Here we go again...RAH is back. RAH. Something so blatantly improbable that many people who read it thought they had suddenly been transported inside a Douglas Adams novel. (Hey, they're a ball to read, I grant you. But have you ever considered living in one of them?)

Just a couple of months after quitting the electronic publishing game, I'm right back at it again. I've always been a glutton for punishment, but this is more than slightly ridiculous. A few things have changed, though.

1) I'm four years older now than when the original RAH first took to the virtual air of cyberspace. So are all of you. Whether any of us are wiser remains to be seen. (Hint: If you were reading RAH back in 1992 and you're reading this now, your wisdom quotient is one hurtin' puppy.)

B) The RAH writing team has more experience and, in general, a more mature writing style. Only time (and the readers) will tell if our stuff is as funny as it once was.

3) The medium has changed. It's a large now.

D) But seriously, folks... the World Wide Web offers a vast new array of ways for a publisher to annoy his readers. There were serious limitations on that kind of thing in the ASCII text-based world of the original RAH. Add a MIDI-based soundtrack and you're talking a major barf-inducing opportunity. Hey, at least I'm aware of these facts. Most of the pathetic geekazoids who inflict blinking graphic horrors on unsuspecting web crawlers have each other totally convinced that they're being cool. (A free clue for these clowns: try walking along the Las Vegas strip at night. Sure, the gaudy flashing lights are exciting to look at for an hour or two. Just try spending a solid week there and see how you feel about that incessant flashing by the time you're heading to the airport for your return flight.)

Don't even get me started on that infernal Server Push "feature" they have in the new servers and browsers. A whole screen that is flashing is just what my diminishing eyesight needs. I can literally feel my eyeballs shrivel in their sockets every time I try to read one of those idiotic screens.

Oh, joy! The Techno-Weenie Ltd. logo is changing color every second or so. All that at the mere cost of me going blind a day or two sooner than nature intended. Thanks a bunch! I'll be sure to find some way of adequately expressing my appreciation to your firm.
(Oh, dear! Has my attention wandered again? Let's get back to the subject at hand.)

5) No dead lines. All RAH96 articles are carefully checked for dead lines before being posted live on the web. Wait! Make that deadlines. We get the new stuff done when it's done. If that's not fast enough for you... invest a few hundred hours a month and see if you can do better. Besides, there are always sites on the RAH96 Funny/Useful Links On The Web page to check out. (RAH96 motto: we post no joke before its time.) On the upside, since there is no set monthly "printing schedule", new material is likely to show up at any time. We will mark such items appropriately in the Table of Incontinence.

F) The characters have taken over. I never had any imaginary friends as a child - and precious few real ones. So now I'm talking to the characters I created for RAH. Some of those crazy wanna-beings just won't take "no" for an answer...and at least one of them has a knife.

So here we go again. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, yadda, yadda... the RAH96 boys are back in Cybertown. Hide the caffeine and the whoopie cushions.