as puns go mystory is not a good one, I think, because the pressed word whines a little (my my my it cries) though he meant well (contra his story and circling mystery). The idea of a research pun is likewise well meaning but defeated by the beakers and bunsen burners of chemlabs past, Frankenstein's storms, and all the dials and other apparatus research carries with us. "The ground of teletheory ...the research pun [brings] together two unrelated semantic fields on the basis of one or more shared words," Greg said, though some puns, as a knife the oyster, should pry apart. What is the pearl within re/search? This is a koan: click here for the answer (we have no time for zen anymore, we think electronically). Ulmer is a great and gentle bear, a lovely man. (We sipped cokes once in a foyer in Chicago in the company of Jay Bolter.) I see him sometimes in virtual space, called Technoculture, a maillist we both frequent. I suppose rather than complaining here, I should tell him there (I'm just learning to think electronically).