OCTOBER
2000
Comrades!
The Silence
of the Turtle is at long last at an end, for we are pleased to announce
the completion of the Turtle's Second Great Leap Forward. In honour
of the slippage between the Gregorian and Julian Calendars, and of socialist
tradition, we are pleased to name this event our October Revolution.
For the messy
JavaScript of the old template has been consigned to the dustbin of
history, in favour of a sleek new Java-driven menu system. This will
guide readers nimbly around the site, and will facilitate the massive
expansion of the People's Organ. We worry that the New Look will Look
Slightly Better on Internet Explorer and Opera than it will on Netscape
Navigator, but there is not a great deal we can do about this, and we
extend our apologies.
Three new features
of the New Turtle are worth trumpeting.
First, there
are new navigation guides to help find your way around an
increasingly complicated site. A Goggle-powered search engine has been
installed on the site to help you locate particular Thoughts of the
Turtle, and it seems to be working with surprising efficiency and precision.
A new "About" page updates the Mission of the Turtle, and
provides advice on the myriad ways that our friends and subscribers
can help to keep the People's Didactic Machine Tool airborne. And a
new "Highlights" page will be invaluable to people finding
their way to the site for the first time, drawing attention to some
of the best material that has appeared in our pages over the last two
years, but which now risks becoming buried in the Archives.
Second, a
new section -- The Lifestyle of the Turtle -- has been launched. In
addition to hosting the Poetry of the Turtle, the Lifestyle
Supplement is home to the Turtle's new Advice columnist, Uncle Rosa.
Uncle Rosa will offer a scientific treatment of our readers' problems
in the fields of, above all, socialist planning, etiquette and sex.
We have high hopes for our Lifestyle pages, for gurgling down the pipeline
for
an early winter launch is our new column, "What's the Turtle been
Swimming in this Month?", in which the Contributors to the Turtle
will
be able to rhapsodise about their favourite intoxicants. Booze will
be the focus, but the Turtle's thirst for novel fluids is not restricted
to
alcohol.
Third, the
Turtle has become aware of his\her/its increasing popularity in the
academic world, and has introduced a set of printer-friendly pages with
full citation information at the top, for those who wish to print off
large sections of the site. These will help those who wish to quote
the Wisdom of the Turtle in their literary production, as well as those
who don't like reading too much small print off their computer
screens, and we hope they will prove a useful addition to the site.
This new Shell
for the Turtle will take a while to harden -- so please bear with us
if you find the odd broken link or untoward carapacial
segment. Please do let us know if the new Turtle won't cooperate with
your browser or seems dysfunctional. Most of the main sections of the
site have been updated and replaced already: the rest will follow soon
enough.
In addition
to this structural sea-change at the Turtle, we have a variety of new
materials. J. Carter Wood has been quick to give us his
commentary on the breezes of post-election
chaos in the United States. This, together with his valuable discussion
of Mel Gibson's "The
Patriot", has won him the coveted November Stakhanovite of
the Month award. Other articles have been creeping onto the site since
the last missive in the Summer. Dom Sandbrook has been prolific, as
ever, with his instant reactions to the fall of the Milosevic
regime in Belgrade, together with his report on the first instalments
of Simon Schama's televised history of Britain.
And we've been pleased to post Chris Fisch's narrative of her harrowing
experiences in Prague at the World Bank/IMF summit, an event which
also spawned Raj Patel's Prague
Quartet of mental disturbances, also to be found on our Articles
page.
Our regular
accolades are being awarded again. November's Salute goes out to the
Roma people; our Stakhanovite is J. Carter Wood, who at times has shouldered
the solo burden of keeping the Turtle's melody steady through the autumn
of the year; and our Comrade of the Month is Clare Short MP, whose several
virtues are these days overwhelmed by the many silly things she has
to say about international development and its beholden institutions.
Our rapid
expansion seems assured. The Turtle will soon be opening a Co-Operative
Bank Account for the first time... our interview series --
The Turtle Drinks Beer With... -- will soon be cranking into gear...
P. J. MacMahon, the Bard of West London, has completed his cycle of
poems about recent leaders of the British Labour Party... the Noticeboard
of the Turtle will soon be announcing your Births, Marriages, Strike
Activities, and Deaths. The future, as ever, is ours.
With so much
behind us already, it seems churlish to end with our standard plea.
And yet it remains true that the Turtle exists only by
dint of the goodwill, and freely-given labour, of all of our contributors.
Having reconstructed the Innards of the Turtle, we now
stand in need of fresh sustenance -- of new streams of Articles, Reviews,
Poems, Dictionary Entries, Problems for Uncle Rosa,
Celebrations of Alcohol and commentaries on everything under the sun.
We are always on the look-out for first-time writers, who bring fresh
thoughts into the otherwise-stale monotony of our lives, and provide
new resources of hope. And the work of propagating our distinctive URL
and of encouraging our friends and colleagues to lend their ears to
the Turtle's song, which brings both joy and comfort into the world,
goes on.
Avanti
popolo!
The Editors
