Greetings, Fellow Mensans:
I recently received a copy of the Mensa email address list, and could not resist sending greetings to some in other nations who are also members of the society.
Stu Lucas <stulucas@aol.com> and I have started a worldwide discussion group for anything of interest but especially international matters. As this is written we have about twenty members from Austria to Australia. My email address is <billbrown1@juno.com>. My trade was printer of newspapers and writer, and I also enjoyed photography more or less as a hobby. I am 69 years old, retired, father of nine children with three grandchildren and one great-grandson -- no spring chicken!
My friend Stu Lucas and I enjoy limericks and bawdy jokes and such, but we more enjoy serious discussion of the problems facing the world and its many nations, each with its own culture. We are agreed that we hate nobody, want to know everybody, and want to know what everybody thinks. We are unlikely to achieve that goal, but we will keep "plugging away."
There is a need for an international group to discuss and solve many problems, and this group may well evolve into such.
We have so far located a few thinkers, but we search for more. There must be many in Mensa, but most of them seem to have crawled into holes, then pulled the holes in after themselves! Are you one of those? If so come out and enjoy the sunshine of healthy conversation and contention. There is no reward except the joy of intercourse (so to speak) with peers. Actual intercourse is a bit difficult to accomplish via email!
Also, while this is nominally a Mensa effort, we are not checking ID numbers. If you have a friend who can reason his or her way out of imprisonment in a paper bag and is not afraid of the contention which inevitably accompanies such dialog, please turn him or her on to us. If asked, I will even send him or her my list of addresses.
Most of these are contributors, the rest are "readers" possibly waiting to catchme in a mistake (I make enough mistakes). There were four contributors, then ten, now about fifteen. The most recent are a Scottish college student, a translator at a Polish university, an English sales manager, a retired hotel manager, an Australian firefighter cum psychologist, and Leong Yim Sing, unknown as yet. He checked in Easter Sunday via the Singapore net. Perhaps by the time you get this we may have twenty or fifty. Could you become the twenty-first or fifty-first?
I am operating with old equipment which can blk at any time, (I must give it an enema about once each week) so I try to send out a list of "Thinkers" often. I am not the "webmaster," or "moderator," I am only a Mensan with an idea, one "keeper of the list". There are many such lists, as many as Thinkers.
There are no rules, no prescribed or proscribed subjects, but we ask civility and courtesy. A personal rule is that I will not answer a rude or contentious letter, nor will I forward it. There must be as many dialects of English as there are cultures upon this Earth (and that's a bunch!) so there are bound to be misunderstandings and failures to communicate. We ask that you try not to offend, and that you not be too easily offended by such errors and failures.
And how are you?
Bill Brown, 125 W. Ottawa, Richwood Ohio 43344 USA