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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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Lessons from a Strange Death
Odd deaths are a staple story type in True, sometimes as a cautionary tale about what not to do, and sometimes as a way to point out how horribly we can treat others. There has been an update in a 2007 "weird death" story.
Noblesse Oblige
Or, Was I Offensive to Little Girls?
There was a phrase in the previous blog entry on the 6-year-old kid, where I imagined the school staff: "Run in circles! Pull out your hair! Scream like a little girl!" Today Nancy in Illinois complained that was "sexist language".
Zero Tolerance and the 800-lb Gorilla
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. Wait: it had a dull, kid-appropriate knife included? Why, knives are weapons! Run in circles! Pull out your hair! Scream like a little girl!
Swine Flu
Yeah: Looks Like I Got It!
I've been out of the office for the better part of a week, and am even farther behind on e-mail and other work than usual. Last Thursday I drove with a friend to Reno, where we were both speakers at the Mensa "gathering" put on by a friend of ours there. I'll have more to say about that later, but my talk went very well. We drove back Sunday, through a couple of snow storms and a sand storm in the Utah desert, and again straight through -- I only took over at the wheel for a few hours. (My paramedic buddy Norm is a road warrior!)
The Dvorak Keyboard
I've heard from several friends who spotted me in the Wall Street Journal today. It was just a tiny mention in an article about the Dvorak keyboard, an ergonomic alternative to the common "Qwerty" layout that you probably use.
A Glorious Dawn
I'm really taken with a video released on YouTube last week. It's an Auto-Tune, which is the name given to soundtracks that use the audio plug-in of the same name. Auto-Tune was designed to correct the pitch of vocals, but clever music creators realized they could use it to make spoken word recordings musical. This is a fantastic example of the genre.
Another ZT Success Story
I've long railed against Zero Tolerance in True, with the first such story appearing way back in 1997. And there have been plenty more since.
Bambi Get Your Gun
Another story that begs to be illustrated by the photo mentioned. From True's 13 September 2009 issue:
"False, Crude and Offensive!"
An angry Premium subscriber, after reading a story in this week's issue, wrote to proclaim "That is not only false, crude, and offensive, it is an obvious, kneejerk response that would occur to many people looking for a cheap shot." Let's start with the story, from the 6 September 2009 issue:
How I Beat Spam
...Without Having to Change My E-mail Address
My e-mail address has been around online for many, many years, and it gets a lot of spam -- many hundreds per day. For most users, spam far outstrips legitimate mail. It was 1996 that I realized that spam would become a huge problem, which is why I wrote my Spam Primer to educate my readers about it. And sadly I was right: it's estimated that more than 90 percent of all e-mail transmitted is spam. And how many of them get to my inbox? Lately, I'm averaging less than one a day.
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