I'm in the paper (again)

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As a former reporter, my name has been in the paper lots of times above the articles I wrote, but this may be the first time I've been at least partially the subject of an article, or in this case a graphic artist's layout. (OK, the second time, but I'll get back to that.) The graphic artist in question, Greg Williams, found my post on spam poetry a while back and e-mailed to ask if he could use it in a page design he was doing for the Tampa Tribune. I said sure, and here's the result. Greg also does Wikiworld, a feature on Wikipedia where he uses his talents to illustrate random entries in that vast online encyclopedia.

The first time my name got into a paper that wasn't my employer was in a Dave Barry column, believe it or not. It had to do with an article I sent him (yes, I was identified as an "alert reader"!) about little flexible robots that engineers were designing to, um, use the basement entrance to explore one's colon from the inside and identify and treat polyps and such. You can imagine what a field day he had with that one.

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