Who else reads The Straight Dope? If you don’t, you should check it out. It’s a fun diversion. In it, Cecil Adams and his assistants regularly answer every sort of question in the world with “the straight dope,” cutting through acres of bullshit and apocryphal stories to get to the bottom of all sorts of myth. A recent questioner asks, Can a live person be packed in a shipping crate and mailed? Cecil replies, in part,
Escape from reality. In the kids’ book Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown (1964), a bulletin board falls on young Stanley Lambchop and nonfatally flattens him to four feet by one foot by half an inch. Pops Lambchop takes advantage of this unforeseen turn of events to mail Stanley to California for a visit. Stanley returns the same way unscathed, proving “jet planes were wonderful, and so was the Postal Service.” It’s fiction, OK?
Unfortunately, he seems to have overlooked one of my all-time favorite songs, Velvet Underground’s The Gift, in which a boy named Waldo Jeffers meets his absurd demise by sending himself through the mail to visit a girl named Marsha.
This isn’t exactly an error of Cecil’s, but I am still disappointed in him for omitting it.
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