Holly wants to know how to con friends into sharing their island quiz answers. I've run into precisely the same problem. All I can suggest is that you be persistent, annoying, and tricky. Incidentally, many of you still need to transmit your own answers!

Holly also suggested that we establish some sort of field in the island quiz stack to provide brief descriptions of those few friends we do manage to entice into the fold. A fine idea, but I am inclined to wait until I have the time to provide a major revision of that stack. My hope is that we will eventually be able to incorporate all sorts of bizarre new features into the stack.

Meanwhile, I suggest that everyone who adds a friend to the collection provide a quick voice card description of the friend. We will be able to put these cards to use sometime in the future.

To get the proverbial ball rolling, I'll try to say a few words about my friend and honorary Archipelagoan, Jim Ellingson.

Jim has one of the most unusual minds I've ever encountered. He is a student of Latin and Economics but somehow ended up heading the research department of a fertilizer company for many years. He has finally broken free of that and is now pursuing an internationly oriented MBA at a special college in Phoenix. He speaks Spanish and has spent some time in Central America.

Jim seems to be one of those people who really belong in a different century. Somehow it's easy to picture him as a power broker in a corrupt corner of the Roman Empire. He has a wicked sense of humor and a gift for subtle and convincing paranoia. He sees the flaws in other people and in himself with astonishing clarity and finds witty and ironic ways to deal with them.

We met in college and have been bachelor pals ever since. We used to play frisbee, eat out, and talk politics almost daily for several years. Jim is a non-dogmatic vegetarian and can spot a pretty girl on the freeway 300 yards away at 70 miles an hour and have her license plate memorized in less than a second, without even pausing in the midst of a joke about a bumbling Anglo-Saxon invasion. As soon as he finds an empire to conquer and buys an SE, I think he will make an excellent Archipelago member.