This week, we have a roundtable and a few of you who have e-mailed about things in the past will see that I did not forget your e-mails and worked in as many as I could. Our address is thirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com.
We do not have time to reply to every e-mail that comes in. Dona, Jim and I work the e-mails unless I'm on vacation. When that happens, Jess, Ava and C.I. help out as well. Dona, Jim and I try to reply to all longterm readers when possible. But even some of our oldest readers don't get more than a single sentence reply.
I note that not just because some people seem to think we can drop everything and live in e-mails. We can't. We don't have the time. I work full time, for example. I am in a committed relationship. I have a lot of things on my plate and responding to e-mails in all of my free time just isn't going to happen.
That brings us to the second point, I don't want to i.m. I don't i.m. friends, I'm certainly not going to 'friend' a stranger and i.m. them.
Yahoo mail changed a few things and now they've got this option to i.m. and a number of people have added us to their list which means we have to "approve" them or not. No one's being approved, we don't have the time to i.m.
That's not attempting to be rude. But we do this weekly magazine and that's why you're here reading. We don't have time to also be pen pals or i.m. buddies. I used to i.m. as late as 2005. Somewhere around the middle of that year (this site started in January 2005), I no longer had the time to i.m. That was with friends. I don't have the time to i.m. strangers.
"I write and write but never get a reply," insists Corinne. I think I've just explained why that is. If not . . .
Never heard from you until two weeks ago. You've written repeatedly wanting to know personal information about Jim, Dona, Jess, Ava, C.I. and myself. We're really not into providing you with gossip. And we really don't know what that has to do with what we're writing about here.
"The Bush Legacy? Repainting history?" I have no idea what that is. But C.I. and we both got e-mails on it and, if you're interested, you can go to this Blogspot website. When people e-mail, we do try to work it in unless it's pornography. I have nothing against pornography. I'm gay, I have bought my share of skin mags. But we do try to keep in mind that we have a wide variety of readers and that if we link to some sites (yes, we've been asked in e-mails to provide links to 'adult' websites) that might mean we were blocked by some programs and some readers wouldn't be able to access us. We've got a photo we'll be using for a feature that will become pretty much a regular one and it's a nude man. From behind. We're trying to figure out (so it won't be used this week) whether we need to block out the rear or not? Do we need to paint a box over the rear, paint on a g-string? Can we run it as is? We're not sure. We've tossed that out to a few of our longterm readers and we'll go over their input and then make a decision. (The photo is on a postcard which got left on a car windshield, believe it or not. Like a leaflet.)
Ava and C.I. are not taking requests for what to cover on TV. They get enough 'advice' or 'input' from Jim. This week, I bring up one show to them because it is going off and they have mentioned it in conversations and have referred to it in their writing. But they're not doing requests. Whenever I write that, an e-mail or two will come in saying basically, "How rude!" I'm sorry, I forgot you were paying for this . . . Oh, you're not. More importantly, Ava and C.I. got pushed into writing about TV. They didn't want to. Our first week, they didn't want TV to be covered at all. A few weeks later when the TV articles went from group pieces to written just by Ava and C.I., they didn't want that either. They're on the road all week speaking to various groups about the Iraq War. There are Saturdays when they get home and have nothing. They have to dig through scripts and discs friends have left and hope they can find something to cover. In four years and counting, they've never missed a week and they have enough pressure on them without knowing they have to write X on Sunday morning.
The big question in the e-mails is are we finishing this year? Yes, we are. We were supposed to go dark in November of last year. What happened was Ava and C.I. promised a friend with a TV show (Fringe) that they would hold off on the review (they were going to rip the show apart, they were told that changes were being made and they were, in fact made) until the spring. They mentioned that right after in commentary they wrote. When Jim read it outloud, that was when we all (including Ava and C.I.) grasped that the site was going past November. They hadn't thought, "Oh, we're done in November, we can't." They'd promised without thinking. We were glad to continue. Ava and C.I. have always been the ones who want to stop. Because of Fringe, we've continued through the end of April. That was the promise made to Stan who wanted to start his own site but didn't want to do it if everyone was going dark as soon as he did. So the promise was we'd go through April community wide. It's April now and we've discussed it and all feel we can make it up to the end of December.
After that?
We're not planning that far ahead. But we are going through December.
Which brings us to the second most asked of topic in the e-mails: Will we do a summer ficiton read as we've done every year? Yes, we will. We're excited about it. When it comes around, we'll probably have lost interest. But if we had the time to work on it right now, we'd have a blast. The June 26, 2005 edition, the June 4, 2006 edition (plus "Strange people (fictional recreation of reality). " carried over to the following week), the June 24, 2007 edition and the June 22, 2008 edition are the summer reads thus far.