JOAN MARIE KNAPPENBERGER SAID: (excerpt)  "I'm proud of you for practicing your group posting.
Tom said that he taught you how.  See, Tom is still useful for something besides changing lightbulbs."

[] Editor said:  Is this the beginning of a new lightbulb joke?  Or has Tom been tinkering with your bulbs?
(Gasp, blush)

BRUCE GILLESPIE SAID: (excerpt)  "I noticed the name of Cathy Cupitt.  Not many Eastern Australian  fans have actually met her,  but she managed to turn up at your place.  That's fandom.  We keep hoping she will visit us here in Victoria,  South Australia and New South Wales,  or that we can scrape up the money  to visit the Western Australian fans.  It's still quite a divide, as no doubt Cathy  has described to you,  because it costs nearly as much to go to Perth and back as it does to go to Indonesia,  Japan or theWest Coast of America."

[] Editor said:  Has anyone considered starting an All-Australian Fan Fund to send Oz fans back and forth across the vast reaches of your continent?

DON S. FITCH SAID: (excerpt)  "Now that you've discovered how easy  (give or take a few bounced copies---fans move from @ to @ like fleas on a hot girdle)  and inexpensive it is to publish a fanzine in
electronic form,  one can hope you'll be doing LeZ on a weeekly schedule.  Monthly?  Well ...quarterly
at least.
The odds of someone stumbling upon a particular (or any) copy of LeZ in a public or academic libraryin Australia seem very small indeed, but I'm not surprised that Cathy Cupitt managed to do it.  I gather
that a crabbed l7th Century mss. that was part of a display at the  Huntington  Library happened to contain information vital to a paper she's doing on Chaucer, and she pored over it for the better part of
half-an-hour.  We really should have taken her around to the used-book stores;  I'm sure copies of early issues of  /,  -,  Quandry, and LeZ would have appeared in all of them ... along with all those elusiveeditions  of books by Wilson Tucker."

[] Editor said:  A weekly zombie?  Are you mad?  Has the California sun rotted your fine mind?  I haveconsidered monthly publication thanks to a memory-triggering device. I always take my bath during the first week of every month and that could help me remember to wake another zombie.

CATHY CUPITT SAID:  (excerpt)  "Thanks for the ish of  Le Zombie --- it gave me a good chuckle.  I am
impressed that you have published  fanzines using almost every type of technology,  including the internet.  I'm sure there aren't many people who can boast that.
I am finally settling back down to work.   The last week or two I've been finding it very hard to concentrate,  as I'm still all hyped up from the trip to the US.  But things are starting to get back to normal now.  I'm just about ready to start tackling the dreaded trip report.  I'm sure I'll enjoy writing it
,once I get into it.  But the task is a little daunting -- I did *so* much!"

JOE FANN SAID:  "Tucker you dummy,  you ain't got the brains god give a goose!   Don't you know them fancy Greek words like 'ibid' and 'op. cit.' and 'ipse dixit'   all mean that somebody cribbed
something  from those old ancient archaic Greek books what was written by scholars like  Plato and
Tiberius and Ptolmey --- that Egyptian guy.  When you crib something from the first chapter you say
'ibid' to the reader and when you crib something from the middle chapter you say 'op.cit' to the reader
and of all that tells him you're cribbing and not paying anybody for it.  Got it now?"

[] Editor said:  Joe you rascal!  I haven't heard a word from you in nearly fifty years.  Have you been in jail again?  Are you still writing anonymous letters to the FBI?  Joe---we warned you!  We told you that
smearing peanut butter on your fingertips would not hide fingerprints forever.  And listen up now Joe,
I've got news for you.  Those were NOT Greek words, those were Sanskrit words. Didn't you know that
forty million people in this world speak Sanskriti?   'ibid'.  means "Take My Word For It, Would I Lie?"   'op.cit.' means  "I Guess So, You Think I Got A Memory Like An Elephant?"   And "ipse dixit" means
"Hi Honey, I'm Home."

ROSEMARY SWIFT SAID:  "Hey Grandpa.  Hugs!  BTW, thanx for finally pubbing LeZ again.  You
promised me in '79 --- or was it '80 --- you'd give me a copy of the next ish, and you did! sort of..."

[] Editor said:  It was in the summer of 1979 while we were sitting in that funny little bar on Ninth Street.
We were watching  an actor and his dog sitting at the far end of the bar talking to each other.  Remember
that?  We were admiring the actor for being a skilled ventriloquist when the dog spotted us staring and
told the actor to shut up, he was making a scene by moving his lips in public.

DAVE LOCKE SAID: (excerpt)  "Enjoyed it.  A delightful surprise to find LeZ sitting on the mail server.
It had to share company up there with spam offering to help me grow hair or a stiffer dick,  or offering
5 million email addresses for sale so that I, too, could be a shitstain and spam others but, hey, yours was
the one I downloaded."

[]  Editor said: Oh,  what splendid company we are found in!  I am  standing tall with pride.

FORESEEING THE FUTURE DEPT:  In 1910 a newspaper editor turned science fiction writer published
a story in the old Argosy bearing the magical title "On The Brink of 2000."   The editor/writer's name was Garrett Smith and his story was reprinted thirty years later in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.   His title
captured my imagination and I never forgot it:  to me it meant we would be rocketing to the far planets
by 2000, we might even be fighting blazing interplanetary wars with Bug Eyed Monsters --- Monsters
that had a fondness for scantily clad females of earth, females who in turn had a fondness for wearing brass bras on earth or in interplanetary flight.
(Scientific research has since established that Bug Eyed Monsters are indifferent to bras made of  cloth.)
And what magical, futuristic scene  did we experience on the brink of 2000?  What  great revelation or accomplishment renewed our sense of wonder?  Why, sir, we had the Y2K hoax.  Humankind renewed
their gullibility On The Brink of 2000.

BOOK BOOST DEPT:  If you happen to have $60 in your pocket that isn't committed to some frivolous
purchase as food or rent,  don't walk but run for a bookstore and order Frank Robinson's masterpiece
Science Fiction of the 20th Century.  It is an illustrated history of our field,  255 tall pages of magazine
covers, book covers, movie posters, dime novel covers and three -- count them-- three fanzines.  The
earliest magazine covers are from 1896 and 1897;  the earliest book that I spotted was Don Wollheim's l943 anthology The Pocketbook of Science Fiction.  In all, a giant treasury of covers from what we like to
call the golden age,  an age when I had twenty cents to spare and could easily buy the newest issue of
Astounding Stories.
Now about those three fanzines.  You'll find them pictured near the end of the book in what appear to be mint condition:  two copies of FANEWSCARD WEEKLY  ( a weekly newspaper printed on postcards
when those cards cost two cents each to mail)  and a gala anniversary issue of  LE ZOMBIE  sporting a cover in seven colors.  (The only time that ever happened.)  Frank himself painted the covers.
He and I are quietly proud of that, if you'll forgive the strutting.

ROBERT LICHTMAN SAID: (excerpt)  "For that matter isn't it about time for another issue of  Science
Fiction Fifty Yearly ?  (Bob) Bloch could ghost-write in his parts."

[]  Editor said:  Are you mad?  Has the California sun rotted your fine mind?

                                                                                   = Bob Tucker