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.

  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.

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  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".

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  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!

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  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!)

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  Bambi Get Your Gun

Another story that begs to be illustrated by the photo mentioned. From True's 13 September 2009 issue:

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  "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:

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  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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