Hi, Ellen, I still can't even look at his name here without starting to cry. I know his work needs to carry on, but I don't think we can ever replace him. I think we should change the name and the logo for it. Maybe the Gideon Memorial News... and I can just keep starting to cry until I finally stop, and we will have found a way to carry on that also doesn't pretend to be him. Maybe I only feel this way because I know I couldn't have sustained the attention to often deadly boring things involved in this battle, that my dedication would have flagged in the face of the other heinous affronts to our Constitution and our Planet and our very Lives. I can't express how I relied on his stalwart contribution to help me rest easier that the information was there. The mail where I live isn't as reliable! Or as brain frying. And it is the more a tribute to him that we could simply relax one section of our own little universes of stresses and panics COMPLETELY because John was John and no fanfare.

This is like suddenly noticing you're missing a foot or a hand or an eye. WHO have you ever met so implacably there for something like this? I have been livid a thousand times that spammers have taken such an extra-attachment to his posts. Their form of recognition for his vital contributions, I'm sure, but I have taken special delight in ruining them for plaguing John.

I'm trying to say that his help wasn't something one never noticed, but he'd made it so fundamental one felt personally attacked whenever anyone attacked him, even with stupid stuff like spam. Maybe I'm trying to say it's even more like getting out of bed in the morning and the floor not being there.

Maybe I'm just too knocked to spit it out, but I really think we have to change the name and the logo as a statement that we know we can't ever BE him, only aspire to such indispensability.... He didn't have a flashy bone in his body, but he shined that much more brightly because of it.

I am crestfallen.

"...like the floor not being there." A comfort to read you, 99. I am feeling much the same way. Lots of aimless staring, moist and teary over my coffee, fidgety at my desk and cursing bacterial meningitis...blowing kisses at the sky.

Yes, indeed. I am dis-oriented.

Do you know, 99, if any (informal) memorials for John are being planned? Sure would love to be with some those who knew him / listen to more stories about the man as a way to relieve some of this choking grief. Is there a way to do a (real time) cyber-memorial? I can't get enough of the beautiful log book/ growing list of comments compiling, but I'd really like something a tad more...real time.

Strange, isn't it, to read John Gideon's name so often writ next to 'REST IN PEACE'? I am having a hell of a hard time imagining him resting, despite the fact that he's earned it a thousand-fold.

Somehow, I much prefer to imagine that after a fond reunion with his wife and some...vestial dalliances / trumpet parades in honor of his other-worldy homecoming, he might take an extended fishing trip Mike Connell and then post a report to us from beyond.

...and HUGS, ELLEN! Thinking of you.

You know, Jeannie, I barely interacted with him in all the years I've been here. I many times listened to him calling in with reports to Brad and Peter B on the radio. I only once butted up against something I needed to email him about. I've, of course, seen all the comments and his responses over the years. He was just here, like the floor, with tons of links every day, a place to go when you needed to check your notions of what was what, or what was going on about what, and the grail for those who wanted to keep up-to-the-minute, which has not always been me on this issue. Sometimes I'm yanked too far afield to keep everything straight. He made it so I didn't have to. And I have been grateful for it and admiring of it for over three years now.

I do not know of any informal memorials for him, and I think we are all too far flung to get together anyway, but maybe we can all just remember to revere that kind of contribution, that kind of manifestation of positive intent, and end up accomplishing his goals for him. That's the best memorial I can think of.

And, again, I am so grateful he didn't have to suffer that horrific pain for very long.