Hey, I'm just grateful the stomach virus is gone. But I was troubled over the fact of my death, and decided to see if I might possibly still be alive. I wanted to live again just for a minute, so I could post the last of my old E1 documents.

But I was still dead; despite the efforts of N-Wing and others to revive me, all that was accomplished was a greater understanding of how dead I was. There would be no more pingouinodes. I tried to create life: there is now a "pingverdi" and a "pingverdi2", but they'll soon be put to sleep, due to a missing password gene. There is a "pingverdi3" on E1, but he's trapped in that Other Dimension.

But I'm back now. It was awful, having to boot Windows and suffer The Flakiest Internet Connection in the World just to see if, maybe, I could get things to work there - which was silly, since the problem most likely was at the server end. So I aggravated myself for no good reason, and further aggravated myself by (in Linux) making emacs crash - I was distracted by the E2 thing while absent-mindedly saving some text with pasted umlauts'n'stuff, and caused one of my occasional crashes. Lost 70K of HTML, plus there was no backup file to simply recover the loss; luckily, it wasn't much different from another file, so I could reconstruct it from that.

On a more serious note, there actually is someone dead: Grover Washington, Jr., a saxophonist. He died while doing a TV show somewhere; I don't have all the info. Grover was a Kenny G figure of the 70s, a purveyor of schlocky watered-down pop-jazz as part of Creed Taylor's stable, I think; the term fuzak may have been coined for the music he made. Many jazz-phobic households had one or two of Grover's LPs in its collection. He was actually pretty cool (for a sellout), with a decent jazz pedigree before stardom, and in the 80s, he began trying to show it off; I remember seeing him somewhere, making a surprise guest appearance - was it with Sonny Rollins? I don't remember now, because, while it was nice to see him playing straightahead-ish jazz, his playing was still somewhere between "Lightweight" and "Artistic Statement" - nothing memorable. But his efforts were appreciated, sort of a sign of "Help! I'm a prisoner of commercial success!" or something.

Maybe this should go in a Grover node. Some other time.