As this is a blog of all things musical and literary, I must include the goings-on as of late that involve a mailing group of which I am a part—in fact, of which I am the group owner.
Some background, first. As stated in my Wikipedia entry, I’m a three-time world champion punster, as determined at the annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas. I’m also a charter member of an organizing committee called Punsters United Nearly Yearly, or PUNY, formed in 1990 to rescue the P-OWC from near dissolution. In fact, the photo accompanying this post is from that era, I believe. As a member of PUNY who had some computer smarts, I set up an e-mail list on the old Prodigy service back in the late 1990s. That group migrated to eGroups, which was bought out by Yahoo! several years later.
Within the past few weeks, a rather ominous announcement came down from Yahoo! Groups. To wit, they would be shutting down their message archives, picture archives, databases, and pretty much everything else, to concentrate on simply transferring e-mails back and forth. This was unacceptable. The search was on for a replacement, which was located rather quickly in the form of Groups.io. They advertised that they would handle transfers from Yahoo! Groups to their own service for a fee. Members of the PUNY group quickly stepped up with donations, and within hours after the decision to transfer had been made, I had begun the transfer process. It took several days for the transfer to go through, but it was successful, and now the PUNY group is up and running on Groups.io.
If you are at all interested in puns and wordplay, I invite you to join the PUNY group. Click on the word “join” in the previous sentence, and you should be taken to our group’s main page, where you will find a form where you can join. In addition to puns, limericks and haiku are served by a separate subgroup of the PUNY list which you can also join. You would be warmly welcomed in both groups.
I hope to see you there!