This is True
Randy Cassingham

Randy Cassingham's Blog

Historical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
— Weird News Online Since the Internet's Dark Ages.

  Independence Day

It's Independence Day weekend in the U.S., and I thought I'd share a couple of photos I took yesterday in the "real" Rural America.

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  Poor Taste? Not Offhand.

I did get some complaints last week about the story of the guy who lost his arm when it became stuck in his furnace boiler. I have my own response to the complaints of "poor taste" and "NOT FUNNY!" I also have a reply from the reader I was thinking about when I wrote the story -- a Premium subscriber who is missing an arm.

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  My New Project: Mastermind Source

I'm finally ready to unveil my new project. I've said I'm going to reveal the secret to my business success so that others might learn from it and be more successful too. Thus, I said, it's obviously "quite a departure from funny stuff or social commentary". It's not something that only works for online businesses, or even just entrepreneurs.

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  FloriDuh

People often try to tell me California is the weirdest state in the union. No way, I always reply: Florida is. I find more weird stories there than from any other state, even though California (with about 37 million residents) has twice the population as Florida (with about 18.5 million). One of their newspapers even has a recurring feature called "FloriDuh" -- they know the weirdness that permeates the state.

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  Later Lyris: Arrived at AWeber

This week marks the first issue sent solely to the new distribution list -- you might have noticed that it says at the top of this week's issue that it's "only" going out to 38,463 subscribers. After months of notice, I have shut down the Lyris-based list, even though well over half the subscribers didn't move to the new list, hosted by industry leader AWeber.

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  GOOHFy Anniversary

Oh! I just realized it's an anniversary! When I went to look up what was the best story from 10 years ago, I realized that there were really two: Mike the Headless Chicken, and the story that led a reader to tell me I was, positively and without doubt, going to hell.

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  Facebook Protest

OK, I'm a crank. I like Facebook. I really do. But one of the things I hate about it is how all up-in-arms people get about nothing. Today, I got Yet Another "invitation" to join a group to protest Facebook's plans to start charging for using the service -- the variant I got was "NO! I WILL NOT PAY $3.99/MONTH TO USE FACEBOOK STARTING JULY 9, 2010! JOIN." Again.

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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
 

Update:

Example Photo Released

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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