I've been intending to write this column for a while now. But things just haven't worked out.

It's a classic scenario here at 14 Plympton: There's never enough time, enough human resources, or enough space to print everything a Crimed might want to.

This applies to news articles, features, columns, editorials--even photos. There's only so much The Crimson can handle, so often things go uncovered or unsaid, not for lack of good intentions.

Things sometimes happen at The Crimson for no apparent reason--at least none that is readily apparent to a sometimes-confused reader.

Here's a personal example of what I mean:

Three weeks ago I wrote a column promising to report to readers every Friday on page 3.

The very next week, The Crimson printed extended coverage of the shootout in the Square, bumping one of the arts pages, which usually would run on Thursday, to Friday instead.

This meant that there was no room for the column on Friday. I, being a student before I am a Crimson staffer, was not available to prepare the column for Saturday.

There was no room on Monday's page 3.

So the column did not run, outwardly inexplicably, until the following Tuesday, four days after it had been promised.

At the bottom of that day's column I wrote a note to explain the delay. But in order the fit the column into the space allotted for it, that note had to be cut.

Other things in the column were also changed or deleted to make the column fit the space--without my involvement.

This isn't something I'm upset about, because it's just how The Crimson works.

To put out a paper every day it is necessary to change and cut and add and delete, and frankly it's not uncommon for writers to read their papers in the morning with as much curiosity as to the final outcome of a story as do their sources.

This sometimes means that writers may have inadvertently misled their sources about how a story will read.