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^CBy Daniel Tobias

   One of the pleasures of working here in beautiful downtown Shreveport is all
the street festivals they have in the summer months, giving residents and
visitors a chance to sample all sorts of foods.  A couple of weeks ago, they had
a Cajun food fair.  In case you don't know, Cajun food is Louisiana's
contribution to the world of cuisine and is becoming popular all over.  This
particular festival centered on the crawfish.  This small-sized relative of the
crab and lobster family is prized in Louisiana.  Up North, where I came from
originally, they call them "crayfish," and they can be caught in streams, but
they're not a common dietary element like they are down here.  In Louisiana,
crawfish cooking has been raised to a science.  There's boiled crawfish, the
traditional method of eating the things that requires the arduous task of
getting the shells open.  (This is good for dieters; breaking the shell consumes
some of the calories you get from eating the crawfish.)  If you'd prefer to
stick to working to EARN your food without also working to eat it, crawfish also
come fried, or in a "PoBoy" sandwich.  Or, there's the newfangled "Soft Shell"
crawfish that you can eat whole; they catch them just after they've shed their
skins and before the new shell hardens.

   So what does all this have to do with BIG BLUE DISK?  Absolutely nothing.  I
just couldn't think of an editorial topic, so I decided to throw in some local
flavor (literally).  If this has made you hungry, why don't you call us right
now and order issue #17 of BIG BLUE DISK, whose "Diskette Cookbook" feature
includes some Louisiana-style recipes.

   At any rate, I think this issue has something to please all tastes.  Anyone
with a personal computer is likely to have accumulated a large collection of
software (and it's hopefully all legally purchased or public-domain; you're not
engaging in piracy, are you?); our Software Indexer helps you keep track of it
all: what the program is called, who published it, what category it falls into,
and where it can be found.  Think of it as a powerful database program that's
specially tailored for this useful task.

   Teachers will appreciate Grade Book; it will keep all the grades to all your
classes, and can output statistics such as mean and standard deviation.  Puzzle
nuts can try to exchange chess knights on a 4-by-4 grid with Knight Exchange,
another chess-related puzzle following right on the heels of last month's Eight
Queens.  Gamers can take a trip back to the wild and woolly Old West with
Western.  And, if you have an urge to become the next Stephen Spielberg, use
Video Pro Titler to add professionalism to your home VCR movies.  It's all here
in this month's BIG BLUE DISK!

   One final note:  Disk space considerations forced us to move many of our text 
features like "On the Editor's Desk," "Blue Notes," and "In the Mail" to a spot 
near the beginning of the menu rather than towards the end as usual.  Don't 
worry; all the programs are there.  They're just further down the menu than 
usual. 
