Ok, great & thx. I am frustrated with a few things as I progress down my learning path. Frustration is, of course, usual and unavoidable when learning a new language. It appears to me that the effect is amplified by the fact that lisp = paradigm shift relative to algol / c languages, which is my background. Anyway, here is my query: Where should one go to ask *dumb* lisp questions? I have looked at comp.lang.lisp but it is sooooo full of spam that I don't know what to do about it. I have tried various news readers, but the spam filtering is either poor, or the documentation on setting up spam filtering is *incomprehensible*. The Google Groups archive is likewise full of spam-shit. Maybe I should ignore the spam and forge ahead? I could give examples of problems I am having, but I don't thing including them in this post is appropriate. Any suggestions? IRC or something? Does the toronto-lisp list deal with simple techical/newbie questions? TIA. - Dave -