Thank you for reading The Fed! You will be happy to learn that a new Board of Editors has taken over this publication, headed by the lovely and talented Anna Chodos, the new Fed Editor in Chief, who will return to us soon as the Spanish government has begun extradition proceedings. We may have to pluck her from an inner tube floating in the middle of the Atlantic, but in any event she's not going back to Cuba, by God!

I get to write this special letter to you because I am graduating. I have enjoyed my time on The Fed enormously, so I want to thank all my fellow students for graciously donating their student activities fees so that we could publish drivel and aggrandize ourselves every three weeks. Columbian comrades, if it weren't for you I would have had to join the Sci Fi club!

I also want to commend the marvelous staff that I have had the pleasure to work with at The Fed. It has particularly been a pleasure for me to hand the paper over this semester to my all-time favorite group of kids. I don't know why we were blessed with such terrific staffers. But every last one of them is a joy. It just ain't fair.

There was a time when Tom the Managing Editor and I were planning to turn The Fed into the Tom 'n Laurie newsletter because it looked like we were the only staff and it was going to stay that way for a long time. Well, people came running to the rescue and the newsletter plans got postponed, and I am thankful to those heroic people for that (and man, if y'all knew what me and Tom are cookin' in our diseased brains, the whole damn Columbia community would be thankful too.)

Finally, I want to thank our aprox. 12 readers, the loyal ones and the ones who use Feds to line their iguana's cage (that counts as reading, damnit.) Thank you readers!

I suppose that at this point I could say some things about Columbia in general. I could tell about when I called my class center with a question and the Dean on the other end of the line screamed in my ear and hung up, or the time Student Activities moved The Fed's office without notifying us and threw out all of our furniture.

Or, I could tell the story that says 'Columbia' to me, about when I was living in an L room in Ruggles with a fine bunch of girls, one of whom emerged from her room one afternoon at 5 PM after having slept for about three days in chemical-induced circumstances and, on her way to the kitchen, hadn't the wherewithal to walk in a straight line, but veered from wall to wall like a ship with its rudder cord cut (and the hallways in Ruggles suites are only four feet wide) muttering as she went about a 20 page paper that was due tomorrow. "I saw the best minds of my generation," etc.

But instead, I'll leave you with this thought of Frank Zappa's:

"Not even a witch ought to be caught on the bottom of America's spew-infested water ways."

He's not kidding folks.