By Uncle Abdul

I think Betsy D. holds an unequaled record in Janus. On the day of her Orientation she walked out of there as not only a Janus member (these were back in the days when you could become a member immediately after your Orientation by paying your money) but also an officer. And the office she held was Editor of GP. Talk about 'fast tracking'.

GP has long been a Janus tradition. Even in the early startup days of the club there was some sort of newsletter, though it may not have been called Growing Pains at the time. There was even a time when GP was printed on half an 8.5x11 sheet, folded in half, and sent to the members. (The Editor then wanted to keep his commitment to get out a GP every month, but he couldn't afford a lot of time doing it.)

There have been a celebrated number of editors that have been through that office. (And no cracks about digestive speeds through large Canadian waterfowl either.) Besides Betsy there was Mark J., Mark C., Dave and Karen A., yours truly, and many others. All managed to crank out GP's in various degrees of quality.

There was definitely a pre- and a post- cyber GP. In the old days, GP was done with manual paste-ups to be taken to the printer. Text was done on typewriters... (what do you mean, "What's a typewriter?" It was like your computer keyboard jammed together with your printer except that there was a mechanical connection from the keys to the printer.) Photos if any had to be taken to the printer beforehand to be screened, i.e., converted to dots of varying gray, to be printed. And there were also a whole bunch of clipart--literally small pieces of line art either original or xeroxed--that was used for space fillers. This practice of plager... I mean unattributed copies was done so often that the origins of some of the pieces were lost in time and space. I recall many issues before my turn in the barrel were literally copies of newspaper articles that got pasted into the master for the printer. Ah, those were the days.

Now of course it's ...easier (???) All you have to do is get e-mail contributions and electronically paste it into your PageMaker® or whatever^not® software, and bah-da-boo bah-da-bim you have your next issue (Dave is probably laughing his ass off on this comment). And what with the litigiousness of today's society and Janus wisely giving up its 'less rigorous' days of yore, copyrights must be observed, photo releases must be on file, yah-da-yah-da.

In either era the complaint common to every GP Editor is, "Where's the content?" With always being under the deadline gun, trying to get contributions--even the ones that someone has promised--is a GP Editor's biggest problem. I guess you could say the amount of whitespace and the use of clipart is an indicator of how successful an Editor is solving this problem.

Chao-4-Now

Unc'