Merry Christmas, even to you greedy bastards

To the hundreds of people each year who ask me if they can freely reproduce text or images from my site, Wilson's Almanac, and who never reply when I take the time to write back immediately with personalised emails offering permission, free copyright, kind words and good wishes ...

... may you enjoy your Christmas and some day get the hang of what life is all about. It's more than clamouring for dollars.

My site, by the way, contains about 7 million words that I have typed in myself with two fingers, and contains many thousands of images that I have scanned and Photoshopped myself -- "at great expense to the management". I love doing the Almanac, but it earns me the grand sum of about $30 in a good week -- a lot less than is earned by a producer for BBC, ABC or NPR. Lots less than someone working for a major publisher. And vastly less than their stock holders.

I have never charged any of you for my labours; I have never refused any of you. But if one in fifty of you has ever replied, I'm a monkey's uncle.

You who ask me for the fruits of my 30 years of research and labour and decline to reply when I grant it freely, are TV documentary producers, directors and researchers. You are movie researchers from Hollywood, Sydney and London. You are students, school teachers, professors, webmasters and webmistresses, church ministers, Sunday School teachers, youth group leaders, recovery counsellors and hospital social workers, pagans, anarchists, Muslims, Jews, Christians, book editors, art directors and book publishers -- to name but a few. You are people from 192 nations of the world, but mostly from the Rich Countries. Funny about that. Almost none of you knows how to say "thank you". Is it a lost art?

My commitment: As long as health permits, I shall continue replying within 24 hours to every single one of the thousands of emails I receive each month, regardless of how busy, healthy, impoverished, tired, jaded, exhausted or stressed-out I am.

I must ask, what will you people who profit from my work do to be real human beings?