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 Aslan Escapes / Survey Results / New
Featurettes
 We've
been having a run of bad luck with our cats. A couple of weeks
ago, we lost our big black cat Terl, due to health problems;
needless to say, this was depressing, although not as much as
you might think, since he was an anti-social cat who hid from
us most of the time. However, on Tuesday, our most friendly and
beloved cat, Aslan, somehow got outside. All our cats are indoor
cats, so this was very upsetting for us. There's a busy road
at the end of our street, and some years ago we had a cat named
Einstein who was killed by a car before we'd even realized he'd
gotten out. So when we pieced together the clues and realized
that Aslan had engineered an escape sometime during the previous
evening, we got pretty scared. To make matters worse, it's was
a brutally hot day, and since Aslan's starting to show his 13
years, worries over heat stroke added fuel to our escalating
fears. When the first patrol of the immediate surroundings came
up empty, we decided to enlist our neighbors in the search and
quickly put together a "Have You Seen Me?" flyer to
canvas the neighborhood with. We put one in every mailbox within
a several block radius of our house, and on some telephone poles
for good measure, and then tried to get back to work, hoping
that someone would find him and give us a call.
The day passed very slowly. We took many walks through our
neighborhood, to no avail. In the evening we got a few reports
back, of a cat fitting Aslan's description, seen hiding under
cars, chasing birds up into trees, and generally having himself
a great adventure... but darkness fell with no luck in finding
him, and I started writing this report with the belief that he'd
still be missing when I posted it.
But this story has a happy ending. A neighbor named Gary rang
our doorbell, saying he'd seen a gray cat under his car... but
by the time we got back there, the cat was gone. Even so, we
knew he had to be close, so we broke out the flashlights and
launched a full scale search. We were soon joined by another
neighbor, Dave, who had spotted Aslan on his porch that morning,
and after much shining of flashlights into bushes and under cars,
we finally found him. Whew!
 The
response to last week's survey
has been very gratifying. It's great getting feedback from our
readers, and even better to discover that lots of people like
the Fluxx T-shirt
idea and plan on buying one (or more) when we make them available.
The results were largely predictable, although there were some
surprises... The Toaster wasn't even on our initial list of choices,
but has proven to be one of the most popular options, and while
I had assumed that The Brain would make the final cut, I hadn't
counted on it being the second most popular choice. Chocolate,
to no one's surprise, was the most popular Keeper.
A useful side effect of Alison's
having recently obtained a Master's Degree is that she knows
how to munge statistics and generate cool bar graphs, so she
took on the job of tabulating the results and creating the chart
you see here.
The Keepers displayed in green are the ones we'll be making
into shirts. We're going with the will of the people on all but
the bottom-ranked choice; there, I feel it's less important to
be democratic than it is to have a set of Keeper shirts that
play well together. (The Toaster has no companion without Television
or bread, and with no Doughnuts in sight, Coffee would also be
unescorted. War would work with Death, of course, but that wouldn't
solve the Toaster problem and anyway, as a peace-loving hippie,
I'm always eager to eliminate War.)
Thanks for voting! The T-shirts will be debuted at Origins,
and available on the website sometime thereafter.
One of my favorite kinds of fiction, both to create and to
consume, is the very short story. A few years ago I picked up
a slim volume of such stories, edited by Jerome Stern, entitled
Micro Fiction, in which each story was no more than 250
words. More recently, I got another volume of super short stories
that takes the challenge one step further, limiting each story
to exactly 55 words. This book, entitled The World's Shortest
Stories, edited by Steve Moss, sets down the rules for 55
word stories as such: each story must contain the following four
elements: 1.) a setting, 2.) one or more characters, 3.) conflict,
and 4.) resolution. Plus of course, the whole thing can only
be 55 words long, not counting the title, which must be no more
than 7 words long. (There are also some technical details about
what really constitutes a word, but I won't bore you with those
here.)
Inspired by the challenge of creating an entertaining short
story in such a small number of words, I started writing tiny
stories of my own. I've written enough of them now - and had
so much fun doing it - that I've decided to try to post a new
one every week. And thus was born a new featurette, which I'm
calling Nanofiction,
since these stories are even shorter than those in the Microfiction
category. I'll be following the rules set forth by Steve Moss
so that I can submit my stories for his next anthology, but I'm
adding one more rule of my own: since these stories will be featured
in the left hand column of the WWN webzine, and vertical space
there is at a premium, all Nanofiction entries will be formatted
as a single paragraph.
I'm starting this week with the first piece of Nanofiction
I wrote, entitled Lost Wallet. I hope you like it.
Last week I announced that Dr Cool had grown weary of choosing
cool sites each
week and was retiring. No sooner did toK
hear this news than she volunteered to pick up where he left
off. So this week we proudly present Fruits
of Chaos, a new weekly cool site award, driven and maintained
by The Other Kristin. Be sure to check out her archive page,
since there she'll be including a couple of sentences about each
site and why she picked it.
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Comments?
Ads for
a new drug called Cellasene assert that it's been "Clinically
Studied to Help Reduce Cellulite." What does THAT mean?
Not clinically proven, determined, or shown... merely "studied."
Huh?
