WhimsyLand

I've been watching Lord of the Rings on TNT this week.  I thought this evening looked a bit like Mount Doom.

My son is guitarist for the Down and Dirty Blues Band (he's the good-looking rascal in the brown suit and buzz-cut).    They play all over Chicago, and their schedule should be on the site soon.

The new Many Mountains Moving is out, thanks to the phenomenal amount of work that Jeffrey Lee put in.  We've got a new website for subscriptions, books from MMM Press, back issues and donations here.  Now, if we can only get coffee cups and mousepads made, but that may have to wait for AWP, where you can find us at the Book Fair. 

We have also opened up our online submissions, thanks to the distributed system provided by the CLMP (and modified by yours truly).  We're asking for $2 for each submission to fund the review process, but (for now) you can still submit via paper and snailmail.

What else is new?  Well, I got my name on my first patent today.  I could tell you what it's about, but then I would have to read my collected works to you while you were tied to a chair.  My friend Dave, chief BBQ specialist at Casa Paulsen, has more than half a dozen of them.  Dave is one of the patent holders of the "laptop clamshell", something that he help invent at Grid, the first real portable computer company.  What's a "laptop clamshell"?  It's what every laptop on earth does now, it opens up and there's the keyboard beneath you and the screen staring at you.  Sure, it seems obvious now ...

More tomorrow, promise.  I've been devilishly busy.