This is True
Randy Cassingham

Randy Cassingham's Blog

Historical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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  Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

A few weeks ago I grumbled in a newsletter about the lousy ads I was getting on one of my sites, which were bringing a whopping 4.8 cents per click. I said "I may try Bing ads instead if Google doesn't get me better [ads] soon."

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  The Life You Save May Be...

A special "extra" story this week. I've pulled it out separately because it doesn't "really" fit in with True's theme. While it is a bit weird, it's certainly not about someone doing something stupid.

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  1984 in 2010

My recent blog post analyzing a Zero Tolerance case (Patrick Timoney's "Gun") showed just how crazy people can get trying to control others, and their desire to punish non-transgressions just the same as if the person was actually doing something wrong. Most people fully got the point. Others, to my shock, didn't.

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  Patrick Timoney's "Gun"

The "zero tolerance" stories just don't stop, despite court decisions and legislators demanding "common sense". A 2" hunk of plastic isn't a gun, unless you're a hysterical grade school principal who demands that 9-year-olds in your care sign confessions when they bring a toy to school.

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  New Project: the Mug Shot Museum

The last time I posted a police photo of someone I wrote about in True*, more than 10,000(!!) people went and looked.

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  On Stage with Penn & Teller

This is the sordid tale of my having been exposed to Teller's bodily fluids.

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  Mystery Power Outage

We have a pretty complex power system at our house in the country: critical systems (heat, fridge/freezer, and the office, including the computer network) are on backup power so we can run them for days in case of a power outage. The worst so far has been just a few hours, most recently when a pole on the edge of our property snapped when it was really, really cold (apparently the pole had rotted, and then couldn't take the cold). So I was really perplexed when I got an alert last night that the backed-up circuits had failed ...yet the rest of the house was on. Huh?!

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  Ed Freeman and Political Manipulation

I generally don't want suggestions for True's Honorary Unsubscribe feature; my usual problem is having far too many possibilities for the one slot each week. In July, a new trend started, and has not stopped (I got another last week): people wanting me to do an Honorary Unsubscribe write-up for Ed Freeman, a brave Vietnam War helicopter pilot who saved about 30 shot-up kids and was awarded the Medal of Honor -- the U.S.'s highest military decoration.

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  A Picture Worth 1,000 Anytime Minutes
 

Update:

This page expanded into an Entire Web Site

Sure: a picture is "worth 1,000 words". Sometimes it's worth 1,000 minutes on your cell phone plan, as in this case. The story, from True's 27 December 2009 issue:

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  Avatar Movie Review

I'm not sure if I've ever done a movie review in True before, and I won't be doing them that often, but I went to see Avatar this weekend, and I was very impressed. Over the past several weeks I saw a lot of the hype for the movie, including quite a few clips, and frankly none of it attracted me. I was intrigued that several actors who weren't in the movie were promoting it, apparently not sent by the studio or James Cameron; that said more to me than anything else.

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