First, the New Stuff:

• 2 new products: the Crossword Coffee Puzzle Mug and the Icehouse piece jigsaw puzzle (actually, they're not really new; they're leftovers of a couple of our holiday gifts)
• The History of Looney Labs, as seen through our annual holiday gifts
• As part of that, the history of Empire Publications
• Plus, a new perk for Wunderland Booster Club members
• Aquarius got a great review in the current issue of Knights of the Dinner Table
• Chapter 56 of the Empty City (in which the Android Sisters discuss the Atomic Bomb and what to do with it)

At first glance it may not seem any different, but this week we are operating out of our new cyber-digs. For weeks now, we've been building a duplicate copy of wunderland.com at its new location, and as of today, the change-over has occurred and our files are now being served to you from a different machine.

The switch over was actually rather painful, because we've gone from being hosted off a Macintosh we own and can sit in front of, to a UNIX account at a large ISP on a machine running somewhere in Who Knows Where. One particular problem we faced is that on the Mac, filenames are not case sensitive - "filename" is the same file as "FILENAME". But under UNIX , this ain't true, which meant we suddenly had broken links everywhere in the 1000+ files on our site. When neatness doesn't count, sloppiness is inevitable; we've spent the last couple of weeks learning this lesson while cleaning up filenames on the site.

All this means is that the site went through a thorough cleaning and polishing phase as part of being relocated, so it should be better than ever. But of course, we might have screwed something up in the process. See something wrong? Please let us know. NQ.

Soon we plan to start doing some direct mail advertising. We have therefore reprogrammed our mailing list robot to collect street addresses as well as email addresses. (Note for those who've been on our personal mailing list for years - please re-submit your information to our robot so that we can be sure we have your most current and complete information. Thanks!)

Keep Number 12 and his family in your thoughts this week... his mom has passed away. Ellen, too - she just lost her aunt.

For years, a cut from the movie soundtrack of The Hindenburg entitled "Fin Repair Sequence" has echoed in my mind under the heading "Exciting Music." I half-watched* the film this week for the first time in years, and it's the best part of the movie. It makes the whole film worth seeing, so rent it sometime if you can. (It makes a great double feature with Titanic.)

* Half-watch (verb): to monitor a movie or TV show with less than full attention; to watch without really watching; to treat the TV as a radio, droning away in the background.

Those who've been casually following it may be interested to know that Nomic Game 3 has ended, with Jake being the winner. As for the game I'm in (Game 2), nothing's happened in a long time, which I think means I'm still President of the World.

Peace,