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Since 1994, this is the 1600th issue of Randy Cassingham’s...
| 9 February 2025: Pirates of the Silicon Valley 2 | Copyright ©2025 https://thisistrue.com |
Other Good Reading: A child psychotherapist thinks he is now much better at his job, because “increasingly I reject everything that I learned.” It’s dramatically thought-provoking: Psychodynamic Nonsense at Aeon.
(As always you’re welcome to copy out that paragraph and forward/post it as desired; credit True if you care to — not required.)
But the World Moves So Slowly! Officers from the regional Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake in Utah were called to a home in Kearns on a report of a shooting. They interviewed Ashton Jonathan Mann, 23, to get his statement on what happened. Mann allegedly said that he and his unnamed friend had gotten together that evening to smoke dope, and were talking about guns. The friend, he said, “said he can dodge a bullet,” so they agreed to try it. But they weren’t stupid! No nono: they made sure the two pistols they were playing with were unloaded, so the friend could “jump out of the way to prove he could move before the trigger was pulled.” After six or so tries, “the final time the gun fired, striking [the victim] in the chest,” the resulting police report notes. So apparently, not as unloaded as they thought. Mann was arrested, charged with second-degree felony manslaughter, and a “felony charge related to firearms.” (RC/KTVX Salt Lake City) ...“Guns are alwaysloaded.” — a rule that’s doubly true when the user is too.
Free Ranged Eggs: Police are investigating a heist at Pete & Gerry’s Organics farm in Greencastle, Pa, where about 100,000 organic eggs valued at $40,000 were stolen from a distribution trailer. With skyrocketing egg prices — a dozen eggs has broken $8.00 in the state — money seems a likely motive, but police are keeping an open mind. “The motive for this theft is unknown. It could be to sell them or even for vandalizing purposes,” State Trooper Megan Frazer said. “When it comes downto it, we don’t know.” (MS/Philadelphia Inquirer) ...New movie coming: Ocean’s Dozen.
How Good is the Air in Your Home?
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The Air Meter in the Ad (only one upgrade in the past week paid about 20% of the expenses for this issue, hence the ad) is the one we use in our ship cabin. Gives us real peace of mind. It’s a touch pricy, but even though we’ve set ours to update every 2 minutes (it’s set to 5 minutes out of the box), the first set of batteries lasted far more than a year. Amazing. Anyway, we need 5 upgrades to omit the ad, plus you get a lot more stories every week! Upgrade here, and thanks!
Venom: If her job “was really dangerous, nobody would do it,” says Stefanie Lesser, a snake catcher in New South Wales, Australia. Bridget Thomson, who gave up her own NSW snake-catching business to educate people about wildlife, says she “fell in love” with snakes after a college course, taken because “I thought it would be really useful living in Australia, as we have 40 percent of the world’s venomous snake species here.” Both have encountered people whohave problems with the idea of women as snake catchers. “I had a woman who wasn’t confident in my ability as a woman to catch a snake,” Thomson said. According to Lesser, one man said, “So when does your partner show up? Chicks shouldn’t be doing this.” Her response: “I was like, ‘I’ll just leave the snake for you, then,’ and then he said, ‘Oh no, you can do it.’” (AC/ABC Australia) ...Sometimes the “chick” is the bigger man.
Thumbs Up: In October, EldiaraDoucette, 22, received bad news from her doctor. She already knew the weird lump in her right arm was cancer. The doctor’s news was, after 3 years of failed treatments, the only way to stop it from killing her was amputating her arm several inches below her shoulder. She had 5 days to prepare for the surgery. She did that by asking her online followers to send a message that would be written on her arm. Examples: “I appreciate your sacrifice.” and “Thanks for all the wiping.” At her doctor’ssuggestion, Doucette also arranged for a funeral home to embalm her arm, and she held an open-casket memorial for it. A video of the service went viral online, with tens of millions of views. It’s not just a stunt: “I got to sit there and really process everything that I had lost within this arm and everything I wasn’t ever going to get back,” she said, “which is a very sad but necessary part of the healing process.” While she admits “the whole thing started as a joke, it ended up beingsomething that was very beautiful.” (RC/USA Today) ...Which is pretty much a summary of life, if you do it right.
Don’t Cry
Spilled Milk Shuts down Florida Highway after Crash
WFLA Tampa headline
Did You Find an Error? Check the Errata Page for updates.
This Week’s Contributors: MS-Mike Straw, AC-Alexander Cohen, RC-Randy Cassingham.
Stories This Week were Written/Edited in Puerto Madryn, a lovely city of about 103,000 in the Patagonian region of Argentina. We got here early due to skipping the previous port since it was unsheltered, and being battered by high seas. This port is nicely sheltered, but winds are keeping dust in the air, and noticeably triggering my allergies. But really, nothing at all compared to what was happening inColorado that started this adventure.
Finally! Part 2 of my profile of Dan Sokol, one of the (literal) Pirates of the Silicon Valley. Part 1 ran in December, telling the story of Steve Wozniak’s long-time friend, how they met back in the earliest days of personal computing, and how he was the “World’s First Software Pirate”.
As it stretched, I decided to break it into two parts. Well, Part 2 is now published ...and there will be a Part 3, next week, because the story absolutely demands it, and Part 2 stretched....
A Little More about Eldiara Doucette, from the last story, who lost her arm. I found it very interesting that she thought of her arm as the source of her suffering. It wasn’t all that useful, since it had suffered several invasive surgeries.
“I almost felt angry at having this part of me that’s connected but it was causing me so much grief and it wasn’t even really functional.” But after it was removed, and she sat looking at it, her perspective changed. This was not her enemy, rather a victim of the cancer that damaged, and then destroyed it.
“I started to almost forgive it more and almost see it as a martyr of this invader in my body,” she said. “At the end of the day, it is my body that is trying to fight this cancer, and it’s the cancer that’s fighting back.” Losing her arm, she said, “has almost helped me find forgiveness for it.”
That’s pretty insightful for a 22-year-old, but living with such a deadly form of cancer for 3 years gave her some time to think about it, eh?
And that’s why I tell stories like this.
On August 26, 1977, I started my first ambulance job, in San Mateo, Calif. Today, February 14, my license will expire and I’ll no longer be a medic.
While that comes out to 47 years, 5 months and 20 days, I took off 19 years, 5 months and 5 days in the middle to finish school, work at JPL, endure 3 surgeries + a year of rehab after an accident so I could walk unaided again, remarry, and move to rural Colorado, where I was recruited back into EMS work. So that roughly comes to 28 years of being a medic. After writer/publisher, it’s the second-longest part of my working life; the secondary part of my career identity.
Importantly, it also informs my writing: thousands of intimate observations of people when their shields were down.
The first time I left the biz, I dreamed about it quite a bit, which I interpreted as not really being ready to let it go. This time, no dreams. I was ready.
Actually, the dreams started a few years ago: frustrating ones, where I was at the scene of some emergency and was trying to summon an ambulance, but I couldn’t get my phone, or radio, to work. I interpret that as a message that it was time to let it go. 🙂
I Had So Much More planned for Issue 1600, such as an Honorary Unsubscribe. But I so wanted to get Part 2 of my Dan Sokol interview published. He really is an overlooked part of early personal computing history. Parts 1 and 2 are the history sections; Part 3 is a more fun personal portion, about his decades-long friendship with Steve Wozniak. It’s already written, and will post nextMonday.
So just like every week, there’s more to look forward to next week!
Ten Years Ago in True: Judge Not, Lest....
This Week’s Story of the Week (you’re welcome to share it), about the obliviots playing with guns, is posted on Telegram, Mastodon, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and/or Facebook, or grab from any of those to post elsewhere.
This Week’s Sunday Reading: A strange death story that lead to a corporation’s death in penance. Lessons from a Strange Death.
This Week’s Honorary Unsubscribe is still to come. I ran out of time on Monday, and have been low on energy since. Working on recovery!
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Copyright ©2025 by Randy Cassingham, All Rights Reserved. All broadcast, publication, retransmission to email lists, web site or social media posting, or any other copying or storage, in any medium, online or not, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission from the author. Manual forwarding by email to friends is allowed if 1) the text is forwarded in its entirety from the “Since 1994” line on top through the end of this paragraph and 2) No fee is charged. I request that you forward no more than three copies to any one person — after that, they should get their own free subscription. I appreciate people who report violations of my copyright.
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