Dave Zobel's

only Slightly Exaggerated Press Release

Cagey about his age, Dave Zobel of Los Angeles will only admit that in the year he represented the Great State of Maine in the National Spelling Bee, "the alphabet was a bit shorter -- you know, we didn't yet consider the ligature 'VV' a distinct letter."

The discoverer of the acronym GPF (for which he was never paid), Zobel eventually graduated from letters to words, and ultimately short predicates.

His favorite labor-saving device is the ellipsis ("Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made." -- C.S. Lewis), and of his startlingly unhelpful sailing primer Dave Zobel's Bent Book of Boatspeak, it has been said: "Don't get me wrong -- there are a few funny parts."

Despite any brouhaha that may have been made over the purported timeliness of his entry, he would like to reassure Ms. Stewart that honestly, the only reason he chose her was because he was looking for a strong, self-sufficient female archetype in a cookery setting.