Dear Readers,

A little history:

When I was GM of the Okinawa HHH in 1990 and 1991, I had the good fortune to travel and hash in Asia and Australia - Seoul, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, and Darwin - but even with my treasured and well-worn copy of Magic's World HHH Directory, it was difficult to connect with hashers there. The information in the directory was old, and hashers, I was dismayed to learn, are a transient bunch. So when I succeeded in finding and running with hashes here and there, I'd copy as much current contact information as I could get, and once back in Okinawa, type my notes and mimeograph them for other hashers heading out on Asia trips.

From 1992 to 1995, when I lived and hashed in Honolulu, I continued to travel around the Pacific, hashing and gathering contact information whenever I could. I graduated to publishing a free, small-circulation newsletter called the Whole Hash Catalog. In addition to contact listings, I began including an international calendar of upcoming events, based on information gathered from the hash e-mail list. I gave copies of the newsletter to local and visiting hashers, and every month mailed copies to Tim "Magic" Hughes, editor of Harrier International and the World HHH Directory; John "Spock" Martin, editor of InterHashional News; Larry McDowell, who had just started up his Global Trash magazine; and Per Manstrup "SeaXplanation" Christian, a Danish hasher who published a pioneering international HHH events calendar by e-mail.

I enjoyed publishing my little newsletter, especially when I heard from hashers who used it to plan hash road trips. But I didn't like the effort and expense of printing and mailing it. Sometime in 1994, the Internet began to look like the solution: you could publish hash information without paper, postage, or subscription lists, and whenever new information came in you could update your page immediately. Only a few of us were on the Net in 1994, but it was clear that the on-line hashing community was going to grow quickly. Even if large numbers of hashers chose to stay off-line, anyone with Net access could print paper copies of web pages to share with non-wired friends. Absolutely, the Internet was the way to go.

And that's how the Half-Mind Catalog, the international on-line information resource for hashers, came to be.

I put the first issue of the Half-Mind Catalog on the Net in August 1995. In Internet years, 1995 was the Pliestocene, but the HMC was hardly the first hash web site - ZiPpY, Floppy, and Beaver Bam Bam Balls had already started publishing general-interest hash pages, and Black Hole's original Internet HHH Home Page - the first true international hash web site - was at least a year old. Still, even though these web pages existed in 1995, hashers could not find international HHH contact and upcoming event information on line. That sort of information was only available in printed hash magazines. There weren't many magazines, they were hard to get and irregularly published, and the information they contained was old and often outdated. With the blessing and cooperation of the editors of those magazines - Magic, Spock, and Mr. McDowell - I launched the Half-Mind Catalog, a site where any hasher could find and freely download contact and event information.

Today most hashers, directly or indirectly, get information on hashing via e-mail and the Internet, and there are now several sites offering the same sort of information you can find on the Half-Mind Catalog. Of the webmasters who publish these sites, all but a very few have agreed to cooperate and freely share information with one another through the HHH Publishers' Association, which means that no matter which HPA member site you rely on, you're getting the best, most up-to-date information available.