On January 19th, Geov Parrish, prolific writer, coeditor, and cofounder of ETS!, suffered a small stroke. He's still in the hospital, but is making a rapid recovery. The good news is that the doctors expect him to make a nearly complete recovery. And in true Geov fashion, he's still doing some work from his hospital bed--for example, he recorded his half-hour weekly radio show, Eat The Airwaves!, right on schedule this past Saturday, over the telephone. There's just no stopping him. He will, however, be taking a break from Eat The State! for the next few issues, although we expect him back in the near future. In the meantime, we'll do our best to keep turning out entertaining and enlightening commentary.

For those who want to express their concern for Geov and best wishes for his swift recovery, please send cards and letters to our address: Eat the State!, P.O. Box 85541, Seattle, WA 98145. We'll pass them on to him.

Regular readers will notice that in this issue we're running a new feature, Short Takes, in place of American Newspeak. Wayne Grytting, author of American Newspeak, is taking a brief vacation and considering a change in his weekly production schedule--plans are not final yet, but he may begin producing the column on a bi-weekly basis, instead. We're sorry to see this happen, but we also understand the pressures involved in writing for a weekly deadline while holding down a full-time job. In the future, we'll be running American Newspeak and alternating it with Short Takes, in much the same way we alternate Stump Talk with Media Watch.

We're excited about the Short Takes column--we want to use it to provide concise updates on past stories we've written, to provide useful facts that we've gathered and can't fit into our longer pieces (but want you to know about anyway), and a place where leads and bits of information we've received from readers can be printed. We hope you find it enjoyable and useful.