I reciprocate, Catspaw49! I mean, you've got some verbal skills I am lacking in and yet admire. By all means keep ribbing me!

Bill D, thanks for the "Everything you never wanted to know about *Schwas [and e-schwas, r-schwas and s-schwas]" article. It was a treat indeed. Some of it reminded me of a textbook in my Sociology of Deviant Behavior class at Yale (this would have been the '72-'73 school year), which actually had the following entry in its glossary:

talking to oneself

carrying on a conversation wherein the person with whom one is conversing is oneself

Shortly thereafter I drank myself out of the place.

Dicho's correct, geoducks are increasingly scarce in many places, with in all probability poaching (not just by immigrants and turistas, but for illegal export to non-emigrants who spend money they could use on travel in the purchase of exotic foods), and perhaps good old Global Warming and Pollution and whatnot (as in "Why are the orcas having such a tough time having babies?") to blame. And geoducks take years to reach their full growth; some are, I am told by people I trust, known to have been over a century old when harvested. (I think clamshells can be "read" sort of like tree rings, but I'm not clear on the details.)

Thanks for the appreciation Maggie. I am not sure why I can't figure out how to do a schwa. It seems silly to be able to use characters like ā, Ĥ and ŵ, not to mention Кбк стрбшно! and yet be unable to use a simple, Websterlike "schwa". It's absolutely critical for writing Lushootseed (although, since there is no "e" in Lushootseed, you can substitute "e" for "schwa" and be understood, it just looks like an awful visual foreign accent, if you get my drift; just as you can use a "?" or a "7" in place of the glottal stop, but it's so ugly...) Incidentally, my main Lushootseed page has an attempt at a MIDI of the Samish Welcome Song on it; if any of you are familiar with that song, suggestions on improving the MIDI would be welcome. Or MIDIs of actual Lushootseed tunes (Samish is to Lushootseed as Luxembourgeois is to Belgian).

Liland