Finley Breeze Number 7 February 25, 1996 ----------------- You who are on the road / Must have a code that you can live by And so become yourself / Because the past is just a goodbye. - Graham Nash ----------------- ARTICLES: Drive-in Psychoanalysis - Ad Boc Crosstown Traffic... - Steve Silverstein Roadtripping for the car-impaired - Jodi Shapiro Counting the cars on the NJ Turnpike... - Sean Murphy ------------- A Trucker's Ode As the gears whine / Shifting into the blinding Sunset, the crimson blur of taillights, Freeways link our cities and towns, Under God's majestic skies... Climbing up Mount Rushmore, past Kansas City, Graceland, the Council Bluffs, Blare the fury of a hundred Big Muffs! I am the American trucker. Like a nomad I must roam... Lubrication eases the Peterbilt's woe, Yonder lies the truckstop, let's go! Mercy sakes, there's a bear in the air, I am the American trucker. Log book violation cost me some time, Looking for a cutie down the line. Eighteen wheels know no bounds... Running my rig to another town. [The Gibson Brothers and the Workdogs, from _Punk Rock Truck Drivin' Song of a Gun_ (Homestead 1989)] ------------- Drive-in Psychoanalysis Adam Boc Somewhere I once read the results of a study that reported that the most intelligent people tend to dislike driving the most. They tend to find it tedious. Who knows? Anyway, I feel the connection between driving and music and so I do the vast majority of listening in my car. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, I tend to find driving tedious and so I welcome the additional stimulation of music. Secondly, it is convenient because the tape deck is always within arm's reach, making it easy to swap tapes in and out, not like at home. It sounds good, too. With the speakers so much closer to my ears, I find the experience of listening in the car to be more immediate. Music sounds best in my car - and I've never had an expensive car audio system. I've always disliked driving itself. Personally, it's just a constant reminder of how far humanity has to go in terms of its evolution - the behavior of drivers, I mean. Once separated from each other by the distance between steering wheels, they no longer feel compelled to be courteous, careful, or play by the rules. Witnessing this behavior has a non-trivial negative effect on the quality of my life. If you absolutely have to judge people, you won't go wrong if you judge them by how they drive. -Ad Boc ----------------- Crosstown Traffic, all you do is slow me down... Steve Silverstein As I tell just about everyone I know, moving to Chicago from Providence was a culture shock for more reasons than I can describe. The first one to strike me, that's hard to forget, is driving. In Providence, it's really pretty do-able to get everywhere on foot. In Chicago, well... And, once you drive, there's the traffic. It took weeks just to adjust to, and sometimes I still think I haven't adjusted. So, what does this have to do with music and why am I writing about it for Finley? Well, driving is, for me, always accompanied by music. And, to be honest, given the amount of attention needed for driving through these parts, I can concentrate a lot less on music than I'd like. Darn. This results in the interesting phenomenon of listening to really odd noise. I've found, strangely enough, that things like the old The Ex stuff or Captain Beefheart, for example, require a lot less attention while driving than pop songs that one can follow along. I can reduce my attention to guitar clanging without losing my place in a piece's evolution. In contrast, paying less attention to a part of a pop song tends to make the song lose impact. It's still possible to drive to and enjoy such music, but it clearly does not have the same impact as if I could concentrate on it without interruption. So, I've actually come to listen to a lot more of this dissonant noise than I probably would otherwise. Has this had a result on my taste and even the music that I make? Of course. Moral of the story: I don't know if there is one. But, if you'd told me that the need to drive out to the suburbs for work would influence my taste in music, I'd never have believed you, but it's true. As for the bass coming through the floor from the upstairs neighbors' stereo and how it's influenced my taste, I'll leave that for another day. ------------------- ROADTRIPPING FOR THE CAR-IMPAIRED By Jodi Shapiro I have a torrid, destructive, melodramatic love affair with New York. A black and white Hollywood movie kind of affair. One where you storm out in the heat of the moment and a whirlwind of bad feelings because you know, deep down in the soles of your Chuck Taylors, the relationship is no good for you and will ultimately drive you to the grave. The second after you leave, regret grips you with a swell of dramatic string music and the only thing you can do to shake it is to come crawling back, crying and begging, only to start the whole shebang over again. You realize that it's a bad thing to stay, but even worse to leave, because in the end, it's where you really do belong. There must be some authentic psychobabble jargon to describe this, but I'm not inclined to go look it up. Sorry. To make up for the heartbreak, I've cheated on New York from time to time, small, inconsequential flings in the New England area and parts of the Mid-Atlantic region. Flirtation is good for any relationship, it's an urge that everyone gets, but not everyone acts on. I recommend the road trip for those of you who have that urge as well. The road trip -- a quickly vanishing piece of Americana! Somehow, the allure of the asphalt throughout the country has dwindled and Route 66 isn't even around any more. Hell, even the modernized version of the TV show didn't last (though that may have more to do with Dan Cortese's questionable acting skills). Maybe the love is gone for the smell of exhaust and the hot sun beating down, making the horizon waver in the distance. It is more than likely stuck in the suburbs with a spouse, house mortgaged to the eyeballs and 2.5 kids. The red Mustang convertible sits and waits patiently in the garage, quietly covered with an old sheet, longing for the good old days, craving to be opened up, full-throttle, when the owner goes through a mid-life crisis. Ah, who am I kidding? I'm too young to really know what road tripping was like in its glory days. I don't even have a driver's license, so why the hell do I have this urge? All I know is what I've seen in movies, namely Easy Rider and Lost In America. Oh, and that Bruce Springsteen song too. I can't ingest a fraction of the amount of drugs Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta did in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I could drink large amounts of coffee and deprive myself of sleep to attempt to mimic that out of my head feeling. One thing I could do was only eat apple pie in roadside diners, like Jack Kerouac, but after trying it once all I can say is that apple pie is not the same now as it was back in the Beat days. My first significant fling was with Chicago, for a weekend of rock and roll (basically) and a tour of as many baseball stadiums I could drive to. The big problem was finding people to go with because I have no car of my own. The second (but slightly larger) problem was that I only have a learner's permit (I mean, how lame is that? Roadtripping with only one licensed driver?). My buddy Nuuj was the recipient of the dubious honor of joining me on this escapade. He did most of the driving, unsurprisingly. When I set out to Chicago, I wasn't trying to be Dennis Hopper (christ, he's even suing Peter Fonda. Sacrelige!) or Albert Brooks. I just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. I felt like I needed to find something I was missing. I wanted to eat truck stop food and see cows along the interstate (I'm still waiting for those heifers). I longed to hear the roar of Peterbilt trucks as they almost forced me off the road. I wanted to feel the fear that only comes when you're driving 80 in a 65 zone and a state trooper is on your tail like a hellhound. I noticed real quickly that road travel is actually nowhere near as romantic as Kerouac and Cassidy and all of the aforementioned movies made it out to be. Truthfully, it kinda sucked for a few hours, especially since we couldn't open the windows. I'm sure Jack and Neal didn't have arguments over which CD to put in the player next or which was a better place to stop: Roy Rogers or Shoney's Big Boy? A brief tangential rumination: _Bob Evans v. Denny's_ is a big midwest question. I like the food in both franchises, but Denny's wins overall. Denny's is the only place you can successfully order food while you're ferociously incoherent. All you have to do is point to the picture of your food and grunt. Bob Evans was just a little too down home for me, and there was nothing good to steal. I mean, I was expecting mugs that said "BOB EVANS" on them, and all they were just plain white open stock institutional mugs. Denny's mugs, on the other hand, have a big brown Denny's logo on them, and having one in your kitchen cabinet is a sign of a true roadside connoisseur. Or a class-A thief, because those servers watch them like hawks. You'd think they were Lenox or something. I was greatly amused with the Bong Rest Area on I-94 between Chicago and Milwaukee. It's right before the Mars Cheese Castle. Milwaukee is also home to the Blatz brewery, which is probably the least attractively named beverage in creation. It tastes pretty bad too. Gary, Indiana looks just like Elizabeth, New Jersey. Industrial smokestacks and power plants, slate-gray sky cut by thick powerlines. We also caught a glimpse of the Madden Cruiser somewhere between Cleveland and Gary. Even though I really wasn't supposed to, I did, however, drive on the way back to New York. We had stopped at a rest stop near Stroudsburg, PA at around 6:30 AM. We had only stopped once, at around 4:00 AM, at one of those Gas-Food-Lodging places somewhere in Ohio. A bunch of Muslims were facing Mecca and praying in the frosty air. It was one of the most surreal things I'd ever experienced, amplified by the lack of sleep and coffee intake. Stroudsburg was a pit stop, phone calls were made, candy bars purchased. The morning sun was brilliantly blinding, even through my sunglasses. Nuuj looked at me with wild, bloodshot eyes, threw me the keys and said the dreaded word: "Drive." "Are you sure?" "I can't take it any more. Drive." True enough, he had done all the driving from Chicago. I am terrified of heavy traffic, so he spared me the horrific experience that is the Dan Ryan. It was even worse than I had imagined, and I was only looking at it through an unopened window. At this point, however, I was only slightly more coherent than he. Nervously, I took the keys, started the ignition and whispered a silent prayer: please, please let there be no traffic. Please let me be calm. And please, please let all the state troopers look the other way when I drive by. No real traffic, but a heavily-constructed I-80 that was as foggy as my head was, and a massive Peterbilt riding my ass, scaring me almost enough to speed up. The power of independent trucking indeed. I was just hoping that he'd gotten some backbone lately. The single moment where it all made sense, the 24-hour roundtrip, the satori (for lack of a better descriptive) of the whole thing happened shortly after. I was watching the sun rise and cut through the slowly rising fog while driving through Pennsylvania, running on about an hour or two of sleep and one half-stale cinnamon danish from hours ago, listening to Slint's "Rhoda" and thinking how perfectly it fit that moment. I didn't exactly "find" myself, nor did I solve any of life's mysteries. I did scratch my itch for a little adventure and a big change of scenery, ate truck stop food, played chicken with trucks and came back feeling a little better about being a resident of New York, the town without pity and even fewer public bathrooms. That is, until the next urge to drive hits me. --------------------- Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike... Sean Murphy As usual, there's a few different strings of thought that all need to be represented in this block of writing. Therefore, no promises about any of it making sense except in that disconnected way that poor story-telling still hangs together since the narrator doesn't stop talking for hours at a time. [One little note... as someone who's done the I-80 drive from Chicago east toward New York City, I'll just note that I think Jodi might have done the bulk of her driving in northwestern New Jersey... Stroudsberg's on the far eastern end of Pennsylvania.] DRIVING AS ESCAPE Something that I've started to do in the last few months is to simply get in my car and drive. No clear destination in mind, no good idea of what roads I'll take, no idea of the ultimate distance traveled. Just drive. Follow a road to the end. See what's there. Pick another road and continue. Stop when you feel like it. Go when you feel like it. It's a weird thing to do, and it results in some mighty weird developments. About 6 weeks ago, I left work on a friday night and felt like driving. Nevermind that a decent snowstorm was forecast, I wanted to see where a particular local highway went. With central New Jersey as a starting point, this isn't too dangerous - travelling more than 100 miles in any given direction, you'll usually hit water - the Delaware River, Delaware Bay, Hudson River, the Arthur Kill and Kill van Kull separating Staten Island from Jersey, or the Atlantic Ocean. (Heading due north leads into New York State, but it's pretty easy to tell when you cross the state line.) So, after about 40 minutes driving down dark, barren roads, I found myself in Brick Township - north-central Jersey Shore area. Drove down the shore, stopping every so often to walk out on the beaches and see the ocean, and made it to arcade hell, Seaside Heights. (Yes, even in January, the arcades are open.) Driving back home in a raging snowstorm was bizarre and a little dangerous, I guess, but it was completely liberating. I was alone on the road, with the radio on, hearing static-riddled snatches of music from my friends up at WPRB, seeing no further ahead than my headlights. It honestly could have been anywhere in the world, since I had no referential scenery to spot my way. And despite my being stressed out from the snow and the eyestrain (and my general tiredness), it was pretty peaceful. Since that trip, I made another... again, picked a highway with a vague idea of where it went, and drove. I guess I sorta knew I wanted to get to Cape May, but no real idea of how or when I would arrive. The road I was on dead-ended at Little Egg Harbor, an inlet off the ocean... so I had to back up a little and then headed down U.S. 9 to where it ends. [Almost. See, the mapmakers got a little crazy and decided that a ferry counted as an extension of a highway, so U.S. 9, which starts at the Canadian border way up in New York state, proceeds south down to Cape May, New Jersey, then hops a 15-20 mile ferry ride and then continues from Lewes, Delaware until it slams into U.S. 13 near Laurel, Delaware.] Anyway, I did wind up driving all the way to Cape May on a random friday night. It's about 120 miles from my house, and it was extremely foggy, and exceptionally random. But 2 things made it very worthwhile: 1.) Hearing a good portion of Frank Zappa's _Lumpy Gravy_ on the radio, courtesy of the esteemed Dr. Cosmo and his "Nocturnal Transmissions;" and 2.) Standing at the base of the Cape May Point Lighthouse, at two in the morning, with fog so thick I could see where the rays of light ended. So, sometimes driving is my little escape from much of the crap in my ordinary life. Not always - driving often contributes to the crap, especially driving to and from work, trying to avoid potholes on narrow country one-lane roads, worrying that I'll blow out a tire with no hope of getting help for hours. Driving's not an especially romantic thing to do. I always drive alone, and much of it is merely to get from one place to the next, and I don't feel like I have any great insights while I'm out there. But on those rare occasions when I set the parameters, there are few places I'd rather be than behind the wheel. THE ROLE OF THE RADIO IN DRIVING I mentioned radio a few times in my opening segment, and I think radio plays a crucial role in my driving experiences. This probably stems from any number of formative moments in my childhood, being strapped into the back of the family car ('73 Plymouth Valiant, 6 cylinder manual, AM radio only). I told part of this story a while back in Mike Appelstein's wonderful zine, _Caught in Flux_ -- my musical tastes have been indelibly marked by those drives down U.S. 1 in Dedham and Norwood, MA, with scratchy songs from the 50s and 60s blared through a crappy radio. Radio is crucial while driving because it's wireless, and doesn't distract your visual senses. And good radio is regional, telling you something about where you are, where you're headed, or where you've been. On my eastern road trip last fall, I intentionally didn't play tapes much of the time, and instead scanned the radio dial for hours at a time. Yeah, that means I heard a LOT of Rush Limbaugh and local equivalents. But I also caught a great bluegrass show on I-81 and I-40 in eastern Tennessee drifting in from Asheville, NC. I heard an amazing hour of songs about Wisconsin and Illinois regional rivalries on I-94 while driving from Madison to Chicago. Radio is a great communicator when you don't have time to stop and look around. Radio is also a way to bring some elements of America together, without the pervasiveness of TV. It allows you to think about what's being conveyed, particularly while driving down mile after mile of federally-maintained blacktop. Oddly enough, I found myself listening to the quintessential midwesterner Garrison Keillor and his "Prairie Home Companion," followed by the doofus Bostonian mechanics of "Car Talk," on a brilliant sunday morning cruising down the ridge of the Appalachians in western Virginia. And I didn't feel like someone else's culture was being shoved down my throat. I didn't feel run over by hearing these incongruous programs. (I didn't even object to hearing the most precious, "northeastern" program on NPR, "All Things Considered," while driving through Mississippi or eastern Ohio. Go figure.) So, radio and driving... it's more than convenience, it's necessity, it's companionship. When you've worn out those 14 tapes in the case, you've always got something new to turn to. Maybe it's wonderfully familiar, maybe it's terribly hateful. But it always changes as you travel, and it can make the big difference in your experiences on the road. THE DRIVING SONG (as opposed to the trucking song, a genre i wish i knew more about) What is it about music and driving? Why are there songs that we call "driving songs," from the Doors' "L.A. Woman" to the song I wish had been my childhood, the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner," to any of the pre-major-label stuff by Mudhoney (which is really just Blue Cheer tuned up or down a couple notches) ? What about that music evokes the highway? Obviously, I don't have any concrete answers. Some music is "driving music" because it evokes the roar and whine of the engine. (That's where Mudhoney hits for me, as does LA Woman... just try listening to that while doing 65 some night... it's pretty wild.) Some of it is merely what you want to hear while driving, when that music meshes with the travel-experience properly. Some of it, obviously, discusses the highway and the road and the experience - again, "Roadrunner" or Paul Simon's "America" (which is more about bus travel, and growing up, but still is a driving song). I don't really have much more to say about driving songs, other than that the best way to test what you think might be a good driving song is to get out there and experience it. (The very best way to find driving songs, of course, is to happen upon one while driving when you don't expect it... whatever the purported genre... but more on that in just a moment.) WAR STORIES (or Sean's opportunity to re-live his roadtrip) Yeah, so I made this dumb trip last fall. 10 days, 3600 miles, from Princeton, NJ to New Orleans/Baton Rouge, LA, to Chicago, IL, and back to Princeton. What follows is not so much a travelogue as a list of things I remember being important about the trip... I've tried to arrange them in order by destination. o I-81, just north of Harrisonburg, VA - it was 1:30am, and I was dead tired, and a little pissed that Winchester, home of Patsy Cline, was north of me, not south... on the verge of falling asleep at the wheel on my first night out, and I flip the radio, and "it's bye, bye miss american pie." Rolled down the windows, and SHOUTED every damn lyric of that song 'til it ended. Never have I been more grateful to hear "American Pie," and never willI be so grateful again. o Harrisonburg, VA - If I had expected to be there, I would have called Mr. Cornick... instead, just after the aforementioned sing-a-long, I nearly stumbled into a race riot at a Waffle House at 2am. I huddled at the counter with the obnoxious frat boys to my left and the "rowdy uppity types" to my right and the scared (or "big-tough-guy") waitpersons hanging behind the counter. Pretty neat. Yeah. o Chattanooga, TN - On I-75 coming into town... there's the river to the right, and Lookout Mountain to the left, hovering over the old factories, and I wish I could have stopped or at least driven no more than 20 miles per hour just to capture the whole picture in my mind... but these people obviously took it all for granted, and so they whizzed by at 65 and forced me to do the same. o Pachula, MS - pulled off I-59 in a vain attempt to get coffee when I was 20 minutes past Meridian but 30 minutes from Hattiesburg... at 1:30am there was no 7-11, no convenience store of any type, just something out of a black-and-white movie about little southern towns and the predictable results of prolonged in-breeding... back at the highway, I found a mini-mart, got some amazingly cheap coffee and a bad chicken salad sandwich, and barely made it to a Motel 6 in Hattiesburg. o Baton Rouge, LA - my friend Rebecca and I sat around her apartment watching "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," then headed out to a shitty sports bar, mostly 'cause we wanted to shoot pool. Behind the bar were a bunch of signs... detailing the various drink specials for each day... jello shots, ladies night, buck-pitchers, three-for-one hour... until the last one, which details the house rules. "No fighting, no preaching, no homosexual behavior allowed." o I-10 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans - it's my first chance ever to go to New Orleans, but somehow I can tell it's not quite right. It's a tuesday, a hurricane is ripping across the Gulf, we're driving through sheets of rain. I fail to be impressed by the Mississippi River ("well, it's not as big or fast or whatever as I thought") and while sitting at Cafe du Monde, I make fun of beignets first by questioning why these people make such a big deal out of doughnuts with powdered sugar, then by griping "well, damn, it's just a square piece of fried dough!" Reb and I hardly spoke 15 more words the rest of the time I was there. o Memphis, TN - I tried to go see Graceland, but I got there at 5:30 and it was closed. (I've been told there's a country song in the making there, but I can't build up the lyrics.) o New Madrid, MO - here, I _was_ impressed by the river. I drove into town, and all of a sudden the street I was on dead-ended at a levee. The top of the levee is actually paved like a normal street, except it's not open for regular traffic... and standing there in the dark, watching the river flow beneath me, I finally got it. It was too flashy in New Orleans to focus on anything, but here, with no sounds but the river lapping at its banks, wow. o Arriving in Chicago, IL - I drove I-57 all the way from its start in Missouri up to its end in Chicago. For the last 5 miles, the highway was ripped up to my right, with exposed steel wire mesh just hanging there... I was not amused. But that's nothing compared to BANG the merge with I-90/94 coming in from Gary on the right... ok, I don't know where the hell Eric and Anne live except that it's north of the business district, so I'll keep driving along... and WHOOOMPF I-55 merges in from the left with traffic from St. Louis... and suddenly I'm on a fucking down-ramp and find myself at a red light on the edge of Chinatown on Cermak St. I have NO FUCKING IDEA where I am. I stare at the signs, hoping for some clue, and nearly get rear-ended for not jumping the light as it begins to turn green. Damn. o I-80 just past Youngstown, OH - it's the last day of my trip... i'm way behind schedule considering it's 5:30pm and i have 400+ miles to go and i have to work the next day... and it's 10 trucks to every car on the road... and I've just escaped the horribly-overprocessed radio of Cleveland... everyone's got an echo-box, and they're ALL using them to atrocious ends... i'm completely losing it and starting to do a tunnel-vision thing... but as the highway starts climbing into the mountains of western Pennsylvania, the sun is setting behind me, and the trees and hills and rocks are all assorted shades of brown and red and yellow with a few oranges left over. It was absolutely beautiful, and I know I could drive that stretch of road 100 more times and never recreate what I saw ahead of and all around me that day. --------------------- Coursing Through The Wires Steve Silverstein : Of late, 4 records have come to lump themselves together and form a block of interest to me. I've somehow grown interested in what I consider well-orchestrated pop, and I think these 4 are as good examples of the genre as I've been able to find: The Beach Boys, _Pet Sounds_ Eno, _Here Come the Warm Jets_ Fleetwood Mac, _Rumours_ Love, _Forever Changes_ In an era where it's become far too fashionable to avoid clean sounds or big arrangements, the world needs more records like these. --------------------- Jodi Shapiro : 1) _Naked Eye_ by S.A. King: An autobiographical comic that has some slight metaphysical leanings, lots of sarcasm and really well-executed art. Every issue I've seen has at least one great El story (see next entry), which is a bonus. 2 bucks an issue to S.A. King, 1333 W. Estes Apt 16, Chicago IL 60626. 2) Chicago. I love this city almost as much as New York (see my story); their public transportation system is as close to MTA as it's gonna get, and there's no lack of weirdos waiting to become characters in stuff I write. 3) Netscape 2.0: More HTML stuff to learn. 4) Adbusters: A magazine (and now website) of cultural criticism from (gulp!) Canada, of all places. But it's good, I swear. Check it out at http://www.adbusters.org/adbusters/ and you won't be sorry. 5) _Rumble in the Bronx_: A great Jackie Chan flick, shot in Vancouver (excepting one scene that was shot in my old neighborhood). Too much plot for a chop-socky diversion, but funny enough to make you forget how lame it is. 6) New records: Grifters, Cobra Verde, dis-. 7) New toys: Harmonic Percolator (wacko distortion box), IOmega Zip drive, Java Developer's Kit for Mac. I'm as happy as a little girl! ---------------- Sean Murphy : o Modern Lovers, _Precise Modern Lovers Order_ (Rounder, 1994) o Grifters, _Crappin' You Negative_ (Shangri-La, 1994) and _Ain't My Lookout_ (Sub Pop, 1996) o The Moles, _Untune the Sky_ (Seaside, 1990) o Gibson Brothers, "Giddy Up Go" (from _Punk Rock Truck Drivin' Song of a Gun_, Homestead, 1989) o the official Speed Trap web-site - http://www.nashville.net/speedtrap o lighthouses, especially Sankaty Head (Nantucket Island, MA) and Cape May Point (Cape May, NJ) o the Petro truck stop at Elkton, MD (I-95, MD/DE border) - clean, comfortable, well-lit, good portions, decent price, and a good assortment of pinball machines. o Phil Ochs, _Tape From California_ (A&M, 1967) o The Embarrassment, _Heyday 1979-83_ (Bar None, 1995) o thoughts of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel - U.S. 13 from Chincoteague to Norfolk, VA... 17 miles, 4 islands, part over water, part under water. The engineering geek in me can't wait to drive this... o Reivers/Zeitgeist, "Freight Train Rain" (from _Translate Slowly_, dB Records, 1985) ================= In Closing... ================= Some (but not all) of the delays involved in generating this edition of Finley can be directly attributed to its newly expanded web pages. Point your favorite browser at http://www.access.digex.net/~grumpy/finley.html and see what else I've been up to. Anyone with tips about obtaining old highway maps, especially a Rand McNally pre-interstate-highway map (i.e. one with only the U.S. route designations) should contact me post-haste. Issue #8 will be announced shortly... just need a couple days to get things straight here at work and then figure out where this dialogue is headed. Driving stories from others in the crowd are always welcome... why let me have all the fun mumbling away out here? OFFICIAL INFORMATION SECTION: DISCLAIMER: All material contained within is the responsibility of the original author, as identified by name and electronic address. If there is no clear attribution, then I probably wrote it, and you can bitch at me. This may be reproduced freely, but I'd ask that those doing the re-distribution give credit where it's due. QUESTIONS, complaints, comments, etc. about the publication as a whole are welcome. Submissions are even better. Subscriptions are cool, too. All should be directed to: grumpy@access.digex.net As I get a lot of random mail each day, please make it clear at the outset that you're writing about FB, not just for your health or to see if you can send mail from your net-site to mine. Finally, as the inheritor of the Telegraphic mission specifications, I'm also holding onto the Telegraph archives. All three are available from me if you want 'em.