Whats with the hamsters?
Gentle Reader, it may be that you have seen me referred to elsewhere as Esther Friesner, Queen of Hamsters. Perhaps you have also heard of CheebleCon. I think I’d better explain this. When my son was much younger, he wanted a pet of his own as opposed to doing a time-share with the family cat. He wanted a lizard, but when we reached the pet store I plea-bargained him into taking a hamster instead. If two small animals costs the same and have similar life spans, I say take the one with the fur! The hamster is question was Huey (named after the apocryphal children’s book Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes). Huey was a very nice hammie and could be trusted to run about on the computer keyboard without doing something Nasty, so we used to give her the freedom of the keys during RTCs on GEnie. I then Sent the resulting gibberish just for grins. Next thing I knew, here’s a bunch of intelligent adults studying Huey’s Pronouncements and declaring, “This
