25 March, 2006
Welcome to The Stringer

This site first appeared in March, 2003, under the name of The Cassandra Notes. As stated on the original home page, the essays you will find here "differ from the pronouncements of a true Cassandra in most ways. They will not always be dire, they will not always concern the future course of events, and their prescience will never be guaranteed. They take their name from the likelihood that they will change nothing."

The title of the site alluded to all those generic "Cassandras" whose predictions have gone unheeded. However, the obvious being harder to foresee than the obscure, that allusion inevitably had to contend with an illusion: that the site belonged to someone called Cassandra. Hence the new name. Let it be known that "The Stringer" alludes to those very minor journalists who file occasional reports from places that don't produce much excitement. It has the added virtue of suggesting one or two other allusions that are not entirely unfortunate, as well as the paramount virtue of matching a domain name that was available in 2006.

The site is no longer absolutely all-text. However, the two graphical logos, one at the top and another at the bottom of the page, should not keep it from loading fairly quickly regardless of your bandwidth. It's optimized for recent versions of the browsers Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

•