Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” in one of his headline reports stated, “And the Israelis and Palestinians move ever closer in the peace process, which is expected to be concluded NEVER.” He said it a year and a half ago, back when Clinton was making his last ditch effort to bring Sharon and Arafat together. Back when Israel puts its best offer *ever* on the table, and Arafat instead simply walked out and supported terrorist attacks.

It is a sign of the world’s unfair expectations that Israel is expected to express regrets (and does so) over the unfortunate deaths of women and children caught in the crossfire, but no one seriously expects Palestinians to express regrets over guerilla assaults that kill Israeli women and children as a matter of design. The Palestinians continue to be painted as victims. It is incomprehensible. Meantime the major Arab countries don’t understand why Israel doesn’t take their generous offer of rolling back to the pre-Six Day War boundaries in exchange for which the Arab nations will finally recognize Israel. My. What a generous concession. The governments will acknowledge that which has been in existence for nearly three quarters of a century. And once they do so, then what? Continue to indoctrinate their citizens from an early age into Anti-Jew philosophies? Three out of four Arabs still refuse to believe that Arabs had anything to do with 9/11. You’d think they, of anyone, would know that “Denial” is not just a river in Egypt.

Israel’s neighbors want to kill them. How does one negotiate with people who want to kill you?

PAD

Greetings and solicitations.

This will be the first of what will ideally be daily updates in this on-line journal. In the near future, we’ll have a regular Q&A set-up, plus we’re trying to figure out how to produce an on-line whack-a-mole.

Have just returned from Florida where I attended John Ordover’s 40th birthday party (while Kathleen was shangheid off to Indianapolis, in connection with her assistant editor job at Del Rey, to attend the Star Wars expo, attendance 60,000, jeez). We hit Universal on Saturday with laser-sighting as to the rides we wanted to go on: The Men in Black ride and the Spider-Man ride. The MIB ride involves riding through a shooting gallery of aliens coming out at you, and the biggest trick to the ride is knowing when precisely to hit the red button on your console which you’re told that you should not, under any circumstances, hit. Smacking it at just the right moment garners you a 100,000 point bonus. And the Spider-Man ride remains the best ride in any Florida theme park, although now I’m wondering whether they’re going to replace the cheesy animated intro with specially shot footage featuring Tobey Mcguire and J.K. Simmons who was so brilliant as Jonah Jameson. Picked up some nifty souvenirs, including an absolutely spectacular Spider-Man hockey shirt that I cannot recommend highly enough. Only thing that groused me was that my novelization of the movie was nowhere to be seen in the stores anywhere in the Park.

And yes, I’ve written a review of the film, which will be running in CBG in a couple of weeks.

PAD

Hi. I’m Glenn Hauman, the guy who’s helping Peter build this web site.

I’m the former publisher of the late lamented BiblioBytes, and have shown up as the CMO of the Enterprise in Imzadi, the leader of the planet in Restoration (along with my assistant Brandi and my minions Bibbyte and Lio) and in Genesis Wave as a researcher at the Daystrom Institute (much to the surprise of the original author, John Vornholt) and even wrote one of those Star Trek things myself– a lovely little work called Oaths which should be out any day now.

But I digress… which is a roundabout way of getting to the real topic of this post.

A lot of people have asked if we’ll be putting up the old But I Digress columns here, and yes, we will, but… well, we don’t quite have a complete archive. Actually, we’ve gone through all the old hard drives and we think it’s reasonably complete, but we have no idea what appeared when or quite in what order.

So we’re just going to post them here as we finish translating them, in what we hope is something vaguely resembling chronological order… and then we’re going to rely on the truly dedicated readers to tell us when and where they appeared. If you can tell us where it appeared, just post the issue number and date in the comment section for the page and we’ll update the entry to reflect it. Then, after we’re more or less complete, we’ll try and archive them with a bit more order.

In the meantime, hey, the search function works, so use that to find that BID that slammed [insert name here]…

Terri Osborne & Keith DeCandido. Keith introduces new errors into the “Gateways” crossover, and Terri provides him with drugs.

Andreas Katsulas, “G’Kar” from Babylon 5, gazing in awe at my James Bond-ish wrist camera.

Aaron Rosenberg, author of “Star Trek SCE” book “The Riddled Post” at the I-Con banquet.