Swilnews 1, Vol. II	"There's SOMETHING STRANGE in my mailbox!" otherwise
entitled -- The year's first Swilnews

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to Swilnews!  This is the year's first
Swilnews (last week's being the zeroth Swilnews), so it has the distinction of
being the one-and-only self-explanatory Swilnews.  (It even has the distinction
of being self-explanatory in the sense of actually explaining itself, rather
than needing no explanation, which is what "self-explanatory" usually means,
somehow.)  Without further ado (or digression on obscure semantic tangents), we
will introduce the self-explantory swilnews!!  (If you're in a hurry, skip to
section * which gives all the truly essential information in distilled form).

A) SWILNEWS is the semi-official weekly newsletter of Swil -- Swarthmore
Warders of Imaginative literature -- the official SF/Fantasy/Comics/ 
Role-playing/etc. organization for this small liberal arts college.  It comes
out every Thursday or Friday, and comes in both traditional paper mail and in
electronic mail editions (if you have an account on the Vax, you can get your
Swilnews there, if you ask for it.)  It is written by the current president(s)
of Swil.  The ruling group, now officially known as "The Four of Us" or "Chris
and Laura and Laura and Chris," run the weekly meetings at noon on Saturday in
the big reserved room in Sharples, and write up the newsletter (among other
things -- for a more complete explanation of the activities of Swil and the
etymology of its titles, come to Saturday's meeting).  

1) To what end do they spend their Friday mornings writing Swilnews, you may
ask?  First, because it's fun,and if they didn't think it was fun they'd (we'd,
actually.  With so many of us working on this together, we sometimes end up
talking about ourselves, or some other part of Us, in the third person) find
someone else to do it.  Second, we want to tell everyone who is interested
(that is all of you who managed to get your names on the mailing list) what
happened at the last meeting, and what will happen at the next meeting (or at
other official or quasi-official Swil events).  Third, we want to entertain our
readership with clever and off-beat anecdotes (Thus the plethora of
parenthetical remarks) and to bring a little sun into Swat's grayness.  (For
vampiric or otherwise nocturnal readers, we offer a periodic "Dismal Edition"
of Swilnews, but such readers comprise only a small minority of the total
readership)

I) Format of a Swilnews -- It varies with the whim of the writers, but will
usually contain a section of News, except when there isn't any (like this
week), events coming up in the next week (nothing's been planned yet), and
attendance of last week's meeting (this part is always fun).  At the zeroth
meeting were Imp, Pink Incarnate, Jeff "a 98-pound freshling no more"
Hildebrand, "99 pounds and fresh" D, Joel, who can identify a larch tree from
quite a long way away, Nao "me", Andy who used to be rich last Sunday, Alex
"the paper's due WHEN?!?" Weirich, Sister Sue, Brother Art, the commission to
elect the commission, Dave Auer-Glass, Bruce the Hahne, Josh "five months of
dead time! argh!" Smith, thirteen dwarves, one hobbit, One Brown Mouse, two
turtle doves, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. 

*) Summary -- Swilnews comes out every week, there's a Swil meeting every
Saturday at noon.  You can find out stuff at both, and they're fun.

Well, that about wraps it up for this self-explanatory edition of Swilnews. 
(Don't worry.  It won't happen again.  They just get more obscure from here on 
out.)  See you Saturday, Save the whales, join the T-shirt of the month club, 
and don't accept Star Trek V tickets as payment for old debts.

4 (The sign of the ...)