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Do the editors listen to readers’ suggestions? When exactly will a planetary alignment allow me to float to the ceiling? What’s the air speed of an unladen European swallow? If you're still confused after reading the answers, try consulting the Muse Glossary. Warning! Muse is NOT the magazine of the Australian Museum in Sydney; the "Voice of Canada’s Museum Community"; the "Journal of Women in Music"; a Web forum for "critical and poetical inquiry into controversial ideas in the post-modern physics of time travel and consciousness"; a community arts guide in Minnesota; the online magazine of an Italian theater; an online literary magazine run by high school students in Maryland; or a British heavy-metal band. If you’re looking for those Muse sites, try our Links Page.
You can find excellent Web sites about the Greek Muses on our Links page. When the wizards at the Cricket Magazine Group were dreaming up Muse magazine back in the prehistoric mists of the mid-1990s, they decided to retire all of the original Muses except Urania and hire a new lineup:
You can meet them all here or on the magazine's official Web site, or read Wikipedia's entries on Muse and Kokopelli & Company. Just what these new Muses do remained a mystery until Musemeister Larry Gonick cleared things up in his novel Attack of the Smart Pies. From their home base in Kokonino County, the Muses watch the world by means of Intelligent Air, a globe-spanning two-way communications network that looks to us like airborne dust, and try to help people in need by whispering advice to them. Because there are only nine of them and they don't always cooperate, their success rate is mixed, but they do what they can. What’s the big idea behind this Web site?No big idea. Sometimes you just feel like throwing a party. Who are the “editors” the Muses keep complaining about in Muse Mail?
The Editor-in-Chief: Gatekeeper and Wordmaster. Decides what goes into the magazine and who gets to write it. Terribly mysterious. The Cartoonist: The Muses’ court painter and historian. Channels them and records their deeds. Terribly talented. The Contributing Editors and Columnists: Scattered throughout the United States, they take time out from their Herculean day jobs to advise the E.-in-C. by e-mail and do odd e-chores. One of them runs this Web site. Terribly Kokopellian. The Folks in Illinois: Everybody else. They put the magazine together, crack the whip to keep things on schedule, and generally make sure the magic happens. Terribly busy. For more about some of these sterling souls, click here. Do the editors listen to readers’ suggestions?They hear and try to obey. You asked for a cat issue, and they gave you a cat issue (July/August 2002). You asked for a dog issue, and they gave you a dog issue (November/December 2002). You asked for Harry Potter, you got him (September 2002). You asked for Lord of the Rings . . . Obviously, even great suggestions don’t make it into print right away. For one thing, there’s a built-in delay because the magazine is produced four months in advance. For another, good ideas need good writers to make them work, and finding the right one for the job can take a while.* As a result, some articles take ages to happen, and some heartbreakingly wonderful ones never happen at all. But it’s not for lack of listening. *As Westley says to Inigo Montoya while hauling himself up the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride, "Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but this is not as easy as it looks." Is Pwt a boy or a girl?
The Great Pwt Debate began in Muse Mail in February 1998, when a reader named Grace referred to Pwt as "she." Feather and Urania agreed that Pwt was a girl, but Mimi said no, a boy. Readers have been arguing about it ever since. As for that other burning question, how to pronounce Pwt’s name, one member of Muse’s Board of Advisors thinks it sounds like a cat spitting. We’ll go along with that. Or maybe like dropping a marble into a toilet tank.
"[O]n September 30 at 8:30 a.m. ... Pluto will pass behind Jupiter, and this alignment of the planets will temporarily counteract Earth's gravitational field. The effect should be large enough that if you jump into the air at that moment, you'll float toward the ceiling rather than land with a thud." The discovery was credited to an astronomer in Spain named Sarta de Mentiras (Spanish for "string of lies"). As always, the page included a picture of Bo announcing that one of the items was a hoax, as well as an upside-down footnote singling this one out as bogus. Even so, Muse was deluged with e-mail from adults, many of them teachers, who either wanted more details or were annoyed that the magazine had fooled them. What’s the air speed of an unladen European swallow?This age-old question was answered once and for all in the Q&A section of the February 2000 issue. Return to the top of the page. This page was last updated on 6 August 2005. |
