Copyright © 1998-1999 by Baird Stafford. All Rights Reserved. Introduction, being the Page on Which we Introduce Ourself

      Our Reader who knows us may safely skip many of the following paragraphs, though we reserve the right to be as coy as possible about how many since as yet we are unsure of the number of words we shall require to introduce ourself to Our Reader who hasn't the faintest notion who we might be; and we do think that some of the information which we mean to place somewhere near the end of this epistle might possibly be of interest (though we may, instead, sprinkle said data throughout the text, thus infuriating those who missed it the first time around and causing everyone else to become insufferably smug about being able to parse compound complex sentences -- a skill which, as nearly as we can determine, has been banished from the English curriculum in the public schools of the United States, which educational facilities [establishments being anathema to good republicans] are not, of course, to be confused with the Public Schools of the United Kingdom since States and Kingdoms are entirely different political, social and historical not to mention hysterical entities): and since we appear rather unexpectedly to have reached the end of that sentence we shall put a summary stop to it, thus:.

      For the information of Our Reader who has already made our acquaintance and has memorized this Introduction to the point where she believes she will go utterly mad if she is forced to peruse it yet again, however, we hereby append the intelligence that the menu labeled "Select an article" at the top of this page will, when treated in the fashion proper to menus on the platform from which she browses the World Wide Web, enable her to move along to whatever article may have appeared since her last visit. The button next to it, which was called "Feedback" when last we saw it, will enable Our Reader to tell us directly what she thinks of our idiocies.

      We first saw the light of monitor (the light of day being somewhat delayed by the circumstance that Our Author had just acquired a smallish, oldish Macintosh with which he became instantly infatuated and used for every purpose from our creation through the recording of his own Journals, the composition of his epistolary masterpieces and the writing down of shopping lists) some years ago when Our Friend that We Live With accepted responsibility for the publication of the newsletter for the local branch of a national organization devoted to the care and feeding of the terminally bright and, upon consideration of the slim pile of submissions, declared in some disgust that unless Something Were Done the publication's first few issues would consist mostly of blank paper -- though, due to the accident of having a member in the printing business who oversaw the actual mechanics of assembly, of blank paper in very tasteful pastel colors.

      Although we are not, ourself, a member of said national organization for the terminally bright (nor have we ever been, on grounds that we have always been a Bright Boy in the opinion of teachers, professors and others who might be supposed to have some basis of statistical fact for that opinion and have never, therefore, felt the need of a Card to prove it), we volunteered immediately and out of the sheer goodness of our heart to be born, that the hideous specter of White Space might be laid to rest.

      So successfully was that specter dispelled that we appeared regularly and with increasing verbosity in that newsletter, and were even in due time nominated for a national award in spite of being on the wrong side of the blanket, as it were; and Our Friend that We Live With became Our Editor, who also Edited the book we called, We, the First Person Singular that we wrote in an effort to assist the finances of the local Chapter and which is now, alas, long out of print and unavailable save to those who had the extreme good fortune (or so we think it) to obtain a First (and only) Edition.

      We are, as the Fancy might term it, of E.B. White out of Angela Thirkell (though we may well have the order reversed, not being ourself a member of the Fancy); and count also among our ancestry such persons as P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde and Georgette Heyer (with Jane Austen, therefore, ranking as a kind of revered ancestress with whom we are somewhat acquainted but whom we really don't know very well). Some have voiced the suspicion that Mr. Clemens may also be lurking back amongst the crowd, somewhere, but we've never seen him and have therefore no opinion to offer on the matter, which is wholly uncharacteristic. The same may be said more emphatically of Ambrose Bierce (though we refrain from any mention of Judge Crater, who for all we care may as well have joined his fellows on the Moon) as well as such petits etoillesi if we have the French -- not one of our languages -- correctly as George Kauffman and the other curmudgeon whose name we have temporarily forgotten but will remember before we commit this to the Web (Mencken -- that was his name. H.L. Mencken.) We shudder at the thought, however, of ever being thought Hemingwayesque.

      In due course, Our Editor left off playing with newsletters for free and became Our Business Partner in a consulting firm for amounts of money which only a few short years ago we should have regarded as perfectly obscene. (This does not, however, mean that we are no longer broke: we are merely broke on a somewhat grander scale.) Our only regret is that the consulting we do is not as exciting as that undertaken by the Original (in our opinion) Consulting Firm and the detective who was its sole proprietor and staff: we should dearly love, just once, to have matched our wits against those of the woman, though of the Professor we have no opinion at all.

      Which brings us at long and logorrheic last to the World Wide Web. Our Personal opinion of it is that it is a Monstrosity, mostly because of the insistence of so many of its "creative" geniuses that full appreciation of its beauties requires the downloading of graphics, animated graphics and cacophonics ad interminable nauseam. We suppose we should be less hostile to the bells and whistles were they not such thorough-going distractions from the information we are attempting to extract: we find reading extremely difficult when pyrotechnics persist in exploding out of the corner of our eye, as it were. The World Wide Web, however poor a replacement it might otherwise be for email and usenet, does offer us a Forum; and we have decided after several years of being able to create, for free, a Personal web page but not taking advantage of same to reverse our stance. Hence, our current presence.

      We shall endeavor to keep our offerings as free of bells and whistles as possible, both out of consideration for the finer sensibilities of Our Reader and also out of sheer vanity, as we are persuaded that our words are in truth much more interesting than our picture, a picture of our house, or of our children, our dogs, our cats, our horses (should we ever obtain any of these latter) or our anything else could possibly be. And if Our Reader wishes to hear our voice, she may rent one of our movies -- the titles of which we would gladly convey if we only knew what they might be for their current releases (one of them, to our count, has had three or four!).

      The caveat, of course, that if our Internet Service Provider should become aware of our presence (which must surely happen should we become madly popular -- a lovely dream and one for which we feel we must prepare though our common sense, to which we do listen on occasion, assures us of the unlikelihood of such an eventuality), said ISP will cease to provide our Page gratis -- and some method of defraying the expense will have to be discovered. At the moment, we are leaning towards an invasion of Ads with Banners waving and including, alas, the bells and whistles we find so objectionable on everyone else's Pages. Our Reader is thus warned of the possibility, though at present we deem the probability very low that we shall have to resort to such desperate measures.