*HALF-MONTHLY POST FOR NEWCOMERS*

[barger@ils.nwu.edu (Jorn Barger)]

[This is an abbreviated version of the monthly post, posted mid-month for
new school-returnees.]

Rec.music.gaffa is a 5-year-old newsgroup dedicated to the sublime,
peerless, nonpareil artistic genius of Kate Bush.  "Gaffa" comes from her
song "Suspended in Gaffa" (on _The_Dreaming_), and (according to Kate)
refers to gaffer's tape, or duct tape, used to keep people from tripping
over electrical cabling, and metaphorically, apparently, to a frustrating
sort of limbo-dimension ("the idea of seeing something incredibly
beautiful, having a religious experience... but not being able to get back
there"):

"Suddenly my feet are feet of mud/ It all goes slo-mo
I don't know why I'm crying/ Am I suspended In Gaffa?"

Rec.music.gaffa is run as a moderated group only because submissions to it
are forwarded to an extensive mailing list of people without netnews
access, who form an informal fan club called "Love-Hounds". (The mailing
list was r.m.g's original format, when started by |>oug /\lan so many years
ago.)  You can mail submissions, without fear of censorship, to:

love-hounds@eddie.mit.edu

If you try to post directly to the newsgroup it will get forwarded there
first anyway, and will look messier, I think.

It's not a bad idea to subscribe to the list even if you read r.m.g.,
because occasionally glitches may cause you to miss messages. To subscribe
to the mailing list, send a friendly message to the "moderator", Bill
Wisner (who's actually in California), via:

love-hounds-request@eddie.mit.edu

These addresses are official-- others substitute "wiretap.spies.com" after
the 'at', at their own risk. (Things have just been relocated, from Alaska,
actually, and there's still a few bugs in the system.)

All five years of rec.music.gaffa/love-hounds-digest can be ftp'd from the
love-hounds archive at wiretap.spies.com in directory /love-hounds/archives

Song lyrics, interviews, etc are in
/love-hounds/kb on the same host.

GIF files are also available in
/love-hounds/kb/pix/gif [and gif.new, gif_footah, gif.saintjohn, pix.hill,
gif_tour_program, gif.newer, gif.fenger]

If you've never used ftp, you use a program on your UNIX system called FTP.
 You connect by typing:
ftp wiretap.spies.com
Log in as "anonymous", and use your username as your password.
To change directories type:
cd love-hounds
"dir" will get you a directory, "get" and the filename will retrieve the
file.  If you "cd" again into "archives" or "kb" you'll find the main
goodies, with "pix" being another subdirectory within "kb", and "gif" and
"gif.new" within "pix".  (When downloading gif's, set your transfer type to
binary by typing
binary
at the "ftp>" prompt.)

===================================================================
Are they serious, when Love-Hounds say:
"Kate Bush is God!" (She really IS!)
===================================================================