[HN Gopher] My mother declared my bedroom a disaster area (1984)
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My mother declared my bedroom a disaster area (1984)
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-04-18 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.lettersofnote.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.lettersofnote.com)
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I enjoy cheeky letters and even moreso, I really enjoy cheeky
| responses to said letters.
|
| The staffer who replied probably enjoyed writing it.
| mwcremer wrote:
| This is one of my favorites:
|
| https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/i-am-unable-to-accept-your-...
| kzrdude wrote:
| that was lovely. Sure enough the letter writer has a
| wikipedia article as Paul Devlin (filmmaker)
| lostlogin wrote:
| I like the Arkell versus Pressdram.
|
| https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/arkell-v-pressdram
| fifilura wrote:
| There is a reference to a "small grammatical error" in the
| rejection from Harvard, but I did not quite understand what
| he was referring to.
|
| Was that obvious from his reply and I missed the point?
|
| I am guessing it must be in the form of "Please accept our
| letter of rejection" or similar?
| sdeyerle wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out where 539 hurricanes is coming from?
| That's over an order of magnitude more than there's ever been in
| a single season...
| knute wrote:
| I'm thinking it must be tornadoes. There were 907 tornadoes
| across all of 1984.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornado_events_by_year
| re wrote:
| Also curious that the letter was from May, before the start of
| the 1984 hurricane season. Per Wikipedia, 1984 did go on to
| have the highest activity since 1971, while 1983 the lowest
| since 1930. But 1983 caused more damage with Hurricane Alicia
| crossing Texas.
|
| The Texas drought reference does appear to be accurate.
| https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/16/us/crushing-drought-in-te...
| tasuki wrote:
| Isn't all of the letter a joke?
| Detrytus wrote:
| It being a joke does not justify POTUS lying to US citizens
| :P
| IncRnd wrote:
| It's good to keep things in perspective. After all, there
| are 16,384 misunderstood comments each minute on this very
| website.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| If your comment is sarcasm, does my comment affect your
| calculations?
|
| If my comment is sarcasm, does my comment affect your
| calculations?
| m463 wrote:
| maybe from a list of funding requests? :)
| js2 wrote:
| It's likely a joke, but it sure stands out. Could also be
| transcription error. The letter itself contains a typo ("if you
| will privide") which is fixed in the transcription. (It should
| have been transcribed as is with "[sic]" added to note the
| original typo.) Too bad there's not an image of the reply.
|
| BTW, the letter was shared to reddit 7 years ago and a redditor
| replied that it was his uncle Andy:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5a95b8/til_i...
|
| A photo of Andy:
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/tsWkg
|
| The story has been circulating the Internet at least since
| 2004:
|
| https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/spring/c...
| kzrdude wrote:
| Is the image composition fair use? The website is commercial. I
| would argue the reagan borrow is fair while taking the whole room
| picture is probably not.
| bhaney wrote:
| Do you seriously care?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Why not, it's a theoretical musing like much else on this
| forum.
| whyenot wrote:
| The "best regards to your mother" at the end seems so innocent.
| Nowadays, it would read like a reference to an SNL skit starring
| Andy Samberg and Mark Whalberg.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| > Andy Samberg and Mark Whalberg
|
| Andy Samberg _AS_ Mark Whalberg :)
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake did that at
| the start of their song about threesomes they did with Lady
| Gaga.
|
| And if I recall correctly, one of their mothers was played by
| Susan Sarandon?
| pvg wrote:
| "Word to your mother" was a thing around the time this was
| written and the history of potentially ambiguous maternal
| reference is probably about as long as that of language itself.
| jh00ker wrote:
| "Say hi to your mom for me." -- Biff Tannen, Back to the Future
| OJFord wrote:
| Amazing, hard not to think (if you've seen it) of the 'I declare
| bankruptcy' scene (surely you've seen a gif if not the show?) of
| the US remake of _The Office_.
| tombert wrote:
| This doesn't appear to be a thing you can easily do anymore now
| that social media has sort of supplanted it, but I used to email
| members of bands that I really liked when I was between the ages
| of ~12-16, so this would have been around ~~2003-2007 or so.
|
| The band members wrote back with a surprising frequency, and were
| extremely polite and grateful for fanmail. I remember that I had
| a fairly in-depth email session with Justin Pierre, the lead
| singer for Motion City Soundtrack, where I asked him about how he
| comes up with songs and what touring was like.
|
| Now, obviously, there's reasons that kids should _absolutely not
| ever do this_ , because there's a lot of really crappy humans who
| might try and exploit the kids or do otherwise horrible things,
| but I was lucky enough to where that never happened to me, and
| everyone who wrote back to me was very professional and seemed
| flattered that anyone liked their music enough to write a fan
| email. I think email was still a new enough thing to where most
| people weren't writing fan emails.
|
| It's something I reminisce about occasionally, and while I don't
| really agree with any of Reagan's policies, I will acknowledge
| that him writing back to this kid was genuinely a kind of cool
| thing to do.
|
| ETA:
|
| Before anyone goes judging them, I should point out that my
| parents did not know I was doing that, and would likely have told
| me to stop if they did, precisely because they would have been
| afraid of me being coerced into something horrible as a minor. I
| don't think they realized at the time that it was even possible
| to directly contact band members via email.
| camillomiller wrote:
| You might like Nick Cave's newsletter, the Red Hand Files
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't think it's really that bad for kids to do this, nor for
| parents to let their kids do this. Obviously parents should
| supervise somewhat to make sure that the kids aren't being
| manipulated by some predator, but otherwise I think it's fine.
| The solution to "there are bad people in the world" isn't to
| shut out the world, it's to watch out for bad people.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, fair; I guess what I was getting at is that kids
| shouldn't do stuff like that unsupervised, especially really
| young kids. If it's just politely interacting with a singer,
| that's fine, but if the conversation gets too bad that can
| shut it down.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Seems OK to me and I would be fine with my kids doing the same.
| Risk for email is very low, especially when the child seeks out
| an adult, opposed to the other way around.
|
| Ironically, my elderly father does the same thing today! He
| cold emails ivy league professors and writers from the WSJ, and
| I'm always surprised on how engaged they get with
| corresponding. They send preprints, lab data, and all kinds of
| followup.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Similarly I've done research on some of the more obscure
| older games, and cold emailing developers when I find contact
| info has resulted in a suprising number of successful
| correspondences.
| mturmon wrote:
| In the 90's I used to listen to Ian Masters' radio show
| _Background Briefing_ which was a very pointy-headed, left-
| leaning examination of various issues.
|
| At the time it was just a show run by a very competent host
| out of a public radio station in LA (KPFK - not an NPR
| affiliate). I think it has expanded since then.
|
| Several times Ian said he was surprised to usually get a
| "yes" when he asked some relatively high-profile journalist,
| think-tanker, or university professor to be interviewed on
| his show. (Typical interview was 15-20 minutes of airtime -
| not just a sound bite.)
|
| Basically, these folks seem to be surprisingly willing to
| chat when cold-called by an interested person.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| After reading a sci-fi novel I really enjoyed, I emailed the
| author to let him know how much I appreciated his imagination,
| and received a rather lovely reply.
|
| Absolutely didn't expect it, but it was really nice to get.
|
| (Adrian Tchaikovsky, and his Children of Time series).
| dekhn wrote:
| I was wondering if he was a real, individual human being
| because that author writes far more text in a short period of
| time than anybody I've ever seen.
|
| I really liked Cage of Souls, it was like a Jack Vance
| revival. And it's always fun to reach Tchaikovsky and
| Alastair Reynolds books back to back.
| pea wrote:
| Oh man I totally did this. I got really nice emails back from
| Jello Biafra and Sole from Anticon as an angsty teenager.
| p3rls wrote:
| I didn't think even Justin Pierre would know how Justin Pierre
| wrote music
| shuntress wrote:
| It's a cute interaction for sure but it's frustrating to see this
| sort of "I'm doing my best to make our government useless"
| attitude from the president.
|
| A better response would have been "Sorry but your mother does not
| actually have the authority to declare federal disasters"
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm aware that Reagan maybe had that attitude in general but I
| don't see it in this particular letter. He mentioned lack of
| available funds due to an excess of disasters, and promotes
| volunteerism, which I'd say is a pretty important component of
| a well-functioning society regardless of how well your
| government is performing.
|
| Your "better" response isn't funny and violates the basic rule
| of improv comedy, which is that you go with what the other
| person gives you, instead of contradicting it. As an actor,
| Reagan was certainly familiar with this.
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