Reader Jeremy Horwitz points out that my recent DVD update left off one of my runners-up, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which is due in February. Warner Home Video, you’re my hero.

On the message boards, bobg referred me to the poetry of Francis Heaney: what if great authors only wrote on subjects that were anagrams of their names? I’m sure you’ve wondered. I used to read these ingenious pastiches on the late, lamented Modern Humorist back in the day, but I had no idea that (a) they’d been published in paperback, (b) the full text is also on the Web, and (c) their author is a blogger and crossword contructor whose merciless review of Crossworld I was pointed to the other day.

Finally: I know this is the right crowd for a question like this. I was poking around on-line yesterday, trying to find a copy of Activision’s late ’90s release of Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces, the only CD-ROM repackaging ever of the Infocom text adventure games of the 1980s. I still own all these games in their early ’90s Lost Treasures of Infocom form, but I discovered in our recent move that (a) I could only find the 5 1/4″ disks, for which I haven’t owned a drive in 15 years, and (b) some of those were missing. So I was shocked to learn on-line that the $20 Classics Text Adventures Masterpieces is now out of print and scarce, and sells for $150-200 used! I’m not paying hundreds of dollars for out-of-print text games that I’ve already paid full price for once (twice in some cases). Anybody have a line on a less outrageously-priced copy? Anybody own a copy and want to help a brother out? (Activision lawyers: please direct correspondence to gotohell@ken-jennings.com.)