response 51 of 98:

Jan 14 05:47 UTC 2001

  As a semi-related issue, for how long have their been five-dollar bills?
  (and where did we come up with the word "dollar", anyway?)

response 53 of 98:

Jan 15 01:24 UTC 2001

   Main Entry: dol7lar
   Pronunciation: 'dd-l&r
   Function: noun
   Usage: often attributive
   Etymology: Dutch or Low German daler, from German Taler, short for
   Joachimstaler, from Sankt Joachimsthal, Bohemia, where talers were
   first made
   Date: 1553

response 55 of 98:

Jan 16 00:34 UTC 2001

Hint:  Author is known for his journals and memoirs - not fiction.
remmers is sort of close on the time period.  Another quote:  

        About noon my road became dim and at last vanished among
        desolate fields.  Lost and hungry, I knew my direction 
        but could not keep it on account of the briers.  My path
        was indeed strewn with flowers, but as thorny, also, as
        mortal ever trod.  In trying to force a way through these
        cat-plants one is not simply clawed and pricked through 
        all one's clothing, but caught and held fast.  The toothed
        arching branches come down over and above you like cruel
        living arms, and the more you struggle the more desperately
        you are entangled, and your wounds deepened and multiplied.
        The South has plant fly-catchers.  It also has plant man-
        catchers.

        After a great deal of defensive fighting and strugggling I
        escaped to a road and a house, but failed to find food or 
        shelter.  Towards sundown, as I was walking rapidly along a
        straight stretch in the road, I suddenly came in sight of 
        ten mounted men riding abreast.  They undoubtedly had seen
        me before I discovered them, for they had stopped their horses
        and were evidently watching me.  I saw at once that it was
        useless to avoid them, for the ground thereabout was quite open.
        I knew that there was nothing for it but to face them fearlessly,
        without showing the slightest suspicion of foul play.  Therefore,
        without halting for a moment, I advanced rapidly with long strides
        as though I intended to walk through the midst of them.  When I
        got within a rod or so, I looked up to their faces and smilingly
        bade them "Howdy."  Stopping never an instant, I turned to one
        side and walked around them to get on the road again, and kept
`       on without venturing to look back or to betray the slightest
        fear of being robbed.  

        After I had gone about one hundred or one hundred and fifty 
        yards, I ventured a quick glance back, withot stopping, and
        saw in this flash of an eye that all the ten had turned their
        horses toward me and were evidently talking about me; supposedly,
        with reference to what my object was, where I was going, and
        whether it would be worth while to rob me.  They all were mounted
        on rather scrawny horses, and all wore long hair hanging down on
        their sholders.  Evidently they belonged to the most irreclaim-
        able of the guerilla bands who, long accustomed to plunder,
        deplored the coming of peace.  I was not followed, however, 
        probably because the plants projecting from my plant press made
        them believe that I was a poor herb doctor, a common occupation
        in these mountain regions.

response 57 of 98:

Jan 18 14:39 UTC 2001

OK, I'll bite.  Who is (was) John Muir?

response 59 of 98:

Jan 18 15:44 UTC 2001

I think Scott might have it.

response 61 of 98:

Jan 18 20:40 UTC 2001

John Muir it is.  Scott's up.  All quotes were taken from A Thousand
Mile Walk to the Gulf.  The book records Muir's trek in 1867 from
Indiana across Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida
to the Gulf Coast.  He was 29 yrs. old at the time.

response 63 of 98:

Jan 19 02:21 UTC 2001

OK, here we go:

"Where te start?  With a death sentence, perhaps.  But whose--my death
sentence or hers?  And if mine, which of mine?  There are several from which
to choose.  Perhaps this final one is appropriate.  Begin at the ending.
        I am writing this in a Schrodinger cat box in high orbit around the
quarantined world of Armaghast.  The cat box is not much of a box, more of
a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six meters by three meters.  It will be my entire
world until the end of my life.  Most of the interior of my world is a spartan
cell cosisting of a black-box air-and-waste recycler, my bunk, the
food-synthesizer unit, anarrow counter that serves as both my dining table
and writing desk, and finally the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set
behind a fiberplastic partition for reasons of propriety that escape me.  No
one will ever visit me here.  Privacy seems a hollow joke."

response 65 of 98:

Jan 19 14:22 UTC 2001

Dan Simmons.

response 67 of 98:

Jan 20 05:17 UTC 2001

Was to me.

response 69 of 98:

Jan 24 16:45 UTC 2001

Hmmm.  I'll guess Ursula LeGuin.

response 71 of 98:

Jan 25 04:06 UTC 2001

This sounds really familiar to me.  I don't think it's Heinlein, but since
jep and I are both Heinlein fans, I'll guess him.

response 73 of 98:

Jan 25 17:57 UTC 2001

Not Heinlein or James White.  The book should be familiar to any long 
time science fiction fan.  My reprinted copy, which I bought used, has a 
"True" cigarette ad in the middle.

Here's another excerpt from the same book:

They were, I gathered, a sexual unit, the five of them, although I am 
not certain I understand, for it is most confusing.  They were happy and 
friendly and they carried with them an air of faint amusement, not at 
anything in particular, but at the universe itself, as if they might 
have enjoyed some sort of cosmic and very private joke that was known to 
no one else.  They were on a holiday and were en route to a festival 
(although that might not be the precise word for it) on another planet, 
where other life forms were gathering for a week of carnival.  Just how 
they had been invited or why they had been invited I was unable to 
determine.  It must surely have been a great honor for them to be going 
there, but so far as I could see they did not seem to think so, but took 
it as their right.  They were very happy and without a care and 
extremely self-assured and poised, but thinking back on it, I would 
suppose that they are always that way.  I found myself just a little 
envious at not being able to be as carefree and gay as they were, and 
trying to imagine how fresh life and the universe must seem to them, and 
a little resentful that they could be, so unthinkingly, as happy as they 
were.