A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper

Editor's Note: It seems appropriate, in this issue of JSS containing the ®ndings of our annual Top Scholars/Institutions study, to pay tribute to the persistent authors who make a journal like this, and a study like that, possible. In their honor, we dedicate the following humorous, anonymously-authored, letter! Dear Sir, Madame, or Other: Enclosed is our latest version of Ms. #1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to ®nish. We even changed the g-d-running head! Hopefully, we have su€ered enough now to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers. I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your anonymous reviewers are less interested in the details of scienti®c procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they were not reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging little old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or ®ve people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process could be unduly delayed. Some of the reviewersÕ comments we could not do anything about. For example, if (as C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented , however, and the paper has been improved and bene®ted. Plus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by ®ve pages, and we were able to accomplish this very e€ectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a di€erent font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way. One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions 13±28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the …