~ An Important Message from Cosmic Connie ~

Dear Ones (now, if that doesn't sound like the beginning of a channeled message, I don't know what does):

Please accept my sincerest apologies for all of the blinking, twinkling animations, silly faces, bouncing balls and such on this site, not to mention the unmatched pages. I cobbled this web site together long ago and far away ("long ago" in Internet time, anyway, which would be somewhere in the late nineties, and "far away" in metaphorical distance, in a place where I seemed to have more time to waste). It was also back when .GIF animations seemed like a real novelty. I sprinkled my pages with animations and doctored-up clip art for the same reason a dog licks his naughty bits...because he can.

Someday I will get back in here and whip this site into shape, and even put some new stuff up, like I've been promising to do since the second Clinton administration. Maybe I'll even put up a Flash animation or two. Or maybe not.

I do know that as Cosmic Connie, my work is not yet done. Although some of the jokes here may be a little old by now, and there are lots of dead links and quite a few odds and ends left over from the millennium hysteria, etc., some aspects of this site are truly timeless. For sure, some things never change. The type of freebie publication that I originally published Cosmic Relief to make fun of is still going strong. Little has changed there. For example, most of them are still using that really cheap paper, and running pop-psychology pablum accompanied by stock photos, or seriously silly articles whose authors, judging from their pictures, went off their meds years ago. Worst ofall, or perhaps best ofall, many of these rags still publish poetry.

Very BAD poetry. Poetry like this.

For that matter, a satirical essay I wrote in the summer of 1991 (it was published in Skeptical Inquirer in early 1992) is still relevant... Some of these things have a loooooooong shelf life.

Culture-wise, the main difference between then and now is that now a lot of the silliness I have always liked to make fun of has become much more mainstream than it was when this website was first launched. Making fun of the silliness has also become a mainstream activity, which means I am no longer ahead of my time (if indeed I ever was). I could just make fun of myself, I guess, but I am sure that many people have already beat me to it.

Oh, well!

Had I launched this web site today, I probably would have begun it as a blog. But Cosmic Relief was born before there were blogs. In those days, however, we did have rants. I have left some of my old rants up, as well as a few confessions. And I recently added a relatively serious essay that I originally published at the back of Cosmic Relief.

As for doing a blog now...okay, I finally broke down and started one of those things, too. I won't promise anything momentous, but here it is.

As for the bare breasts and naked lesbians hinted at above, well, they're here somewhere too, but you have to search for them.

And by the way, the book, Cosmic Relief, IS still for sale. Get it now; there aren't too many left. (In fact, it is probably listed as Out of Print on Amazon.com, but let's just say that rumors of its out-of-printness have been somewhat exaggerated.)

(In case you are interested, here is a link to a PDF of the front cover of Cosmic Relief.)

At any rate, I hope you enjoy your visit here and that you tarry a while. It's still a pretty good place to waste time, and you can surf at work without worrying about embarrassing noises when you click on any of the pages.

So, have fun...and write to me when you have time!

See you around...
Cosmic Connie

July 2006