From Lognet, issue 93/3.
Now that we have our bulk-mail permit, and are sending out Lognets in batches, it is relatively easy for us to add a few more copies to each print run and bulk-mail the extra copies gratis to a new set of recent customers or former members each time. So that’s what we’ve been doing: giving away 30 or 40 copies each quarter; and we hope that this small glimpse of our loglandical activities will entice some of you “recent customers or former members” to become members of the cninu ge logli munce, the new Loglanist community, that has been growing around The Institute since we went public again in 1989. Your turn for this free copy could come around again every 3rd or 4th quarter. Of course, if you’d rather not receive LN at all, please tell us, and we’ll be happy to take your name off this rotating mailing list. To those who are enjoying their free copies, we say, Gesko mia! (Be our guests!) We hope that you will be intrigued by the glimpses of Loglandia that you will get in this way, and that one day decide to have your LN’s sent to you regularly. To do that, just join or rejoin The Institute. Ordinary membership is still only $50 per biennium; students and retirees pay only $25; sustaining members pay $100; and anything above that is at your discretion...and very welcome.
We are shipping LOD (the “Loglan Online Dictionary”). The price to non-members is $50, to members, $30. In either case, you will have perpetual update privileges. (At the moment our charge for updating all your Loglan software, if we can do it at one crack, is $5.) You will also have the right—yes, the right!—to edit your own dictionary, and to send your edits and additions in to us for possible inclusion in the next “official” edition. We expect our book to be a growing one—growing primarily in the hands of its users—and so to issue 2 or 3 editions each year. Surely this is one of the momentous advantages of electronic publishing...especially welcome for handbooks and dictionaries. We bought a license from PKZip in order to make the IBM version of LOD “self-decompressing.” We are using the Apple Installer to load the Mac version onto your hard disk. You’ll need about 3.5 megabytes of hard disk space for either version. If you’re ordering the IBM version, please specify preferred disk size and capacity. You can have it on 1-3.5" disk of 1.4M capacity, 2-3.5" disks of 700K capacity, or 4-5.25" disks of 360K capacity.
You haven’t heard from your Keugru (“Caretaking Group” = Academy) for some time. We haven’t died; we haven’t quit; we’re still taking care of things. A number of minor suggestions have come across our collective desk during the past six months, and one major problem has resurfaced, that of drawing comparisons. We now have two or three mutually contradictory suggestions to mull over, the funnest kind!
We should have something to report to you in December’s LN93/4.
I mentioned last time that my wife Evy and I were planning a 4-week trip to Russia. One of those weeks was to be spent at Oranienburg, near Leningrad, at the Annual Meetings of LOS (“Language Origins Society”). The other three were spent, first, in Moscow, then traveling across that immense country on the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping in Irkutsk on the shores of Lake Baikal, and finally arriving on the Pacific Rim at Vladivostok. From V we flew back to M, spent a few more days in M (visiting the Kremlin grounds and going to a Russian circus), and then took the overnight train from M to Helsinki; and from H flew home to San Diego on Finnair. During those last few days we managed a transit of some 250 degrees of longitude! That’s almost 3/4s of the way round the world; and we did it twice: once slowly, pleasantly, and ecologically soundly (that is, mostly by train), once wickedly wastefully and ridiculously fast (by air).
Our Russia Trip was an immensely satisfying travel experience, one of the best my wife and I have ever had. —JCB