Unfortunately, my plans for commemorating 9/11 on the site have gone kerflooey because I’m going to be out of town until Wednesday. I knew this trip was coming up but I never found the time to prepare any articles. My plan is to do reviews of the various 9/11-related comic books. I still plan to do that, but it will have to wait until I come back. However, all of the Monitor Duty contributors have been invited to participate and some of them may have reviews posted before I return.

I went back into Fanzing’s archives to find my original editorial from right after 9/11. Want to hear something ironic? The issue published in July of 2001 was the “Our Worlds At War” issue.

Kind of jumped the gun on that one, I guess.

Anyway, here’s my original 9/11 editorial. At the time, the death count from the World Trade Center was still estimated to be around 7000; I thought about amending that editorial, but I think it’s better to let it stand as an example of those early days of the fog of war. The only other error in it that I can see is that, if I recall correctly, 17 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not all of them. I think I even knew that at the time; it was just sloppiness on my part.

Oh, and I predicted that security would be a lot rougher in the future on all middle eastern men due to the actions of the hijackers; this was before all of the groping and inconveniencing of everyone equally just so they wouldn’t feel singled out. At the time, planes weren’t even flying, so I didn’t know that would be our solution. Oh, and (this is embarrassing), I predict that “we may tighten up our borders and begin enforcing our immigration laws”. No one has ever confused me with Nostradamus.

See you all on Thursday. Remind me to tell you all about how my brother’s film shoot went. I now know a lot of stuff about the Transformers movie that I won’t be able to repeat without getting him in trouble.