07-21-2008, 09:17 PM
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#2
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To shreds, you say?
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: in the house and on the street-how many, many feet we meet!
Posts: 18,449
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sweetwater
If you are going to start a swearing thread be sure to invite Mr. Parker to the party! |
Jean Shepard is one of my favorite writers. "Phantom of the open hearth" was also great.
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Early in his tenure at WOR, he and his listeners decided to play a prank on the New York Times best-seller list; he suggested that they go to bookstores around the city and start asking for a book that didn't even exist; the listeners suggested the title (I, Libertine!), an author name (Frederick Ewing), and even gave this fictitious author a fairly detailed biography (former British civil servant, lived in South Africa, spoke on the BBC about 18th-century erotica, was married to Marjorie "a horsewoman from the North Country"). As his radio listeners included airline pilots who traveled overseas and press agents who fed information to leading gossip columnists in the city, The phony book and its phony author were soon a hot topic in transatlantic publishing circles, appearing on best-seller lists, getting mentioned in Earl Wilson's syndicated gossip column, and even getting Banned in Boston. Finally, one of his listeners, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal persuaded him that it was time to let the rest of the world in on the joke - by then, the book was such a big deal that Ballantine Publishing asked Shepherd to actually write a book called I, Libertine!, and with the help of science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, he did. Needless to say, the Times didn't take kindly to having been fooled, and when they reviewed the book, they implied that Shepherd had misled his fans into asking for the book, when in fact the listeners were part of the hoax from the very beginning.
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The internet is a hateful stew of vomit you can never take completely seriously. - Her Fobs
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