My name is Murray Adelman, Art. To stick out my neck even more, you can see a picture of me at

http://www-math.mpce.mq.edu.au/~ross/maths/photos/madelman.gif

I choose my nome d'mudcat because (a) There was already a Murray posting at the time. (b) My old UNIX habits which lead me to choose a name without any spaces.

I think we do have a community here. The thing we seem to have in common is our ACTIVE interest in music. That doesn't mean we are all players, but, for example, we tend to run to our books and other sites to find out information--some of it quite scholarly. You will see somebody who is interested in Blues make non-trivial contributions to a thread on Celtic music.

Like Joe I have drifted away from rec.music.folk. I found most of the postings shallow--about this or that cassette or this or that artist. (There are some pretty sharp "lurkers" there, however.)

I feel a lack of tolerance in the folk and the guitar players newsgroups that doesn't exist here.

I won't try to analyse why it is the case--I will simply enjoy it.

By the way, I discovered the forum when a friend of mine told me about the database. Being a natural "sticky beak" I had to see what was going on.

Murray