Fred Ramsey has moved his email newsletter to blogspot. Welcome to the blogsphere, Fred! I look forward to your commentary. For those of you from out of town or not familiar with Fred, he's one of the owners of Webster's Bookstore Cafe in downtown State College, which once was Seven Mountain Books, and originally was the Book Swap of myth and legend. Fred helped found the Penn State Science Fiction Society in 1968, and helped run Paracon back when it ran as a yearly SF con in State College. Fred's running Spring Creek Slammers with Dora McClade these days.

He's way the hell to the left of me in most ways, being an authentic red diaper baby; he tells me that his ancestors were Wobblies back in the day. (Wobblies were union activists with the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a far-left organization that largely went under due to harsh competition from the Stalinist CIO and mainstream AFL.) On the other hand, Fred surprised the hell out of me on Wednesday by telling me he had been disappointed by Connie Lucas's failure to get renominated for the County commissioner race. Lucas is a local theocon Republican and one of the current commissioners; I really was not impressed by what I saw of her in the last election, but Fred insists that she was good in the limited role of a county commissioner.

Anyways! Welcome, Fred, and remember: he who dies with the most links, wins.