Now and then I get a letter from a reader that really makes me smile. Last week it was from Michele in California:
One year 8 months and 3 days ago the little baby girl I reluctantly put up for adoption in 1968 found me (President’s Day 2002, when she found me working in the office on a holiday). We clicked extremely well right off the bat and it was obvious that we shared so many common traits, so of course I immediately started looking for stuff we could share. One of the first 2 things I did was to sign her up for gift subscriptions to the New York Times monthly crossword puzzles and sign her up for your Premium newsletter. I can’t tell you how many times she’s commented about how much she laughs every time she gets the next edition of your publication — it’s been a terrific hit for our new family, in more ways than one. Thank you for being better and more important than you ever intended to be. ::smile::
P.S.: The crossword puzzles are a slightly lesser hit.
Trysha, is that true?
The feel-good note from before that was from Pete in Wisconsin:
Please keep up the great work, Randy. I’m a disabled vet on limited income, yet your column brings me riches of funniness and examples of the stupidity of humanity that are priceless. MasterCard should possibly consider doing a commercial featuring your website: phone line – $40, computer – $500, This is True – Priceless.
Thanks, Pete!
Last, one of True‘s friends is Leland Gregory, author of What’s the Number for 911? and other collections of humorous human stupidity. (I asked Leland if it was OK to mention that he was a Premium True subscriber. He replied: “Actually you can mention I’ve been a Premium subscriber for five years and will be until ‘they pry this keyboard from my cold, dead, hand!'” I think that means yes. 🙂
Anyway, Leland’s new book is out, and he’s getting bolder in his titles. This one is called Hey, Idiot! — Chronicles of Human Stupidity. It contains “nearly 400 stories of human stupidity at its finest. The book is divided into 12 chapters each dealing with a different category of stupidity (Government, Law, Sports, Medicine, etc.)”
He uses True as one of his sources for story leads — and even kindly mentioned that fact on one of his appearances on the Today Show. Keep at it, Leland!
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Leland is indeed keeping at it: his latest, as I recheck this posting in 2007, is Idiots in Charge: Lies, Trick, Misdeeds, and Other Political Untruthiness. Gee: ya think that one will sell?!
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I doubt that this will suddenly make Leland Gregory any richer, but if you hadn’t posted this article, I’d have never known about it so I can go out in 2007 and buy his books.
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With authors, making money is secondary. What we really want is people reading our stuff. So if/when Leland sees this, he’ll smile — guaranteed. -rc