From Lognet, issue 95/2.
Last May, immediately after taking LN 95/1 to the post office, my wife Evy and I left San Diego for a long, quadrangular train journey around the U.S. and Canada. We took a whole month to do it, stopping for many pleasant visits along the way. First stop, Gainesville, Florida, for visits with my daughter Jenny and her husband Joe, as well as with other Institute friends and Trustees, such as Jean Chalmers and her husband. Then it was up to Pennsylvania to visit old school chums of Evy’s; then on to New York where we stayed with Evy’s daughter and her husband, and where we also had a chance to visit with Alan Gaynor and his wife Helena, and with Kirk Sattley, who very kindly made the trip down from Boston to meet with me and Alan. It was then on to Canada, where we first stayed with a former student of Evy’s in Montreal, then on to Ottawa, where we stayed with Bob McIvor and family. Then across Canada—including a thrilling meander through the Canadian Rockies—to Vancouver and then Seattle, where we visited James Jennings and his wife. Then down the Pacific Coast to San Diego and home. All in all, a sparkling journey!
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I’m not sure that everyone knows that Loglandia now consists of two parts: there is an e-connected part, a growing “electronic village”, and a less active hinterland that is still only paper-connected. With the denizens of the latter, these increasingly widely-spaced (but bigger) Lognets are The Institute’s only contact...apart from the occasional paper letter. Please move into our village if you can; interaction by e-mail is so much more satisfying. Just e-write me at the e-address on the back cover; I’ll put you on the Logli List immediately. But if you can’t e-connect with us, or have decided not to, please be assured that we will keep our paper publications going as long as there is any need for them. Please continue to support our publication efforts by renewing your dues when they come up. The date on your label shows when your personal biennium will—or has already, uu—run out.
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We nearly always have questions from cnugoi (“new-goers” = newcomers) to answer in Lo Lerci. This time we have a heap. The letters themselves, plus Bob’s and my answers to them, dominate the issue. This is as it should be. Lo Lerci is where we hear from our cnudjo (“new members”) whether they are e-connected or not. We also like hearing from logli who have something to say to the whole community, not just its e-connected part. (It’s still a minority, by the way; about 90% of our members are not e-connected).
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I do the bookkeeping for The Institute but I do it just three times a year. This includes check-depositing and label-updating, and I do it just before sending out Lognets; that happens in January, May, and September these days. (It is more efficient for me to do it that way. We don’t have enough income to hire help...even parttime help; so we rely on volunteers, including me.) This quirkiness on my part—and I admit it is—means that a dues-renewal check you send us right after any of these three occasions could actually sit around nearly 4 months before being cashed! This is well within the 6-months definition of “old checks” that most banks use, but this practice sometimes causes puzzlement to our members and customers. Did we get your check or not? 99% of the time we did. We’ve just husbanded a volunteer’s precious time by not depositing it yet!
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Like many not-for-profit organizations, TLI runs on volunteers. But our volunteer corps is shrinking even as our general membership continues to grow. So we need new blood in our various working groups, especially the blood of younger people. We especially need editors and writers to work with us on our various publications; L3 and LL especially need help. Our teaching programs, too, could use some expansion and renewing. Unless you help, Hoi Junti Logli, we are in danger of becoming a corps of Old Men, a corps that is bound to diminish in energy and strength as its members age or die. So get involved. Write and ask what you can do. Even if it’s only a little because of your other obligations, that little can be made to help.
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I’m starting a preliminary file for our “Usage Catalog” (see Note 2 on the Bigelow letter in Lo Lerci, p.14). CompuServe’s filing system makes accumulating such entries easy to do. So as you contrive new us-ages, or feel you understand some old one—i.e., have figured out how to “interpret” or “eliminate” it—please submit these entries to me. You may submit them any way you like, but e-mail is best for me. I’ll accumulate your ideas for later editing and eventual publication. As building and refining usages is our central task just now, someone has to serve as a repository for our collective efforts. I’ll be that someone until some junti logli volunteers.
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James Jennings has put our “What Is Loglan?” document and some articles from Lognet on the World Wide Web. Logli who can access the Internet may be interested in looking up our “Page”. You can find it by pointing your favorite web browser at: http://www.halcyon.com/loglan/. If you’re a Web Novice, you might try one of the following: (a) If you have Unix-shell based Internet access, try typing: lynx http://www.halcyon.com/loglan/. If that works, you can probably move around using your arrow keys. (b) If you have PPP or SLIP based Internet access, you need to get a web browser for your computer. Mosaic and Netscape are both popular and work for both PCs and Macs. (c) If you have a Prodigy or America OnLine account, you should have recently acquired web access. Ask around. —JJ/JCB