Thank you very, very much for passing along this information. Please know you have my condolences and it does my heart good to think he found enjoyment in our company. This site has been a place of enjoyment for a lot of us over the years, no matter how much or little we post. He sounds like just a very special person indeed. It's a privelidge to see past user names and learn a little more about the real person behind them. I know it had to be difficult at this time for you to post this, but it enriches all of us. Thank you.

I want to add my two cents worth about my disappointment with the way Org. Gardening has turned out. I have read it for decades and am now reluctantly giving up. Garden Design is useless. Love Fine Grardening - yeah, it's lots of pictures (I think the best photography of the lot), but really good articles and advice. I have volumes going back for years - that's the one I keep. And I share them a lot w. new gardeners and friends. It's easy to locate specific articles with useful info. Also like Horticulture a lot. And I have just become a "member" of New England Gardening Club - primarily for the magazine People, Plants and Places - which is really quite good, but also because with joining comes a discount card for many NE garden centers and nurseries. This advice is only useful for NE, obviously - but if you are in this region check it out at newenglandgardening.com. I also belong to the Americal Horticulural Society and their magazine is excellent - that's an expensive join, but I get free entrance to many botanical gardens and so it pays me to do this (besides which, it's a good org to support_) I know this is supposed to be about least favorite but, hey, it just leads one to think about what one DOES like. sorry if this is incorrect

thyrkas, I have a collection of fountain pens, mostly inherited from my grandparents and great-grandparents. They are not the ones I use on a daily basis as they require a bottle of ink and need to be re-filled. While the process is fairly simple, with curious kids in the house, it's far more tidy to use a modern fountain pen with a cartridge. I've a Parker fountain pen that was quite reasonable in terms of price and the cartridge refills come five per package, if memory serves, and only cost a couple of dollars. Many types of daily use fountain pens and refills can be found at the big square office products stores like Staples. The beauty of a fountain pen is that it slows down my writing and in doing that, forces my brain to slow down as well. It's a lovely way to write and nothing else can really compare. If you try it, I will be interested in hearing about the experience! I like the idea of only writing on one side of the page. With a fountain pen, you sometimes get a blotch of ink that could soak through and writing on one side would keep it a bit more tidy. And there is that bonus of editing...although I may have some rather sparse pages here and there in relation to my earlier post...if you get my drift. PAM

Does Salon still feature short stories? I haven't looked lately. If you pick up one of the Best American Short Story collections that get published each year, the table of contents will give you a pretty good idea which literary magazines still publish award winning fiction these days. Unfortunately, outside of the quarterly academic reviews, not as much gets published these days. I also think it is unfortunate that Science Fiction (such as what might get published in Asimov's) is rarely considered in the literary category. I find a lot of Science Fiction that is just as thought provoking and well written as anything I've ever found in the literary journals.