It would seem our Winter issue of nearly two months ago was given a leisurely cruise over various oceans, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service. We're now receiving reports from Europe and Australia that the issues are finally starting to arrive.

Our first indication that the issues were not actually lost came a couple of weeks after our initial story on the missing issues. We got some pieces of mail back from the countries of Bahrain and Qatar which were labeled "USPS Global Economy (surface) mail Service shipments have been suspended." This told us two things: 1) That the United States has suspended certain types of service to these countries for whatever reason and 2) The issues went by way of a service known as "Global Economy" which is NOT air mail, the service we had paid for. We never found out for sure whether they actually waited for the issues to arrive in these countries before slapping the stickers on them and sending them back (which would have been extremely foolish) or whether they simply waited more than a month before even looking at the envelopes that were supposed to be mailed out (which would be extremely inefficient). But the key bit of info we got out of that was that the issues were indeed SOMEWHERE in the postal system and that they would likely be delivered fairly soon.

Now that issues have finally started to show up, we feel we can reassure those of you who have been waiting for them that they will be in your hands soon if you haven't already received them. We intend to have a serious discussion with the post office about this charade so that it never happens again. We want to thank those people within the postal system who were alerted to this situation through our website and have been working with us to try and get it all sorted out.

Please let us know if you have not received your issue within the next week. (This only applies to those of you not in the United States and Canada who were on our subscription list for the Winter issue back in early January.) And to help comfort everyone, we will extend all affected subscriptions for an extra issue. We're sorry for the pain in the ass this has been.