Stix Sighted!

A number of readers have asked after our Nicholas Stix [1], who lives in Far Rockaway, an area very badly hit by Hurricane Sandy. For a while, calls to his home were being told by a robot that the foreign country being dialed could not be accessed, adding to real fears that he'd been washed out to sea. But I just returned from this weekend's Mencken Club conference [2] to find a voice mail message from Nicholas saying he and his family are well—using a cell phone, a technology to which he previously had been stubbornly refusing to extend diplomatic recognition! Literally a case of an ill wind blowing some good.