fpb | To my Australian friends

For some reason, in spite of the worldwide reach of the Net, I tend to have net-friends in clusters. For instance, when the Red Sox won their already-legendary World Series, I found that I had a surprisingly large number of Massachusetts friends and correspondents.

Australia is another cluster, especially since

kikei relocated there. And this causes a problem that one or two of my net-friends do not always seem to remember.

This is hardly the first time when I have woken up at six in the morning or earlier, staggered to my computer to see what mail had come in overnight, and found an IM dialogue announcing a message - that turned out to have been left hours earlier, in the middle of our European night. These messages make me feel unreasonably guilty about not answering them. On one occasion, I think, when I could not sleep, I did answer one; and that may have set a bad precedent. Please, folks, I love you all, but remember that we are antipodeans; that when it is morning over there, it is late in the night over here; and try to go for the overlap. I hate to find out that someone wanted to talk to me and could not.