Clever Magazine, " Editor's Note " (www.clevermag.com)

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A note from the editor:

If you sign up to become a serious Clever reader, you'll hear from me maybe once every three months...

Winter 06/07
It's time once again to send out the holiday wishes to everybody. Here's hoping that you are all enjoying life, finding time to spend with friends and family and especially, having a few laughs. That's what we're up to around here, finding the humor wherever it is, and also finding the thoughtful and interesting stuff that comes our way. We are thankful to have so many kind and patient friends helping to keep Clever Magazine cooking. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Fall 2006
This is the time of the year that I always remember back to when this website first sprang to life (August of 1998, in case you forgot :-). I wanted to create a site that people other than my family and close friends would rarely visit. I figured that it would take voices other than just mine to lure readers back again and again. I also wanted to create a non-commercial site, I didn't want to sell anything, which is a difficult concept for many people to grasp, but that's what I did. And the site continues to get visitors (the stats tell me over 800 per day, looking at more than 2,000 pages per day!) and writers continue to send their articles, so I'm still calling it a success. So let's all give ourselves a hand, and just keep on doing what we're doing. It appears to be working!

Summer 2006

As our latest issue goes up I'd like to remind everybody that we will only publish Clever as long as we continue to receive articles, stories, jokes and so forth from you readers. We've had a long journey together and things keep changing, even on the internet. More people are blogging these days, and even more have their own websites. As a result we are beginning to feel a little less relevant.

Clever continues to get thousands of hits every month, but mostly it's for our archived material. There are permanent links on other websites for much of our archived stuff, and of course, there is always interest in our humor pages. We continually monitor our image files. Bloggers, especially those on MySpace and LiveJournal, link our images to their pages. As a result, it's our bandwidth that pays for their images. Whenever we find this happening, we take whatever steps we can to discourage this practice, mainly because we do not receive any publication credit, and bloggers, as a rule, are not terribly well-mannered about such things.

Bottom line: if you are interested in keeping Clever alive and well, stay tuned and send us your best stuff.

Diannek, editor

Spring 2006

I’d like you to take a moment to carefully read our article about the Chinese Moon Bears, http://www.clevermag.com/environment/moonbears.htm I was so shocked to read about this horrible problem that I feel that I must bring it to your attention. Be aware, the opening photo is truly gruesome. If you feel the way I do, I hope you will consider sending a donation to the rescue group that is working hard to save as many of these bears as possible. Here's my secret wish: if every Clever Reader sent a few bucks to those Moon Bear Rescuers, we could rescue one whole bear all by ourselves. Wouldn't that be something?

It was a pleasure to publish the entire issue this time out. There are lots of stories that we hope will amuse and entertain you. And we’d like to welcome a new contributor to Clever: Laura Toffenetti. Hi Laura!

We’ve started some housecleaning on the site, beginning with our humor archives. During the next few months we’ll be reorganizing other parts of the site as well, so take a look around. You might see something you missed.

Sincerely,
Diannek, editor

Winter 05-06 We have good news:

After experiencing how difficult the job of Production Assistant truly is, Tooey demanded help. As you can see, working on Clever is a huge and tiring job. Here's Tooey after a recent stint at the computer:

As you can see, she's exhausted. When she heads for the TV equipment, we know her work day is over. She loves the warmth that comes from this machinery, even though there's no soft padding.

Introducing "Mini", Tooey's assistant. She looks remarkably like TC, just much smaller. She weighed just over 2 lbs when we got her. Now she's up to 5. She's quite active, interested in every facet of the office, and she admits that she really likes working with Tooey. I think she's going to be perfect at her new job.

Kittens are truly a blessing.

(Here's the archive of some editor comments.)