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Since 1994, this is the 1652nd issue of Randy Cassingham’s...
| 8 February 2026: Special Honorary Unsubscribe | Copyright ©2026 https://thisistrue.com |
Race to the Bottom: Chinese New Year is coming up, and it’s the Year of the Horse. A cute little celebratory plush toy horse came witha problem: its muzzle was sewn on upside down, making its smiling mouth look like a frown. When a buyer on Amazon pointed it out, seller Zhang Huoqing offered to replace the defective toy, but the buyer decided to keep it — and others wanted the “Crying Horse” version too. “People joked that the Crying Horse is how you look at work,” Zhang said, “while the smiling one is how you look after work.” In fact, the crying version seems to be widely outselling the original, so factories in China gearedup and churned out huge volumes of the “defective” version, and multiple Chinese resellers on Amazon are competing with each other to sell them. (RC/WXIN Indianapolis) ...Crying Horse is how all the factory employees look all the time.
Pizza? Pizza: A different kind of theft, done in such a way that it becomes a felony. [Premium Only]
The Philosopher’s Pebble: An alchemist’s dream. [Premium Only]
Aw Gee Whiz: With a search warrant, police in Houston, Texas, raided an online grocery warehouse armed with ...tracer dye? Indeed, the dye proved that sewage discharge from the warehouse was being routed into a storm drain, which emptied into Brays Bayou, a waterway that extends into local neighborhoods. “These types of releases can kill plants and fish that are essential to the local habitats,” said Jackie Medcalf of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance. Agents from the TexasCommission on Environmental Quality were part of the entry team, and are determining the damage caused, which could result in as much as a six-figure fine against the company, Weee! Distribution. (RC/KRIV Houston) ...Somewhere, an exclamation point is reconsidering its life choices.
Life Choices II: Florida Man skips out on bar bill, and is caught when.... [Premium Only]
TOZO Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds, <$50.
All for under $50 in choice of 3 colors. Shop Now, Choose Wisely (Amazon). |
Week 6 of No Ads ended after last week. I would much rather readers support True than ads. Each week it takes ~5 upgrades (or equivalent contributions) to pay this edition’s bills. With 2 carried over from last week, we only needed 3 more. Your response: no new upgrades. 🙁 And also no returnees, thus the ad above. Now we need five upgrades to skip the ad next week (as always, morewill carry over). If you love True please support it: taking your favorite sites for granted is why so many of them have disappeared. Upgrade here, and thanks!
This Stinks: When a workplace “what you can’t head up in the microwave” rule results in a lawsuit. [Premium Only]
Short Memory: The owner of a company in Medley, Fla., noticed an inventory shortage, and apparently started watching the warehouse more closely. He called the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office after catching an employee “relocating” a box from its proper location and “concealing” it elsewhere. Inside: 50 Kingston memory cards worth $14,750. Deputies say Ricardo Jose Blanco-Nunez, 33, admitted to stealing 55 of those boxes since November. Total value: $811,250. Blanco-Nunez allegedly saidthat he was doing it to pay for his habit. Not drugs: selling the memory cards brought the money to pay his bill for TikTok livestreams. His arrest for grand theft doesn’t necessarily solve the problem at Abboud Trading Corp.: the owner says that the inventory shortage since November is $2.5 million. (RC/WPLG Miami) ...What, he thought Blanco-Nunez came up with the scheme by himself?
Frozen Bureaucracy: An overzealous tax agency. [Premium Only]
For the Birds: A conundrum for wildlife managers. [Premium Only]
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Restaurant goes well beyond “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service.” [Premium Only]
Life Imitates Arf: A little doggy ran away to avoid a bath, and by the time he returned to his family, he was so dirty they didn’t recognize him. Suchis the adventure described in Harry the Dirty Dog. A copy belonging to the Fairfax County, Va., Public Library also had quite a journey. It was checked out, presumably for 5-year-old Dimitris Economou. Years later, his father, a Greek diplomat, went home, then on to Syria, Japan, the Netherlands, and back to Greece. “Harry” went with him. Then one day, Economou, now a father himself and visiting his dad, wanted something to read to his son. He found Harry. “As we finished, I got tothe back where I saw the library card” bearing the due date: Nov. 6, 1989. It was nearly 36 years overdue, but he returned it with a note: “And now it can find its way home.” (AC/Washington Post) ...If library books could tell their own stories, many would relate adventures their authors never wrote.
Slip-Stream: There’s already a new twist to last week’s story, “It’s All Aerodynamics” (about ski-jumpers adding material to the crotch of their suits to get extra lift, and thus longer jumps). [Premium Only]
This Cuts Into Profits
Muncie Man Robs Taco Bell with Pruning Shears
WXIN Indianapolis (Ind.) headline
Did You Find an Error? Check the Errata Page for updates.
This Week’s Contributors: AC-Alexander Cohen, RC-Randy Cassingham, Mike Straw is off this week.
Stories This Week were Written/Edited at sea finishing a long trek from French Polynesia to Australia — 2,500 miles (4025km) over many days with only two stops in between. It’s a big world when you limit your speed to around 12 kts (~14 mph/~22 kph), especially when your stops aren’t exactly along the straight path.
The Honorary Unsubscribe is Caught Up: Last weekend I finally caught up with the H.U., adding someone almost unknown, or at least mostly forgotten, despite being largely responsible for stopping a disease so horrible, many of the 30 percent who died from it were probably grateful to die. And so contagious, the honoree was shocked to find that in one section of one country, 11,000 people had become infected ...in one week. It was fascinating toresearch the story of how he was forced to think about the disease from a position of scarcity (of the vaccine), and came up with a new way to fight it: Epidemiologist William Foege, which is not the write-up included below.
And this week’s H.U. is a no-brainer for me: not “just” a computer industry pioneer, but a friend of mine (and Premium reader going back to 1997). I will very much miss Dave Farber. I’ll have a lot more to say about Dave in my blog over the next couple of weeks: I interviewed him “on the record” both during Zoom calls and in person when we were in Tokyo. Stay tuned.
Jeffrey in Israel wrote (emphasis from the original) last week that “I am often astounded by the sheer commitment and tenacity of some of your HU subjects but [Gladys West] takes the cake. That said, there are so many contenders for ‘The Most’ that you have brought back to life over the years as it were, it is not possible for me to remember all those that you have given World Recognition to your audience, giving recognition topeople that just went on with their lives performing amazing achievements whom other simple people such as I would never have known about without your tenacity in researching their history. The HU section is always an excellent ‘Dessert’ to my weekly helping of Floridians, (wherever they live in the world!)”
Thanks for noticing, Jeff. Pretty much, every time I start researching someone who is clearly deserving, I find that the deeper I dig, the more gold I uncover. It can be even harder when the person worked in a technical field, because then I want to explain what their accomplishments really mean, whether it’s geodesy (West) or rocket science (Stofan).
It gets to the point where I just have to stop ...but not before I have a full story about the person, since that’s what makes it interesting to read.
Ten Years Ago in True: Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire.
Last Week’s Story of the Week (you’re welcome to share it), about about the Canadian’s beaten up car, is posted on Telegram, Mastodon, BlueSky, Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, or grab from any of those to post elsewhere.
This Week’s Sunday Reading: He’s not the first man to hit the pages of True sporting a tattoo on his forehead. His Motto.
This Week’s Honorary Unsubscribe goes to David Farber. This one’s different: it’s in my blog for reasons you’ll find apparent when you click his name to get to it.
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Copyright ©2026 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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