Once again, I'm not ready to take on a full-length entry. So here are a bunch of odds and ends; mostly things I've wanted to mention, but haven't gotten around to, for one reason or another.

How many people do any of us really know (or know of) who are middle-aged or older, who have only had one partner, were virgins when they married, never strayed, never got divorced, and are still with that one partner?

Actually, this describes the overwhelming majority of the people I know who are middle-aged or older...

I only wish I were exaggerating.

Then again, given that I already own the first edition of this, the most single-minded of dictionaries, I suppose it'll be hard to justify the expense. Unless I can get a review copy through the college paper, perhaps. But I'm still waiting for a few other books that way -- most notably Vikram Seth's An Equal Music -- so that's probably not going to cut it. Hmmm.

Of course, I'm not entirely happy with Mr. Sheidlower, 'cause he's making it increasingly unlikely that I'll ever manage to sell my essay on the subject. Then again, considering that I've never finished revising the thing, I suppose it's a moot point. Alas.

See, my old ISP was this really small company with an entire four phone lines, and really cheap service. Sure, things broke down every now and again, but I had the advantage of being in direct contact with the guy in charge of the service, so that even when there were problems, I knew what was wrong, and what was being done about it.

Alas, it was so small that it ended up closing up shop altogether, at the end of last year.

So I went to the new place, which was also a smallish ISP, but nowhere near as small as the last place. Why, it actually offered PPP access, so one could use those graphical browsers! (Not that one would really want to.)

Unfortunately, it also turns out to have a technical support staff that takes weeks to get back to you, and they tend not to be very helpful, even when they do so. And the system is a bit flaky. And 'twould seem that one of their users did some spamming some time back, and they didn't do anything about it, so I can't send mail to some ISPs, including one used by a member of my notify list. I have to duck over to my college account to take care of that one. In short, I get the disadvantages of a small ISP -- and then some -- without the advantages that are supposed to come with it.

On the other hand, they still seem to be the only ones left offering UNIX shell accounts that can be accessed through a dumb terminal, which is what I want. So I seem to be stuck with them, for now.

When and if I ever do make the switch over to Linux, that might change. We shall see.