I did get some complaints last week about the story of the guy who lost his arm when it became stuck in his furnace boiler. I have my own response to the complaints of “poor taste” and “NOT FUNNY!”
I also have a reply from the reader I was thinking about when I wrote the story — a Premium subscriber who is missing an arm.
The New York Times had an article today on a ridiculous zero tolerance situation: a kid in Delaware who was so excited to get his Cub Scouts camping utensil — a fork, knife and spoon combo — that he took it to school to eat his lunch with. Yeah, a Cub Scout: Zachary Christie is just 6 years old.
An update on the Bear Story from a couple of weeks ago, about the Colorado woman and the bear.
A few comments about this week’s lead story, about the encounter between a bear and a Colorado woman. If the location sounds somehow familiar, it’s because that’s where I live.
There will probably be two responses to the first story in this week’s issue: 1) I was too hard on the public library/librarian, and 2) I wasn’t hard enough on her. To be sure, my tagline was judging her based on the standards of the American Library Association.
There was another mass shooting today, a nut with a gun at an immigration office in New York, with at least a dozen killed. Here’s what I want to know: why do these things so often happen in April?
I continue to be astounded at the number of people who choose to be offended by things that don’t exist. I refer this time to a story in the 31 August 2008 issue about the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin:
You all remember the Janet Jackson 2004 Super Bowl “Wardrobe Malfunction“, I’m sure. The Federal Communications Commission slapped CBS television with a $550,000 fine over that, but today a federal appeals court threw out the forfeiture, ruling the FCC “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in fining the network.
“Seven Minutes of Terror” — that’s what NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I worked for 10 years before leaving to work on True full time, went through yesterday.
Such it is with the timing of world events: As you probably know, I write True on Sundays. I’m on the road this week and had already finished writing this week’s stories — with the lead story about a guy who shot himself in the head.
Long-time readers know I have a special place in my heart for the planet Pluto. It’s not just that I spent 10 years working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and worked on the precursor project to the probe that’s on the way there now.
I have something to say about last week’s story “about the vice president” (as most people are terming it):
I watched the news reports last Wednesday from Platte Canyon High School in the small mountain town of Bailey, Colorado, with a bit of dread. (It was nothing like Columbine: some drifter took hostages, and killed one of them — a 16-year-old girl he didn’t know. He then shot himself.)
So here it is, 9/11 — the first time I’ve published a True newsletter on that date since the fateful events in 2001.
Tomorrow (as I write this), it’ll be 6 June 2006, which some have been shorthanding as 6/6/6 (except of course in Europe, where they put the dates in different order, in which case it’ll instead read 6/6/6).
Before I get started each week, I do a last scan of the news to make sure I haven’t missed anything big. And one of the first stories I found was a report that one of my mentors had died yesterday morning: Johnny Carson.
You may have heard about the plane crash last weekend (November 28, 2004) in Montrose, Colorado, mainly because a “celebrity” was aboard (NBC Sports head Dick Ebersol; his wife is actress Susan Saint James).
Ronald Reagan died last week. I didn’t happen to mention that fact in last Friday’s free edition — which “naturally” brought a grumpy complaint from Jeffrey in Florida:
Did a story in This is True ridiculing an announced new product from Microsoft result in its cancellation? Let’s look at the evidence, starting with the story that appeared in True’s 11 May 2003 issue: