Dear Friends of the Turtle,

Welcome to the Turtle's December Bulletin which, this month, has been shamelessly timed to distract your attention from the bombing of Iraq.

Indeed, the dialectic of history has taken a downturn of late. General Pinochet has also been granted a moment of reprieve, with the heroic verdict of the House of Lords having been overturned, owing to Lord Hoffman's public and personal commitments to preserve, protect and defend international human rights. The Turtle notes that while The Sun has been outing cabinet ministers and inciting xenophobia, Rupert Murdoch has reprimanded his editors and urged them to not print their exposés immediately before important votes on broadcasting rights in the British and European parliaments. This month also bears witness to the entertaining chaos in the Tory ranks in the House of Lords, and to Mr. Lafontaine's attempt to take over the entire European continent.

The Turtle's past month in cyberspace has been no less tumultuous. The Dictionary of The Turtle is making triumphant progress: pages from A through G and I have made their debuts, and new pages for H and J through Z are on their way. Averaging over one new entry per day, and with many more being prepared in the files, we hope to have completed our initial trans-lexical tunnelling within the month. The new Pinochet page [since removed - ed.] bulges with good things, and the wacky design on the Dictionary site proves that the Turtle continues to be unafraid to strut its funky stuff. We've also had a bit of a coup on the article front: Professor Walden Bello, from the Third World Network and the University of the Philippines, has agreed that the Turtle should be the worldwide distributor of a speech given at The Politics of Globalization/s conference at Cornell University in November. Read it here.

You don't, however, need to be a professor to write for the people's pleasure monster. Remember that the holiday is a good time to catch up in order to fulfil your quota for 1998. Our One Year Plan for 1999 may serve to motivate. After a two week break, in which the Turtle will be visiting friends, and extracting promises of contribution, throughout Europe and North America, the Turtle will follow the advice of the leading Women's Magazines of the age and relaunch itself with a New Look for the New Year. The Great Leap Forward scheduled for January 1999 will see the return of "The Turtle Salutes..." and the inauguration of a new "Stakhanovite of the Month" Award (and Page) in order to hail the stars of the rank and file. The Turtle is also developing a proper guestbook feature, and is still trying to acquire a more memorable URL. At this critical conjuncture, the wisdom of your advice is most welcome, and we urge you to follow Mao's dictum and "Bombard The Headquarters" with suggestions as to what you would like to see on the site.

The Turtle has learned a great deal from its Albanian comrades' pyramid schemes, and has recognised that it is not inconsequential that we have about the same number of subscribers as we have Dictionary Entries. If everyone writes just one Dictionary article for us over the coming month, and recruits one more subscriber, then its size will swell effortlessly and geometrically with every month that passes. The Turtle is a Collective, Collaborative and Co-operative Creature, so please pick your favourite leftist term and put finger to keyboard for the People's Organ. The Big Soviet Encyclopaedia had one hundred thousand entries. So must we.

The Turtle does not believe in Father Christmas, and even harbours a sceptical doubt or two about the existence of his Russian counterpart, Grandfather Frost. But the Turtle does have unwavering faith in the boundless generosity of the massed ranks of his (or her!) readers and subscribers. What the Turtle really, really wants for the New Year is new material, and lots of it: send us your articles, entries, reviews, jokes, criticism, recipes, advice, New Year's Composite Resolutions, dialogues, diatribes, and dialectics. And in return, the Turtle wishes you all the best for 1999, when the fin-de-siècle and the fin-de-capitalisme are surely bound to coincide, when the popular will will begin to prevail, and when we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, just in time for the new millennium and its Ordine Nuovo.

Avanti Popolo!

The Editors of the Turtle