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Rest assured, I do not.

Because I need one. The words sympathy and communion do not convey precisely what I wish to say.

Great, I thought, I bagged the statist.

I'd been aware of Lynette since about the time I discovered Usenet in 1997. She was the only woman I ever saw on the Whitewater newsgroup that was consistently worth reading. The Whitewater group was a rough crowd, my first impression was that I could never have a voice that would be heard there. She took it all in stride, with grace and dignity, and always gave as good as she got. No, better. I was always impressed with her.

But as I found my voice my attention was focused on the anarchist camp. Lynette was more of a libertarian conservative. That made us part of a very loose alliance in the Weasel Flame Wars, but I always had the unpleasant habit of shooting conservatives in the back when they were most vulnerable. We talked about that once in in brief email exchange. "At least you don't go for the head shot...", she wrote, "...like Schneider." That was true - I was only trying to wing 'em.

She was a very good writer, but I didn't realize quite how good she was until she started to write articles regularly for Union Square Journal. Still, she was a statist, and I didn't see any future for her in my plans for No Treason. But Rob Robertson talked me into inviting her to contribute along with Beck and Sabotta as I've already explained. I didn't expect much to come of it, in fact I teased Lynette by making her a Junior Editor when everyone else was a Senior Editor. But our real conversation had begun. I quickly learned that there was more to her than I had appreciated.

I have a knack for understanding what people mean. That had never been reciprocal, I'd always been frustrated by the fact that no one understood what I was saying the way I understood what they were saying. For me the most exquisite pleasure has always been shared understanding. I've exercised good judgment in choosing friends and lovers, and I've had the great pleasure of sharing considerable understanding with them. And yet...

Lynette had the knack.

You can't know what that meant to me, because you don't have it. I'm telling you right now in plain English, but you can't know. It meant my life could begin.

I did what any truly sane person would do under the circumstances: I went for broke. As the Moor did with Desdemona, I told her the story of my life. I started with my loves. Can you appreciate that? All I really knew of this woman was that she had a knack of understanding and I immediately launched into telling her the story of all the loves of my life in intimate detail. She never flinched. I told her of my family. I told her of my friends. She listened carefully. And she understood.

I sought no sympathy, and anyway it was not by any means a sad story. It was a triumphant story, the climax of which was her very act of understanding. And she could not hear it and not know what I was prepared for.

That took a couple of weeks.

I decided that she was going to work out after all, so I promoted her to Senior Editor.

Who is this young man?

The implications of Furling are highly significant. The first implication is blogging without having your external links broken or invalidated by a changing internet.

The the implications go a lot deeper because Furl is in principle the opposite of a memory hole.

Following Shonk:

1. Grab the nearest book.


2. Open the book to page 23.


3. Find the fifth sentence.


4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Vasily the footman steps down from his footboard, in the same motion unfastening the bearskin lap robe, and my mother walks briskly toward a shop whose name and display I do not have time to identify, since just at that instant my uncle, her brother, passes by and hails her (but she has already disappeared), and for several steps I involuntarily accompany him, trying to make out the face of the gentleman with whom he is chatting as they both walk away, but catching myself, I turn back and hastily flow, as it were, into the store, where my mother is already paying ten rubles for a perfectly ordinary green Faber pencil, which is then lovingly wrapped in brown paper by two clerks and handed to Vasily, who is already carrying it behind my mother to the sleigh, which now speeds along anonymous streets to our house, now advancing to meet it; but here the crystal-line course of my clairvoyance was interrupted by Yvonna Ivanova's arrival with broth and toast. (The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov).

..you're in for it...