Prank Letter #2
As a high school Junior, I had become, well, pretty sarcastic. Our school (while good in certain respects) didn't have many advanced classes. Also it was something like 99.999% white, so we made a lot of jokes about that. I had a friend, Josh, who used to go to BCS, and I arranged to use his parents' P.O. Box as the return address for a prank letter. Here it is:
I still remember giggling hilariously at "1/8 Native Armanian." I thought I was hilarious. It was a couple of weeks before Josh called me and I went to pick up the response -- I wasn't sure I'd get anything at all, but it was a big hefty enrollment packet! The cover letter, though, is the best part:
But the really painful thing was, I had this letter and a response that I thought was
so funny, but I couldn't tell anybody about it! I told a couple of friends, but I was worried that if I told anyone else I'd end up getting in trouble. But it's been almost 9 years, so at this point I'm probably safe.
The next year, my senior year, our Yearbook teacher Mrs. Nace was talking one day about some weird letters they had gotten at the school that had been passed around the office. I asked her what they said, and she described this exact letter! I gulped, because I thought she was on to me and was slowly getting around to accusing me. But then she said that they had eventually figured out that it came from some parents of a student who had left the school... so I guess they thought Josh or his parents sent the letter. It was so hard not to explode with laughter at that moment, but I was still worried about getting in trouble, so I held it in.
There are several books of prank letters that really inspired me, but the first and foremost is
Drop Us a Line, Sucker
by James and Stuart Wade.
Letters From a Nut and other ones by Ted L. Nancy are also really good. They've led me to write at least a half dozen prank letters like this, but these are the only two I've ever gotten a response from... so far! ;-)
Becoming an aware consumer
This time of year, we buy Vicks 44E about once a week -- we are just perpetually coughing and congested. The bottles are tiny, so I am constantly going to the pharmacy to get more. Well, this week I did a price comparison and found that it was $1.50 cheaper per bottle at HEB than at Walgreens or CVS! So that is how I found out that Walgreens doesn't price-match competitors, which I think is ridiculous. I bet I can find a competitor who
will price match, and you can bet that's where I'll start buying my medicine! Here's the letter I wrote to Walgreens.
Dear Walgreens,
My wife and I have been Walgreens customers for years, but we have recently decided to change that. Here's why:
This week I needed several OTC medicines for my wife, so I chose to do a price comparison. Your store, where I normally shop for medicine, was quite a bit more expensive than HEB (a grocery chain). For example, Walgreens sold Vicks 44 for $5.49. HEB sold an identical size and variety of Vicks for $3.99. Several other products were also substantially cheaper at HEB.
Having been a Walgreens customer for so long, I decided to give you a chance to keep me as a customer - I asked a manager if the store would match HEB's price for me. She informed me that they would not.
So, for a little over $2.00 (the cost it would have taken to match prices), Walgreens lost me as a customer. Can you gain a customer for $2.00? I doubt it. I will now not only buy OTC medicines elsewhere, but I will have my prescriptions filled elsewhere - for instance, the CVS one block down the street will match prices on prescriptions (though not on OTC medicines).
I'm not angry at Walgreens. This is just the most economical thing to do. So, what will you do to win back my business?
Sincerely,
Derek Kurth
I don't normally write letters like this, but I'm guessing it will accomplish nothing. Still, if I'm going to quit shopping there, I might as well let them know why, on the off chance they do something about it. If they reply, I'll let you know!
Clara is here!
Yesterday, Kaeta met her new cousin, Clara Anne Richardson! Check the Photos link at the top of this page for pictures, or click this picture to jump straight there:
She's adorable! It's weird to see a baby that makes Kaeta look big. Clara was born on February 9, 2006, and she was 7 lbs. 6 oz.
As long as I'm posting, there is another new photo gallery with some really cute pictures of Kaeta. Click this picture to jump there:
On Babies, Curiosity, and The Theory of Relativity
One thing that really amazes me about Kaeta is that she actually
wants to figure things out. For instance, the first toy she played with (see the
videos I posted a couple of weeks ago) involved spinning some wheels. Once she got the hang of that, I put her in front of a different toy -- this one has buttons that you push and it plays animal sounds. At first, she would kind of drag her hand across the buttons, like she was trying to roll them. She had learned that motion from the first toy, but here it didn't work so well. Occasionally she would press down hard enough by accident and get the toy to make a sound. After about 15 minutes, she was no longer trying to spin the buttons, and she was working on pushing them (sometimes comically throwing her whole weight into the pushing motions!). She had tried to figure the toy out, and succeeded!
So anyway, it's really fascinating to me that she has a desire to figure things out. Which got me thinking about something I read recently in
The Case for a Creator. It's about solar eclipses.
Total solar eclipses are better viewed on Earth than they would be from any other planet in our solar system.This is because the sun is 400 times the size of the moon
and it's 400 times as far away from Earth. There's no physical principle that requires this--of all the other moons in our solar system, only Saturn's moon Prometheus comes close, but because of its oblong shape, it only produces eclipses that last about a minute.
Because of this, scientists can observe finer details of the sun's chromosphere and corona than they could from any other planet. Eclipses have resulted in some important scientific results. For example, by comparing the spectrum of the sun's radiation to those of other stars, scientists have used eclipses to learn about the physical makeup of the stars.
Einstein's theory of relativity also gained wide acceptance because of an eclipse. Here's the 3-paragraph version of that story:
Before Einstein, Newton's idea was that space and time were inflexible and unchanging. However, Einstein's general theory of relativity required that space bend and curve around massive bodies.
A guy names Arthur Eddington realized that if Einstein's theory were true, then light passing near a massive body, rather than following a straight line, would be distorted. The Sun would be a perfect test case if we could observe whether it distorted the light from far away stars. But this would be impossible because the brightness of the Sun washes out that other light.
To oversimplify a long story, Eddington and some others made careful observations of the positions of stars near the Sun's eclipsed image before and after the eclipse of 1919. Their results confirmed Einstein's theory, and he quickly became a household name!
This could not have happened from any other vantage point in our solar system. It's interesting that, in the words of astronomist Guillermo Gonzalez,
"the very time and place where perfect solar eclipses appear in our universe also corresponds to the one time and place where there are observers to see them."Reflecting on Kaeta, I can see that not only has God instilled us with a desire to discover, but he has placed us in a world made for discovering!
SourcesIn writing this, I copied certain things rather blatantly from:
6 More Weeks
Happy Groundhog Day! Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Three years ago today, Karianne and I were in Punxsutawney, PA for Groundhog Day, and it was a ridiculous adventure.
Punxsutawney is a pretty small town (around 6,000 residents), but around 25,000 obnoxious tourists swarm over it every February 2, and in 2003, we were among them! Now, since so many people come, if you want to see the most famous rodent meteorologist in the world, well, you have to get up pretty early in the morning. We spent the night in Clarion, PA and got up at 3 a.m. to drive into Punxsutawney. This is what we look like at that time of day:
(Only one of us is a morning person.)
We bundled up, left the hotel, and arrived in Punxsutawney around 5:00. To handle the crowds, they have you park in grocery store parking lots, and then they bus you in to Gobbler's Knob, the site of Phil's yearly prognostication (this whole thing has a very weird vocabulary associated with it).
On the bus, we sat right in front of a group of about 8 college students. Freshmen, if I may venture a guess. They were SO excited to be there, and they were saying so very loudly, with voices that cracked on every syllable. "I can't belieeeeeeve we're in Punxsutaaaaaawnnney!" They went to Penn State and had decided at about midnight to drive in for Groundhog Day. This made us (who had made hotel reservations, packed carefully, etc.) feel old.
When we first arrived at Gobbler's Knob we got a very good spot not too far from the stage. However, there were, um, odors. Basically we were surrounded by "young-uns," and the smells of smoke, alcohol, and possibly some rather intense B.O. were pretty overpowering. We looked around for a better place to stand, and far off, on the other side of the crowd, a sign shone like a beacon in the darkness: "Family Section."
"You want to go over to the Family Section?" I asked Karianne. She did. So we carefully navigated through the crowd until we reached the sign. There we stopped for a moment.
"Honey, you realize that once we cross over into the Family Section, we can never come back, right?" I asked. "We'll be in the Family Section for the rest of our lives. Are you sure you're ready for this?"
"Let's go," she said. And on that day, we crossed over.
So, again, we felt kind of old. For the record, the Family Section was not altogether odor-free, either. The (~50 year old) guy in front of us was drinking what I suspect was wine stored in a grape juice container, and he was pretty loud, too.
Now, you might think that with 25,000 people coming into town to stand for two-and-a-half hours in sub-30-degree temperatures, there would be something to
do. And you'd be right: you could
watch high school kids dance. Seriously, the town of Punxsutawney spared no cost to see that these thousands of out-of-towners would be entertained. They set up a sound system, played some pop music, and got high school kids to come up on the stage and dance awkwardly. For two-and-a-half hours. Here's what it looked like from the Family Section:
At 7:25, a lot of groundhog officials come out in fancy outfits:
They have titles like "Fog Spinner," "Storm Chaser," "Burrow Master," and "Head Hailmaker." They wield their power over nature like a mighty fist to crush those that oppose them, yet they handle their gentle groundhog leader with tenderness and respect. Or maybe they're just big nerds.
Anyway, after awhile, they bring out Phil, put him on a stump, and look to see if he sees his shadow. To me it looked like he just stood there, but they said he saw his shadow. Seemed like a scam -- I think Phil is just a puppet leader for the weather regime which will soon be overthrown by insurgent hamsters. Long live the hampsters!
Sic Semper Groundhogus!Um... sorry, forget I said that. Moving on: After Phil saw his shadow, we waited around to be bused back to our car, which took about another hour -- we were some of the last people to get on a bus. It was miserably cold, our feet were frozen, and we had been up since 3. But we were happy:
We slept in the car for an hour or so, then spent most of the day touring Punxsutawney. Here's a goofy picture someone took for us in the Weather Museum there:
Notice that I don't know how to stand behind a wooden cutout -- I'm holding on to my own arm! What a dork.
There was a pretty cool (pun intended) ice sculpture in the town square:
Here's a pic from Feb. 1, when we came into town briefly to scope things out. Punxsutawney is the "Weather Capital of the World." So if you have a complaint about the weather, write the Congressman from Punxsutawney. I'm pretty sure that's how that works.
Twice already I've mentioned how this whole thing made us feel old. We use to
be the loud annoying kids who thought every single thing in the world was hilarious, but now we were the crotchety old adults being annoyed
by those kids. Well, it got worse.
There's a Christian parody band called
Apologetix that we really like. They were playing in Punxsutawney that day at a skating rink, so we decided to go. It was a fun show...
...but it was all junior high kids and their parents. There was
nobody there our age, except maybe the band. Once again we felt like our youth was past and we might as well hit the early-bird-special at Luby's and try to get home before dark.
There's an Apologetix song that really helped me that weekend, though. On our drive back to Pittsburgh, we listened to "How You Rewind Me" (a parody of "How You Remind Me" by Nickleback), which contains these lyrics:
And I've been wrong; I've been down
But through the problems and every battle
These five words in my head scream "But He isn't done yet"That was really encouraging. Sometimes I just feel like my best days are behind me, or my relationship with God will never get back on track. But He isn't done yet with me, or with you! He still has plans for you, to give you hope and a future.
Well, that concludes the story of our trip to Punxsutawney. Have a great Groundhog Day!
