JUST the facts, ma'am (and precious few of those..) I was born in 1947 and after 34 years of sometimes tempestuous but always entirely committed and ultimately deeply satisfying marriage have attained the unlovely and undesired status of widower. But the site goes on because she would have wanted it that way. We have two sons, two granddaughters, and a grandson. I came to Fractals by a path so circuitous and unlikely that it illustrates either absolute randomness or the Hand of God. You pick. Before that I was an amateur herpetologist, rock-'n-roll musician, and editor/publisher/chief contributor to a newsletter that did its part to remold this world closer to the heart's desire (or at least hit the brakes on some trips in the wrong direction...). I have crossed this country by thumb, seen where it all began in Greece, walked in the footsteps of my Lord in Jerusalem, and survived the sixties with no permanent brain damage beyond an affinity for the work of J.S. Bach and M.C. Escher. My attitude toward the Internet is the same as to life in general: come as you are and do what you can. To place unnecessary barriers in people's way is too close to what the Bible condemns as "grieving the Holy Spirit." I don't believe in text boxes that can't be read easily at lower screen resolutions. I don't believe in intricate homepages that take forever to load at slower transfer rates. I don't believe in giant Internet portals that mix their social agenda with their supposedly objective news coverage and then discontinue support for a still reasonably widespread and capable (for Windows) Windows version. About the name of my site: Schlaraffenland, in German folklore, is a topsy-turvy place where everything is inverted, mixed-up, and/or time-reversed. It's a psychogeographic province in the general vicinity of the Big Rock Candy Mountain and the francophone Kingdom of Cockaigne: best reached today through the Land of Nod, though I understand that tickets to purported alternate routes are being sold on streetcorners and other places. Well, the hen has crowed, so this tale is all told out. Cock-a-doodle-doo! --Wynn Schaible