MAIL SNAFU

Dear Readers and Writers: Because I'm a computer Bozo and let my mailbox at ar@allenrucker.com get overstuffed, much mail has been getting kicked back to senders lately. If this has happened to your mail, please resend. We here at allenrucker.com thrive on your spirited correspondence. Keep it coming, please.

Just back from three days in Palo Alto speaking at the new Stanford Med SCI Partnership with the Palo Alto VA and others. Created and run by the dynamic Dr. Graham Creasey, this program links SCI researchers and staff at Stanford with the vet population at the VA SCI unit and other facilities. I learned more about my own psychic situation talking for an hour to a roomful of severely disabled vets, young and old, than I have at a hundred medical conferences. Thanks, Dr. Creasey, for a memorable visit.

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING

If you are a published author -- and you know who you are -- consider joining THE AUTHORS GUILD(http://www.authorsguild.org/), a group looking out for all writers' best interests. The guild, currently headed by one of America's finest writers, ROY BLOUNT JR, recently settled a case for $145 million with GOOGLE to provide authors royalties on all books that Google plans to scan and offer free of charge. And Roy just wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about Amazon's new and egregious practice of providing in-house audio versions of copyrighted books for free on KINDLE. I love my Kindle but this is thievery. And THE AUTHORS GUILD is out there fighting it.

This week I'll be at Stanford Medical Center and the Palo Alto VA on Thursday (19th) and at the CSUN Disability Tech Expo at the LA Renaissance Hotel at LAX on Saturday (21st). If you are interested in the Expo, a big one, go to http://www.csunconference.org.