Whether or not anybody other than me will ever use it remains to
be seen. The forum's homepage is located at

http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/forum.htm

the forum itself being located at

http://pub26.bravenet.com/forum/2190189085/

Have I mentioned what Café Satan is about, on this list? I can't
remember. If not, the homepage for that proposed camp is at

http://web.newsguy.com/commonsense/Cafe_Satan.htm

I have the reading material, and I've been playing around with
recipes, but haven't gotten around to putting any into finished
form yet, for posting. In part, for a reason which is something
of a catch 22, I suppose : I'm not sure that anybody is reading
any of this. But, then again, if the recipes are what people are
dropping by for, maybe you ought to have more than one of them
up, eh, Joe? Yeah, probably.

On a more positive level, I've been getting back into my work
with greater effectiveness, and Chicago has been having something
it hardly ever sees - NICE WEATHER! Not freezing, not frying,
just nice. Nature is actually giving us a spring this year,
instead of going through its usual April-May vacillation between
a late winter and an early summer. My response has been to grab
my books, a notepad and my trusty noise blockers, and head out
for some fresh air and productive relaxation, which is one very
good reason why the Web has been my last priority lately.


What's the plan with the Café and its forum? Right now, I'm
starting a few threads explaining a variety of possible ideas
for the backstory of Café Satan, and seeing who gets interested.
I'm not inclined to pursue it as a Burning Man camp at present
for a few reasons, including these.


1. Too much of a detour - work is keeping me busy, and
a trip into the desert would eat up a lot of my time.

2. Hostile audience - pure death for any improvisational
theatre effort. The sad fact of the matter is that
the ethic of "let's dive in and participate" has, in
being taken to a mindless extreme, produced an
unpleasant spinoff : a willingness on the part of many
burners to hate others, merely because they're asked to.
I'm not prepared to say most, but enough burners to
pose a real problem.


My thought : let's (if there ever is an "us" for this effort)
do this as a Chicago-based theme party, and not even mention
"burning". We don't have to deal with the dyspeptic potheads
because they aren't likely to even hear about it until long
after the fact, and probably not even then.

I say this a lot, and maybe I'm starting to turn this into a
mantra, but one of the things that I found most tiresome about
the 1990s was the way in which sane, intelligent, decent people
were being driven underground by the crazed and the underhanded,
who would then fictionalize history in order to make events
seem less genuinely offensive than they really were. It's high
time that the 90s ended as a cultural era, and that trend got
turned around. All the rest of us have to do is try.