If you are at all familiar with the Staff Home Pages here at Word, you may have noticed that much of the fare we offer (and indeed, much of what is offered on Word in general) consists of stories and reminiscences from our own lives. You, the reader, are asked to listen as we ramble on and on about ourselves, recounting one vaguely interesting episode after another.

I myself have devoted a considerable number of homepages to recollections I have salvaged from my past. I have dredged up memories about children's books, condors, classroom exercises, religious discontent. Now I find myself groping for another event to recount, another autobiographical narrative to relate, only to find that the well has gone dry. All that remains are scraps and crumbs, dissassociated fragments of memory and anecdotal snippets that could hardly fill a gap in a dinner party conversation. Poring over these leftover pieces of my life, I worry that they are incomplete, inexplicable, half-remembered, or simply not all that interesting. Perhaps, as some claim, each of us has only a few stories to tell. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to make something of these scraps, to keep them from going to waste.

In a desperate attempt to deal with this dilemma, I have fused the technological capabilities of the Internet with the tattered remnants of my memory. The result is the device you see below: a machine that, when prodded, will randomly summon fragment after fragment from my diminished store of autobiographical thoughts. I hope you find them enjoyable.