EPL update
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I hadn't checked my fantasy league team for quite a while. I didn't have time to make all the changes I would have liked and got caught with a team that had 3 players out injured. Not a real effective way to make points in a fantasy league. It looks like all my players are healthy now, but I am languishing in 1111th place out of 1709 active players. I guess I won't be winning that trip to England this year...

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, January 28 2004 11:40:11 PM

Silly Season is upon us
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Well, we are now well into what I have regularly called "Silly Season."

No, I'm not referring to the primary elections and caucuses, although that would also qualify. The Kansas Legislature is in session. The session has been open for 16 days, and by law, can only run 90 days (although a special session can be called in an emergency).

For the first time in a few years, no one is making noises about reducing funding for corrections. This scares me, because we've sort of been on the chopping block for the last few years and have managed to squeak by each year. This year we seem to have support from the beginning. But lurking out there is a lawsuit filed by some school districts challenging the state's school finance formula. In December a judge ruled that the formula was unconstitutional and also added (in a fine display of judicial activism) that the state should be spending an additional $1 billion on school finance each year.

One report I saw said that if we fund everything this year at the same rate as we did last year, we will be something like $850 million in the red from the start. I don't think the legislature can raise $850 million in new taxes, let alone the extra billion, and so my paranoia begins. The money is going to have to be cut from somewhere else and community programs are "somewhere else." In the end, I don't expect corrections to get hit too hard, but this is always a nervous time for us. I normally spend quite a bit of time each day reviewing testimony and the news reports from the Topeka Capitol Journal, but this year, the bloody weasels have made the legislative report section a pay site. So I'm having to go a bit further afield for my news.

So far, nothing too substantive seems to have come out of Topeka, but that is typical for this early in the session. Still, I'm doing a lot more newspaper reading than I normally do (other than at this time of year) so my other projects, including finishing the essay on how I got to my current political views, are mostly on hold.

Strangely enough, Howard over at The Smedley Drafts, has written a short piece on the cognitive dissonance experienced when one realizes one no longer fits the label one has worn comfortably in the past.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, January 28 2004 10:26:58 PM

Because we don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt...
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Apparently they have done away with posting the Honor Roll in Nashville. From the Washington Post:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways -- on the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, lawyers for the Nashville school system warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission. (emphasis mine)

For God's sake, we wouldn't want little Johnny to feel bad about not getting good grades because he doesn't have time for studying due to the time demands created by the pursuit of drugs, alcohol, and getting laid. I understand that educational theory says we don't want to lose students, we don't want them to disengage and that we must bend over backwards to keep from alienating students. I'm sorry, this is wrong. We need more competition in schools, not less. Children who grow up thinking the world is a happy cooperative place are in for a traumatic awakening when confronted by the real world when they start looking for a job. The sad thing is that instead of encouraging healthy competition, we leave our kids stunned and demoralized when they realize they can't compete because they don't have the tools or skills necessary to do so. And the people involved want to eliminate competition altogether. From the same article:

...Others think it might be a good idea to get rid of the honor roll altogether, as Principal Steven Baum did at Julia Green Elementary in Nashville.

"The rationale was, if there are some children that always make it and others that always don't make it, there is a very subtle message that was sent," he said. "I also understand right to privacy is the legal issue for the new century."

Baum thinks spelling bees and other publicly graded events are leftovers from the days of ranking and sorting students.

"I discourage competitive games at school," he said. "They just don't fit my worldview of what a school should be."

By all means, our children's ability to compete in the marketplace ought to be decided by whether or not it fits with some grade school principal's worldview.

I get real testy about this sort of thing. Having listened to my parents talk about all the horror stories (from a teacher's perspective) about parents who insist that their little Johnny is a genius who can do no wrong and could never be disruptive or difficult or obnoxious or just not too bright (the kind of people who complain about little Johnny not making the Honor Roll) I always tried to be supportive of my daughter's teachers when she was in school. I tried not to interfere, because when I did try to help with homework, I found that what was being taught and the manner of presentation didn't fit with how I remembered it, so rather than make things worse, I just stayed out of it.

My daughter now has a High School Diploma. She is intelligent, creative and has, I think, some potential as a writer of fiction. Unfortunately, she wouldn't know a punctuation mark if it bit her on the butt. This is just one of the ways I think she was betrayed by the education system. Mind you, I don't put the entire blame on the school. I knew something wasn't quite right, and I let myself be lulled to sleep by "authority."

I don't know where this rant was going, and I seem to have lost my train of thought, so maybe I should just quit and come back to this later.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 25 2004 03:21:13 PM

On Tolkien and Multiculturalism
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I do some of my best thinking when I'm driving. When I was younger, I had a 30 minute commute from the town where I lived to the town where I worked with very little of it being actually in town. So I regularly spent time on the open road. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have to listen to me when I get done) I don't drive much anymore. I live about 5 minutes away from work and don't get a chance to travel much, so opportunities for uninterrupted musing just don't present themselves too often.

Today I drove over to my parents's house. Before I left, the Head Rat and I had watched the Two Towers again. While on the road, it occurred to me how glad I am that Tolkien wasn't a multiculturalist. Imagine if you will, the Tolkien universe transformed by today's notions of multiculturalism and political correctness. In the PC Middle Earth, there is no notion of good and evil. All the varieties of experience are valid. Orc culture, civilization and life experience are no different and inherently no better or worse, than that of hobbits, elves, dwarves or men. Taking unilateral or cooperative action against a neighboring kingdom whose actions appeared threatening, without actual proof of current hostile intent would be unthinkable. A conspiracy to retain possession of the Ring would be unacceptable. The Ring is, after all, a cultural artifact and the Politically Correct thing to do would be to return it to its rightful place in the indigenous culture from whence it came. Not much of a story, when you think of it.

OK, maybe its a good thing I don't do much driving anymore...

by Cziltang 
Posted: Saturday, January 24 2004 07:18:23 PM

Still Alive
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Last week I was all wired up about the material I was working on. I wrote quite a bit, but then got sick and spent the better part of 6 days in bed trying not to get pneumonia. I don't like staying in bed and I detest daytime television so I listened to a lot of music and the rain on the roof and didn't do much of anything else, because I couldn't concentrate long enough to write or read. Although I have a bit more written, the only bit I'm ready to post is this small section:

The First Wave

The first wave of crystallization occurred when I came to grips with what I had perceived as my own failure. After a few years I had a pile of evidence that no matter how much "help" I forced on people, some of them still did stupid things and I had to send them to prison. I thought I wasn't trying hard enough or I didn't know the right thing to do. So I worked harder and read more social theory, because it was obviously my fault. But still the evidence mounted. There were cases where I was convinced there just wasn't anything else I could have done. I eventually came to the conclusion that the failures weren't all my fault. Some of the clients were victims of such horrible socialization and oppression for so long that I just couldn't fix it in the time allotted to me. So I pardoned myself for some of my failures, convinced that it was the system and there the first wave grounded out. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

 

Other Matters

I ran into this article last week in the Register (the IT website). Since I run a treatment program, I'm always looking for advances in the field, but treatment for text message addicts? Not bloody likely. (By the way, if you have any interest in IT news, you really should read the Register. And check out the BOFH installments. I would try to explain the BOFH, but its something you should see for yourself. I will just say that BOFH stands for "Bastard Operator from Hell".

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, January 20 2004 06:55:50 PM

Background
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If pigs could fly, we'd all eat a lot less bacon.

The Pancake Breakfast Aphorisms, St. Alphonso

I've been sick for the last 3 days. I've been trying to write, but what I've written has come out as a sort of a rambling, jumbled mess. This has all been in response to a couple of articles Steven Den Beste has written entitled Three Way Struggle and Teleology and Solipsism. In my last entry I wrote about waves of crystallization as a metaphor for those kind of "a-ha" moments when suddenly something that has been confusing becomes crystal clear. For me, these articles are the catalyst for a wave of crystallization that has occurred for me regarding political philosophy. I've run into the ideas in Den Beste's articles before in various shapes and forms, but they happened to appear in just the right form at just the right time and were a "seed crystal" for me. Since then I've been writing about some of the other major waves of crystallization that took place on my own journey from being a self-proclaimed Socialist and intellectual elitist to my current position much closer to the end (or ends, if you accept the ideal of a multiple axis description) of the political spectrum. This turned out to be a much larger project than I had anticipated, and seemed to me to require a rather large amount of background information to make sense. It also seems to me to make more sense if one is familiar with the ideas in the two Den Beste articles referenced above. I've had to chop this into sections and am going to post it in serial format like I did with my essay on personal responsibility.

Note: Since I also have this thing about books, and I have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on my desk, it never occurred to me to look for it on-line, but tonight I found it here.

Background for Waves of Crystallization or How I got to Here

The primary goal of the Church of Reason… is always Socrates' old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it's revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, chapter 13.

I grew up in an educated family. My father has two Masters degrees. My mother has a B.A. and was a teacher. My only aunt had a Masters. My grandmother was a teacher for a while. When my sister and I were growing up, there was never any question whether we were going to college or not. It never occurred to either of us that there was a possibility of not going to college. I would say that it was expected that we would go, except that that doesn't really capture the essence of the situation and sort of implies that there was some sort of pressure. It wasn't like that. I don't remember ever being told I was going to college. It was just something that was going to happen. (Now that I think about it, it may have had something to do with the fact that my parents regularly went to summer school to pick up new qualifications and, in my mother's case, to renew her teaching certificate. As a kid, I spent four summers living in college towns while my folks went to school, so I guess it just seemed like the natural thing to do.)

At some level, I grew up in awe of higher education. I think that is why I am so fond of Pirsig's 'Church of Reason' metaphor for the true University. It implies that there is something special, noble, perhaps even righteous about the quest for knowledge, and I bought into that idea. I very definitely had intellectual pretensions. Metaphorically speaking, I worshipped at the Church of Reason and in fact, worshipped the Church of Reason itself. When you feel that way, school is cool.

And so it was that in high school, I was one of the Science Geeks. My friends were Science Geeks. I did other things too; I was in debate and music and did the lights for the school plays. But mostly it was science and math (and a fair amount of English). I graduated at the top of my class. And if the truth be told, I was just a wee bit smug about my intellectual capabilities. (OK, that's not the truth. I was arrogant as hell. I never thought of myself as a genius, but I thought I was pretty damn smart and pretty damn proud of it.)

So off I went to college and spent a year with a heavy load of the hard sciences. And after a year I didn't know where I was going. Something didn't seem right. Something was missing. So I dropped out.

This is sounding depressingly like an autobiography, and that was not my intent. I was trying to establish where my reverence for the Church of Reason came from and why I started my adult life as an intellectual elitist and considered myself a socialist. (for a discussion of how the two are related see this article by Steven Den Beste.) In the clear light of hindsight, at first it appears that this was inevitable, but I see now that it need not have been so. Careful reflection and introspection about some of my inherited beliefs might have set me on a different path. For instance, I seem to have inherited a populist streak from my farmer grandparents and it appears I also inherited an almost libertarian, contrarian tendency from my mother's father. (When crop subsidies were first introduced, he decided he didn't want the government interfering in his farming, so he refused to plant wheat - and this in Kansas of all places.) But I have always been a collection of contradictions and am strangely comfortable with that, so no heavy introspection was forthcoming.

In spite of the rhetoric and dogma I internalised over the years, I have never shaken the belief that there is an objective reality out there. While I am not comfortable with the ideas of absolute good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, I am convinced that things work because there is an objective reality (I am in many respects, a pragmatist, which goes a long way toward explaining why my behavior changes before my philosophy. I look for things that work, and figure out what I think about them later.) 2+2 equals 4 because it works and it doesn't matter that it might be more aesthetically pleasing or gender sensitive if numbers made of curved lines (i.e. feminine) always added up to sums made of curved lines (e.g. 2+2=5 or 6, even) instead of straight lines (i.e. the male/phallic numbers like 1,4 and 7). And, I was (and am) convinced that some social conventions should be observed, conventions such as a belief that there is such a thing as correct English grammar (my parents were teachers…).

There was one brief moment in the fall of 1979 when I might have discerned the underlying contradiction between my belief in objective reality and the leftist intellectual principles of subjective reality and equality of result (again see Den Beste). I was sitting in an English 102 class listening to the instructor explain that he and the MLA (Modern Language Association) believed that all ethnic and cultural speech patterns were valid and therefore we were to ignore the old rules of English grammar and write the way we talked. I was incensed. But my reverence for the Church of Reason prevented me from thinking critically about any pronouncements by an authority of that Church. I am amused now, that at that time my favorite bumpersticker was the one which said "Question Authority," which I was perfectly willing to do if "they" were sufficiently removed from me, but which I would never have considered doing of an academic figure with whom I had regular contact.

By the way, I have no idea whether that ever was or is the position of the MLA. I was taking the instructor at face value. A current look at the MLA website does not clarify this point, as there is no statement of principles, and the MLA addresses dozens of different types of literature. They do, also, publish the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, suggesting a belief in certain conventions, but then, research is not literature.

I became enamoured with the social sciences; psychology and sociology in particular. After giving up on being a preacher, I decided my mission in life was to HELP PEOPLE. I immersed myself in social theory and quite by accident found myself in a job in corrections. It should be noted that I thought that helping people was something you did to them (an elitist notion if there ever was one). I fully bought into the classic leftist arguments that crime was a matter of Socio-economic status (an inherent feature of the capitalist system), bad socialization (obviously the fault of the State), and oppression (especially racist oppression) by the capitalist machine. I thought I was helping my clients even the odds a bit in their fight against persecution by the state. I truly believed that there are no bad people, only bad socialization.

 

Well, that is probably way more than you wanted to know and may, in fact, be way more than you need to know to make sense out of the coming articles. While I prize elegant solutions (in the engineering sense of the word) I've never been particularly good at them. Likewise, while I firmly believe that very often less is more, I'm not particularly good at that either.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, January 13 2004 06:13:11 PM

Waves of Crystallization
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You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (somewhere in chapter 13)

For the past three days (off and on) I've been looking for a passage from Pirsig (not the one quoted above, I found that one by accident and just like it.). It has been years since I last read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so the search culminated in a nearly complete re-read of the book. Except that I read the chapters in reverse order because I knew that what I wanted wasn't at the beginning, but I couldn't remember how close to the end it was. This method gives the book a kind of odd spin and I actually found it enjoyable. I'm not sure what that says about the way I think. I eventually found what I was looking for in chapter 15, but I kept going until I ran into the quote above.

I've been reading a lot lately. I'm trying to come to grips with the ongoing ramifications of the paradigm shift I'm going through. I realized that a good portion of what I thought I believed about the world didn't fit with what I know about how the world works. I've hit one of those places where there is an answer out there, just beyond my reach. I'm sure it is there, but when I try to formulate it, it just evaporates. I try to track down the threads of my thoughts and just when I think I've got something nailed down, the other threads escape me (sort of like herding squirrels). I just don't have the words, the structure, the format, something. I'm missing something somehow, somewhere. And after I (figuratively speaking) beat my head against the wall for a while, I do what I always do: dig through other people's ideas.

Eventually I find something; a word, a definition, an idea, something that sets off a chain reaction. One thing falls into place, which causes another to fall into place, which causes another and so on. Pirsig described that something that starts the process as a 'seed crystal.'

Seed Crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.

A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.

He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.

If you've never seen this process, it truly is amazing. It's been 25 years since I saw it in a Chemistry class, but I think it only took a second or two for the entire beaker to go from liquid to solid crystals. And you really do see them grow, radiating out from the point of first crystallization. I remember this passage because it is the closest metaphor I have ever found to describe what it feels like to me when I finally find that 'thing' that allows the thoughts to come together in a coherent form.

So, I've been looking for seed crystals. I've found a couple, which has given me no small sense of relief, but in the process I've also gained some perspective on how I got from being a self-proclaimed socialist to whatever it is that I am today (I still don't have a label for it, though mostly I seem to fit somewhere between conservative and libertarian). I've realized that these waves of crystallization don't just materialize out of nowhere. The raw material accumulates over months and years and then I find that one seed crystal that changes the way I think in some way. That seems obvious now, but when it was happening (especially when I realized I supported the liberation of Iraq) it took me completely by surprise.

Well, that is as far as I can get tonight.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 11 2004 10:03:58 PM

The Dog ate my homework
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When I got home this evening, my football buddy (see Personal Folly section) was chewing up the mail. I have tried to explain to her that cats don't eat paper, but she was singularly unimpressed. I decided to get a picture as proof, because everyone knows that if the cat eats your bills you don't have to pay them, right? As always happens with cute children, by the time I got the camera, she was doing something else: in this case batting Q-tips out of the air. (The Head Rat taught her to fetch Q-tips, but she figured out that if she batted them out of the air she didn't need to go get them.)

This has absolutely nothing to do with what I was intending to write about this evening, but sometimes that's just the way it happens.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, January 08 2004 07:12:27 PM

If I were younger...
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If I were younger and 50 pounds lighter (OK, maybe 60, or 70...) I would already have submitted my resume' for the corrections job in Iraq. (see yesterday's post) And so would a couple of my co-workers. We spent some time talking about it today, just exploring the challenges involved.

It seems to me that the central issues in building a police, court, and prison system that is viable are ones of respect and trust. For the new system to work, the Iraqi people have to trust the system to be equitable and they have to have respect for the system and the people who populate the system. Those are incredible challenges. Just a few examples we thought of:

Criminals think differently than "normal" people. One of the hallmarks of criminal thinking is the sense of entitlement. Generally speaking, most criminals believe they are entitled to what they want, and they believe they are entirely justified if they take it, coerce others to get it or intimidate others to get it. Of course, that would appear to be an apt description of the Hussein government, so how do you separate out in people's minds that you (being a member of the new correctional system) don't operate that way and that the system now doesn't and won't operate that way?

How do you design police interview and interrogation procedures to be effective, yet be respectful of the beliefs of the segments of the population that operate under the assumption that it is improper for a woman to be with men who are not family members?

Our bias against cruel and unusual punishment goes hand in hand with the correctional principle that you don't demean prisoners as part of their punishment because being incarcerated is the punishment. How do you sell that idea? How do you sell the idea that incarceration in a reasonably clean, reasonably humane cell with regular meals and no torture is serious punishment?

My co-workers and I are convinced that from a corrections professional's standpoint this is the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to be a positive part of something this big just doesn't come along every day. Alas that we are all older and slower than we would like to be, but its probably just as well, because our wives would probably kill us and conspire to dispose of the bodies if we were to pursue such a thing.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, January 06 2004 11:16:44 PM

Go with what you know
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Every time I start working on an essay about foreign policy I start doing background research. In the process I always get distracted with other people's links and comments and the next thing I know I've spent two or three hours reading utterly engrossing material by excellent writers about things I want to comment on but realize I really don't have the broad backgound to do well.

Last night I ran across an article by James Lileks. Read the whole thing. Here's why:

"...It took me about 45 seconds of googling to come up with a long, boring press release from the IMF about the disposition of Iraqi oil revenues. They’re audited by the international community in accord with a UN resolution. How did that happen? How did a Unilateralist Cowboy War for Oil fumble the ball at the goal line? Perhaps the UN threatened to deploy Crack French Bureaucrats who'd unleash the indifferent shrug and the chastening frown. No! Not the lowered eyebrows! Anything but that! Here – take the oil money, all of it! Anything but a facial manifestation of Gallic disapproval!"

I don't care what your position on the war in Iraq is, anyone who can string words together like that deserves your attention.

Or if you are feeling philosophical, how about an essay on Tolkien and Mortality by Anna Mathie.

For a while I was quite depressed. What I write seems kind of simplistic and shallow compared to a lot of the stuff I see on the internet. But then I remembered why I started doing this stuff in the first place. In the past year I've been through a major paradigm shift in the way I look at the world. It started out as a recognition of some serious cognitive dissonance between what I thought I thought about how the world is and the everyday practical knowledge I have about people gained via nearly 24 years of working in corrections. It sort of mushroomed into a full fledged paradigm shift. This Blog started out as a way for me to explore what I know, what I think I know and what I think and maybe get a little clarity for myself, because I still have gut feelings that don't exactly fit with what I know and I think things that don't match what I feel.

So, in that context, of course it is going to be simplistic and shallow. At the ripe old age of 44 I've finally started thinking (really thinking and not just brushing the surface) about politics and philosophy and economics. I can't possibly have the background information that the writers I admire have. I haven't been at it long enough.

One final note. I found a job I would like to apply for. The State Department is looking for 1000 or so police officers and corrections officers to help the Iraqi people "organize effective civilian law enforcement, judicial, and correctional agencies". I could do that. Unfortunately, when I mentioned it at home tonight the Head Rat went ballistic. She needn't have worried though. I checked the qualifications page and am pretty sure I couldn't pass the physical agility and endurance tests (although qualifying with a 9mm probably wouldn't be a problem). Still, it would be a really cool opportunity for someone like me.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, January 05 2004 11:12:58 PM

Return of The Return of the King
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I wrote this a couple of days ago while I was having problems saving Blog entries. I finally got clever and saved this one to the notepad, so I didn't lose it.

Hopes and Fears realized:

I finally went to The Return of the King tonight. I mentioned before that I was quite apprehensive about it. There were so many ways it could have been a disappointment, but I was pleased. Not what the English would call "best pleased," but satisfied. Given the constraints of movie making (and knowing full well that all of what I love about Tolkien doesn't necessarily make for gripping cinema) I'm not sure what else that I would have wanted could have been squeezed into a movie. My major complaint was there was no scouring of the Shire. I've always believed that this is a major point of the story. Generally, my other complaints are that I just wanted more. More of Legolas and Gimli, more of Eomer, more of Eowyn and Faramir. And, I was so afraid that Peter Jackson would go for a big finale and ruin the whole trilogy for me, but instead, he ended it correctly. I can live with the odd complaint or disappointment. Basically, it was marvelous.

Now I just have to wait 8 or 10 months for the extended DVD version to come out.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 04 2004 09:10:44 PM

A guarded success
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Well, I've re-installed Blog 8.2 and copied in my missing entries from my backup. I say guarded success because I had copied the entries off the website onto notepad then copied them from there back into Blog. Consequently, the links didn't transfer. I will have to go fix them if I get a chance later today.

I'd like to say that the entries I tried to write and couldn't because of my technical difficulties were all pithy and substantive, but we know better, don't we?

Update: this exercise suggests that maybe I should pay more attention to backing up my data on a regular schedule, no?

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 04 2004 12:22:48 PM

Repair work
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I crashed my system a few days ago and since that time Blog has been wonky. If this entry saves and posts things will apparently be fixed and I can get on to replacing the entries I made since my last backup (which was 12/16/03, unfortunately). If you are not reading this, I have just engaged in a typing exercise.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 04 2004 12:06:58 PM