User:Ragityman

I AM the Ragityman, for better or worse. I am not very active on ANY of the Wikimedia projects, and this is my first (if memory serves) visit to THIS wikipedia project.

I hope my email is active here. If anyone has difficulty contacting me from my talkpage, try logging on to en.Wikipedia. I KNOW my email works from there. All that being said, I may not respond in a timely fashion even if you DO manage to penetrate cyberspace. I do what I can. I try to work carefully and avoid causing problems, so maybe you WON'T HAVE to contact me. "If wishes were horses..."

You may call me Rags, for short. That is, if you are civil. I don't respond to rudeness. Life's too short.

I understand and support the concept of a simplified English project. My take is that precisely correct English is even MORE important in such an endeavor. I am a nitpicker. This is a statement of simple fact, not an apology. I will take on a tedious correction, and derive satisfaction from details some find trivial. An encyclopedia should not ONLY communicate well. Such a reference should MODEL the standards of the language in all respects. This is my quest: to follow that star! No matter how hopeless! No matter how far. To fight for the right (not politically, though) ... [Call it 'sampling.' I claim Fair Use, with apologies to Don Quixote de la Mancha, and, especially, to the lyricist, whose name i will have to search.]

UPDATE: The lyricist was Joe Darion. The song, if you are unfamiliar, is 'The Impossible Dream,' from the Broadway musical 'The Man of LaMancha,' an adaptation of one of the first and oldest novels written anywhere, by anyone. Cervantes had the opportunity to make up the rules, as there were not yet any standards for what a novel was, or should be. When I learned the music as a teenager in the late 1960's, they expressed my ideals of idealism. What I have learned only recently (never having read the book), is that Cervantes had tongue firmly in cheek. The book, and sequels, were extremely popular, and were comedy, indeed satire, of the Hero on a Quest. 40 years with egg on my face. Oh, well.