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| Volume No.: 1 |  XX   XX         XXX           XXX     |Chris M DICKSON|
| Issue No.: 04 | XX               XXX           XXX     | Arco Room 007 |
| Next Deadline | XX   XXXX        XXX           XXX     | Keble College |
| 4th February? | XX    XX         XXX           XXX     |  O X F O R D  |
|  then as OMR  |  XX   XX         XXX           XXX     | O X 1   3 P G |
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		\- E-mail to chris.dickson@keb.ox.ac.uk -/

	First of all, I'd like to apologise to Mark Sheiham. He, and about
a dozen or so other people, received issue pi of GIT (which should be in
this OMR as well) by flyer, as the contents were directly relevant to him
as they contained results of a game he was (and still is) in. Unfortunately
Mark's envelope had a dirty great brown tyre-track all over it. This is
because it got run over by a bus.
	I'm not normally in the habit of feeding letters under bus tyres
before I feed them into the post box. I was cycling down to the main PO on
St. Aldate's with the letters in my wire-frame basket attached to my bike's
handlebars. The wind was rather stirring them around a bit, and with the
mesh being not-especially fine, one flew out. I stopped (not a trivial matter
with my brakes being able to cause deceleration of about 0.00001 m/s/s) and
got off the road. I turned around to see a bloody great bus pass... straight
over Mark's letter. The rest of the journey passed without incident.
	Anyway, main story this issue concerns outgoing Oxford University
Diplomacy Society president Hanbury Hampden-Turner (yes, his full name is
only one syllable short of a haiku). I'm not actually 100% sure if it's
true and it'll only be verifiable after OMR has gone to the printers, but
it's a wonderful tale none the less. Pin back them lug 'oles:
	You know The Girlie Show? On Channel 4? He's going to be on that.
	What The Girlie Show will be doing is a series of articles on unusual
male hobbies, presumably with an intention to provide any grrrrrls watching
with a cheap laugh at sad blokes. One hobby they picked was War Gaming. So
to pursue this they got in contact with the head honcho thereof at Fen Poly
(which you may know as Cambridge University) aiming to set up filming of some
sort of Inter-Varsity match from which they could extract the potentially
most-embarrassing two minutes to air. Fine, 'cept the Oxford Uni War Games
society is in a pretty knackered state and has been so for years now. So the
Tab War Gamer picked us as next-closest alternative.
	I don't know how this will all pan out. Quite possibly it's all a
tremendous Hanbury hoax. If it is, though, it's a good one. Apparently the
filming is set for this weekend. We shall see what we shall see.
	Much more certainly (as in: certainly as opposed to not-certainly)
Keble College have thankfully given permission at long last for OxCon as
planned when we wanted it. Technically if there's some academic event that
tries to book for the same day they get priority and we get shafted, but the
chance of that happening is really pretty miniscule, and not really something
that we can plan for other than making contingency arrangements. I'll be
running the Settlers (I can't decide whether to call it Siedler or Settlers!)
of Catan tournament, and the details thereof will be inside.
	An unexpected but thoroughly welcome bonus for OxCon will be the
presence of a team from Future Publishing's superior RPG-etc. magazine
arcane; in about as many issues as OMR the first game they ever awarded a
full 10/10 to wasn't a RPG or a collectible card game, but actually Settlers.
As such, they are more than keen to see Settlers tournaments flourish, and
ours happens to be in the right place at the right time. Bonus! It also
helps that at least one of the writers studied for a degree here at Keble.
	Television this year has been a mixed bag, especially for Craig
Charles. After 40+ months of waiting we finally get Red Dwarf VII and I
have to say that I found the first episode as funny as all the others have
been. There's rather a paradigm shift from prior series as it's so much more
cinematic and big-budget, and the time travel motif they hung the first show
around was a very easy target. Although the jury is still out - especially as
all the episodes are by different combinations of writers - initial signs
look more than positive. On the debt side for Charles, his late night Funky
Bunker chat/comedy show is not big, not clever, not classy and not funny;
already a contender for my worst shows of '97. Frankly, I'm too scared to
watch his pirate ship comedy on Friday nights, lest that's just as bad.