Once upon a time, when the Internet was new and shiny and there was no Google, I got bored one summer and joined a bunch of pen-pal sites. One day recently I checked those same sites again and was unpleasantly surprised at how many people were just looking to have sex. There are personal ads for that. Anyway, I made many quick friends and none of them lasted, except for this one expatriate in Japan named Lyle. He decided to do something else with all the emails he was getting--he combined them into one long newsletter-type thing and sent it to everyone in his address book so everyone else could read it, too. Everything gets covered, except for politics and religion. (His rule.)

I asked him if I could do something with it and he agreed. I might put some of it up here and I might turn it into a print zine, if I can force myself to do it. He's a very nice guy and he's a recent convert to Linux (yay open source!), who taught English in Japan for a decade and is currently earning yen as a writer/rewriter/editor and sometimes translator - still in Japan.

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