Those receiving this message have been in my personal e-mail address book that has also served as the Skeptic magazine e-mail address book. As the numbers have been growing rather rapidly of late, I decided to establish a Skeptic magazine hotline online, to be called simply SKEPTIC MAG HOTLINE. Anyone can subscribe. There is no charge. And you are all automatically members. I will now be sending my general posts to this list rather than the way I did it before.

This hotline was set up for me by Randy Cassingham, the "Dumbth" columnist for Skeptic magazine and the creator of the spectacularly successful "THIS IS TRUE" online column (to subscribe to "THIS IS TRUE" send a request to the following e-mail address: join-this-is-true@lyris.net). Randy went from a couple of hundred people to a couple of hundred thousand people in less than three years. I would like to build an online Skeptic mag subscribers' list of similar size over the next couple of years. To continue our efforts to teach science and skeptical thinking we must reach more people than we are through bookstores and magazine stands. The internet is the most powerful tool of communication ever created and this hotline list, in addition to our Web page, is another important avenue for the skeptical movement.

YOU CAN HELP US BY SENDING OUT THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST. Just copy it into your message window and send it globally to everyone in your address book. Thanks,

Michael Shermer