# (no subject) was Gummed *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 16 Dec 2011* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Lee Berman *16 Dec 2011, 21:22* > Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: I know what you mean ... when I joined we had (among others, simply > from memory) Alice K. Turner ("Alga"), a former fiction editor at Playboy; and Michael > Andre-Driussi ("Mantis"), whose work I assume everyone here is familiar with; and Kevin > Maroney. All these seem to be gone forever. I miss their contributions. Yeah, I am eternally jealous of you Dan'l, that you were participating in those Golden Days, though I did get some discourse with Mantis a couple years ago in an online- one year Book of the Month Club for the Sun Series. Actually, I think Nutria (James Jordan) put a short blurb on here not so long ago. Would be nice if he'd contribute more. > Daniel Petersen: Well, Lee, I'm one of the newer 'very intelligent, insightful, well-read > contributors' who is in danger of being chased away even by your 'free thought' postings. > But never fear, I won't really run. Heh. Nice try! I may be a softie but I'm not such a sucker as to fall for that line. Anyway, I give all kinds of credit to David Stockhoff. He is a better Gerry foil than I ever was. You can see it in their current exchange. Gerry may see himself as the scorpion, but David is a fox who ain't going down no matter how many times he gets a stinger aimed at his back. > Gerry Quinn: Am I to understand from this that you consider that the torrent of largely nonsensical > ?theories? you post here is in some sense for the betterment of the group? That it encourages others > to post equally nonsensical theories, and that this is good? Candidly, I have always suspected it. > My offence, then, is not so much “social manipulation” so much as making the list a less comfortable > environment for nonsense? heh. Good one Gerry! Classic Quinn. But nope. The value is in the medium not the message. The entertainment factor. That's what keeps them in their seats. ---