When Dennis Green wrote "the SSA competition will not be held this
year (it's 13th) but will resume next year,"

Wojtek Rychlik questioned:

>After 12th is always 13th. No matter if you skip a year or two.
Why are you guys so paranoic about 13?<

To which Ray Zone, General Secretary of the SSA, responds:

Tell me, Wojtek, the last time you stayed on the 13th floor in a hotel?
You have probably never spent time there because there usually isn't a
13th floor in a hotel. Did you know that?

Accordingly, as General Secretary of the SSA, I felt it appropriate,
with what would have been the 13th Annual SSA Card Exhibition, to make
a similar observance.

Heck, you can also call it my acting out of grief over the fact that
Bill Walton, who drove the proliferation of the stereoview card format
in the SSA and who inaugurated the SSA Annual Card Exhibition, is no
longer participating in SSA Folios. I also greatly miss Linda and
David Thompson who for several years have chaired the SSA Annual Card
Exhibition and can no longer do so because of the kind of vicissitudes
of mortal life that are also afflicting Bill Walton. Thank God for the
fact that Linda and David still serve as Circuit Secretaries of the
Speedy Folios.

So, as an act of poetic observance of the powers of art-making in the
throes of our mortal passage, and as an ironic homage to the enduring
power of the stereographic image, I elected to consign the 13th SSA
Annual Card Exhibition to that great hotel in the sky which consists of
nothing but 13th floors. There, all the great stereographers of the
past can assemble as a host of percipients and pass 'round the
stereoscopes gazing through (what Baudelaire called) the "peepholes of
the infinite."

I am exceedingly grateful to Dennis Green for agreeing to chair the
14th SSA Annual Card Exhibition in 2009 with the judging to be held in
Mesa, Arizona

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