words, if you are a parent or could become one, there’s a reasonable chance that everyone alive a thousand years from now will have genes that passed through you. That is an awesome responsibility. Be careful. Be proud. The future of the human race depends on you.

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

(#6 in my series “Fuzzy Thinking About Big Questions”)

I have long thought that you should not judge the merit of your efforts based on consequences. Those consequences will keep changing over time and as your perspective changes. (Remember the story of the Zen master told in “Charlie Wilson’s War”.) You do what you feel is right and you do it to the best of your ability. No regrets. No second-guessing. If everybody does that (given the diverse mix of what people believe is “right” and of what they are capable of), the flow of human endeavor will move in the best possible direction. (Don’t ask me the criteria for determining “best’ here. This is raw gut feel.) Like with your kids — you do all you can to get them started in the right direction, and then they are on their own. Your projects, too, leave the nest.

If you knew beforehand the long-term effects of what you were about to do, in all their permutations, you would never do anything. And even knowing exactly what would happen next, and then next, and then next, you wouldn’t really know anything, because at each new instance the context and hence the meaning would have changed. The old Heraclitus bit, that you can never cross the same river twice. If you could relive any moment of your life, it wouldn’t be the same moment, because your knowledge/consciousness/perspective would be so different.

This discussion reminds me of an essay I read back in high school “Grandeurs and Miseries of Old Age” by Elmer Davis (from his collection “But We Were Born Free”).

I’m now 63, and getting unexpected emails from old friends re-evaluating their life’s work. I guess we’re at the age when we realize that we’re moving from middle-game to end-game, and a change of strategy makes sense.

My father (86) was talking that way about a week ago. Apparently, he is having trouble sleeping at night, unintentionally going over and over in his mind decision points in his life and why it turned out one way rather than another, wondering whether he made the right choice, wondering what could have happened; heavy with regret. I mentioned that my take on that was that we have a natural proclivity, and that what seem like decisions often aren’t decisions at all. In our guts, we know what we are going to do, what we have to do because we are who we are. And the reasons we give are simply rationalizations, excuses we cobble together. Yes, there are random events that affect our lives. But in many cases, those just temporarily knock us off track, and we continue in the same general direction by a different path (cf. movies Sliding Doors and Wonderland). Think of Einsteinian space-time. There are ups and downs in that landscape. There’s a shape to time. As we approach a decision-point, the further we go in one direction everything gets difficult and painful (you trip over yourself, you can’t find the words, you forget things that you have to remember; you are at odds with yourself); and in another direction the path feels right. And if you go the first way despite the obstacles, soon there’s another branching of the path, another choice, and then another; and, most likely, sooner or later you find your way back to what was naural for you.

A few nights ago, I had an alternative reality dream that I met my wife at a party two years before I actually met her (in 1968, instead of 1970). That may have actually happened. She may have come to a party in my dorm room when she was a freshman and I was a senior. In the dream, we fell for each other immediately. She got pregnant. We married. In the dream our first child was born six years earlier than in this version of reality. But the shape of our lives wound up very much the same.

So 1) you can’t judge what you do based on the consequences; you should just do what you feel is best, and do it as well as you can, and 2) your life isn’t as subject to random occurences as at first appears, nor is it as much under your control as you believe.

Basically, I believe that there is more to your life than you are ever likely to realize. And that should inspire not frustration, but rather wonder, curiosity, and reverence.

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

(fifth in my series “Fuzzy Thinking About Big Questions”)

It’s high time I wrote more “fuzzies”. My thinking gets fuzzier every day. And that’s the problem I want to tackle today — the fact that as I get older I think and learn differently. My thinking changes because the context of my thinking changes because of what I have experienced before and also where I stand in the course of my life (like opening, middle-game, and end-game in chess). But it also changes because my thinking apparatus becomes stiffer, less agile, less able to deal with new information and new circumstances, less able to learn new kinds of things.

Yes, it’s difficult to cope with the notion that what we perceive and what our minds make of what we perceive does not match the “real” world around us. But our apparatus for perceiving and thinking
evolved in this world, and hence I have a basic faith that for practical purposes the equipment does an okay job, and what I think is close enough to what “is” (whatever “is” means). But I find it disconcerting to realize now that this equipment that I use to determine what is “true” and “important” isn’t static. It changes radically over time.

In other words, whether I thought the Earth was flat or round, I presumed that the mechanism (combination of perception and reasoning power) that I used to arrive at that conclusion was constant. Now I realize that that is not the case.

The typical challenge to the assertion “I think therefore I am” is that it presumes the existence of a subject who can think. Now I’d question that from the perspective that the thinking apparatus changes over time; so if I define who I am by how I think, I am a different person today than I was 20 years ago and than I’ll be 20 years from now (if I should live so long), not just because of accumulated experience and memories, but because the equipment I depend on for my perceiving and my thinking works differently, and that difference is outside of my control.

I recently read “Talks for Teachers About Psychology” by William James. That started me thinking in this direction. It’s a user’s guide for the human mind. Nothing startlingly new, but well stated and making you realize things you should have realized long ago. For instance, if you focus on one kind of activity, one realm of knowledge (which is natural as you advance in your career) it becomes harder and harder for you to learn new things that are unrelated. You might postpone learning about something you are curious about or doing something you enjoy, only to discover later that you no longer can make sense or it or no longer can enjoy it. James didn’t say this, but the analogy that came to me was the ability to digest milk. If you go for a long stretch without drinking milk, you lose the ability to digest milk, because chemicals in milk are constituents in the chemicals neeed to digest it. That’s another way of saying — use it or lose it.

I wonder if I would have made other life choices if I had understood that principle when I was in my 20s and 30s.

On the plus side, I have kept up with a wide variety of interests. On the minus side, I’ll probably never be able to decipher Japanese (no surprise there) or make sense of advanced math and science (that I didn’t realize).

A pessimist would say that that our ability to think deteriorates as we age, just as our ability to see and to walk.

But my instinct tells me (and that “feels” more reliable than reason) that what matters overall isn’t the individual mind, but rather the results of our collective thinking and what we do based on that thinking: that the aging mind has characteristics that are important when mixed with the diversity of other ways of thinking. In other words, I believe the world needs old fogies like me, just like it needs young whipper-snappers

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

I have nearly doubled the size of all three of my “Collections of Book Collections and Huge Books Made Manageable” — American Authors, British Authors, and World Authors. Unlike my usual collections, these files are in .doc or .rtf format (your choice), which allows me to include internal links. Such links can make it a lot easier to navigate through huge books and multi-volume works, and they also make it possible to put many books in a single file.
Putting all the books of a series or all the books by a single author together in a single file makes it easy for you to quickly search or browse or sample or bounce back and forth among all those related works (without having to open and close separate files).

Also, the ability to put links inside book and book-collection files has interesting implications for schools and home schooling. For now, I’m just using it for the overall index on a CD and for internal links that are simply an “active table of contents.” But once you put a copy on your hard drive, you can make your own creative additions. For instance, teachers could easily (with Word) add links from one passage to another within the same file or to a particular passage in another book file — to highlight text to be compared/contrasted or even as part of a daily assignment. They could even ask students to do such linking (in addition to using search and copy/paste to assemble collections of quotes and excerpts) as a form of commentary on a book or set of books.

The individual books here gathered on these CDs .doc files all appear separately in .txt form on our other CDs and DVDs. So while you would find all those books on our Complete Book DVD set with 20,884 books, you would not find these multi-book doc/.rtf files there. http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/dvdcomplete.html

NB — These CDs are not recommended for the blind, who typically find our plain text (.txt) files work better with their screen readers and other devices.

American Authors has 611 books grouped as 66 files — works by American authors, regardless of the subject matter (fiction, non-fiction, religion and children’s books). Here I have added works of Laura Lee Hope (Bobbsey Twins), Mary Baker Eddy, Anna Katharine Green, O. Henry, William Dean Howells, Grace Richmond, Jonathan Edwards, Ellen White, Albert Payson Terhune, Charles Spurpeon, Margaret Sidney, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Kendrick Bangs, Emily Dickinson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Theodore Drieser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, eleanor Porter, and Charles Spurgeon. It also includes an 11-book files of Black American Classics. The Dickinson has links to each and every poem she wrote. The Lincoln has nearly 2000 links. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/amau.html

British Authors (English, Scottish and Irish) includes 643 books grouped in 50 files. Here I just added works of Gilbert and Sullivan, John Bunyan, Edmund Burke, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), Thomas De Quincy, George Gissing, Kenneth Grahame, William Hazlitt, William Hope Hodgson, Anthony Hope, D.H. Lawrence, E. Nesbit, Saki (H.H. Munro), and John Synge. I also added two multi-book files of cook books from before 1800. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/britishauthors.html

World Authors (books originally written in languages other than English) includes 300 books grouped in 46 files. These books are all in English translation, except when otherwise noted in the table of contents. This CD includes several large and important works that are very difficult to navigate without internal links: Richard Burton’s 16 volume translation of The Arabian Nights, the 20 volumes of The Talmud, The Tanach, and Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Acquinas. I just added works by Martin Luther, Philip Melancthon, Emanuel Swedenborg, Olive Schreiner, Aristophanes, Alexis de Tocqueville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thucydides, Plutarch, Marcel Proust, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Barcuh de Spinoz, and Joanna Spyri. I also added a multi-book file of Classics of Judaism. Details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/woau191bogri.html

Are you curious but confused? Are you unsure how well this would work on your system? Send me email asking for a sample, and I’ll send you one of these files (.doc or .rtf, your choice) as an email attachment for you to test drive.

Next I plan to update our American DVD, World Literature in English Translation, and then our Genre CDs (such as Drama, Poetry, and Historical Novels).

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

If you have a Windows PC and a Kindle, I highly recommend MobiPocket Reader software. It’s free. The download link is in the blog item.
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsReader.asp

You should try using it to convert plain text books (like the ones on my CDs and DVDs). Just open the reader software, click on Import (from the selections at the top of the screen), then in the drop-down menu that appears click on Text document, then navigate to select the file you want. In a few seconds, the software creates a copy in its special format (.prc) and puts that copy in a new folder (My Ebooks, under My Documents). The book appears on your screen ready to read, in a format that lets you flip pages (left to right), rather than scroll down; and when you copy that .prc file to your Kindle, the books shows up with with an even (rather than ragged) right margin — very readable. (Thanks to David Green in Idaho for pointing this out to me).

Conversions from .txt, .pdf, and .html documents .prc happen instantaneously. And you can move .prc files directly to your Kindle over the USB cable, without depending on Amazon for conversions. NB — if you wanted to put some of your own Word documents on your Kindle, you could (in Word) save those documents as .html, and then use MobiPocket to convert them to .prc (This works great for text, but charts/tables and graphics probably won’t come out the way you want them.)

MobiPocket also makes it a lot easier and more pleasant reading books on your PC.

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

I finally finished updating our Complete Book 3-DVD set, adding over 1500 books, for a total of 20,884.  As usual, the value goes up and the price remains the same.  Also, as usual, the organization is the same as on our Classic Collection CDs.  The DVDs work just the same as our CDs (the books are in plain text .txt format, not audio or video).  A DVD simply has more storage space than a CD. This is a complete library, more than a life-time of reading, for less than a penny a book.  You can see details at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/dvdcomplete.html

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com

For many years, Gamestop (both the online and the physical stores) was a great source of videogames and videogame hardware, both new and used. Unfortunately, they have teamed up with a dubious outfit called “Reservation Rewards.”

If you buy something at the Gamestop online store, you will see an offer for a coupon good for a discount on your next purchase from them. Beware. If you request said coupon, your credit card information will automatically be passed along to this other company (Reservation Rewards) and you will be charged $12 per month for a “subscription” to their “services”.

Burried on that check-out web page and on a page it links to are words that explain the “offer”, but the setup is confusing and misleading, and many people have been hooked into agreeing to something they did not want. (Do a Google search for “Reservation Rewards” and see what hundreds of angry people who have “signed up” at Gamestop and elsewhere have to say about such an “offer”).

When I brought this issue to Gamestop’s attention, they replied:

“At the end of a purchase from GameStop.com/EBgames.com we have a link to the Reservation Rewards program. They offer customers the opportunity to receive an electronic gift voucher for GameStop.com/EBgames.com if the customer would like to sign up for a trial membership with
Reservation Rewards.

“In order to sign up for this program customers would have to type their email address twice and click on the button labeled YES, I have read and agree to the Offer and Billing Details and authorize
GameStop.com/EBgames.com to securely transfer my name, address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing. I understand that the first 30 days of benefits are free and that I will be billed $12 a month thereafter and may cancel my membership at any time.”

The way I read that, buyer beware — it’s business-as-usual to deceive/trap/trick customers into signing up for a “service” they don’t need or want.

So, regrettably, I no longer trust Gamestop, and I’ll never do business with them again.

Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com