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My mother declared my bedroom a disaster area (1984)
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoI enjoy cheeky letters and even moreso, I really enjoy cheeky responses to said letters. The staffer who replied probably enjoyed writing it.
- mwcremer 3y agoThis is one of my favorites: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/i-am-unable-to-accept-your-rejection https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/i-am-unable-to-accept-your-...
- kzrdude 3y agothat was lovely. Sure enough the letter writer has a wikipedia article as Paul Devlin (filmmaker)
- lostlogin 3y agoI like the Arkell versus Pressdram. https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/arkell-v-pressdram https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/arkell-v-pressdram
- mauvehaus 3y agoThat is excellent, and if you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy the Cleveland Browns one: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/very-truly-yours
- hodgesrm 3y agoThe cc: to Art Modell [0] was a nice touch. He was a real character. I imagine he thoroughly approved of the response, assuming he didn't think of it himself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Modell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Modell
- fifilura 3y agoThere 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?
- demondemidi 3y agoYeah I’m pretty sure Reagan didn’t write this reply. Spending decades on social media has made me not trust anything I read that is “feel good”.
- Merad 3y agoAround 2017-2018 I remember reading a really interesting article about how the Obama White House handled letters to the president. The vast majority of letters (hundreds per day, IIRC) were answered by staffers, but each day they would select 10 letters that Obama would read himself. He didn't personally write out a reply, but he'd make notes for the staff about how he wanted to respond. No idea how Reagan's team handled it, but it's at least possible that he was personally involved in the reply.
- mlyle 3y agoReagan's administration worked in the same way. But Reagan himself was a prolific correspondent, and personally dictated a much greater share of those replies than most 20th century presidents. (Reagan also was known for reading articles and scribbling notes to staff about a note to send "from him" about the content-- quite a few journalists and essayists received Reagan letters).
- octopusRex 3y agoWould like to see responses from the Alzheimer's years. He got pretty bad towards the end. Biden sounds like a 20 year old in comparison. Trump is still off in cofeve land.
- eleveriven 3y agoSocial media has ruined our faith in kindness
- psychlops 3y ago[flagged]
- skyyler 3y agoWell thank goodness you haven't just done that! Oh, wait a minute...
- psychlops 3y agoReally? What do you think I revealed?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pelagicAustral 3y agoIs this a quine?
- sdeyerle 3y agoI'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 3y agoI'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornado_events_by_year
- tasuki 3y agoIsn't all of the letter a joke?
- Detrytus 3y agoIt being a joke does not justify POTUS lying to US citizens :P
- IncRnd 3y agoIt's good to keep things in perspective. After all, there are 16,384 misunderstood comments each minute on this very website.
- aspenmayer 3y agoIf your comment is sarcasm, does my comment affect your calculations? If my comment is sarcasm, does my comment affect your calculations?
- IncRnd 3y agoI like your comment! Though, I dislike sarcasm, which your post seems to be.
- 3y ago
- kzrdude 3y agoIs 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 3y agoDo you seriously care?
- kzrdude 3y agoWhy not, it's a theoretical musing like much else on this forum.
- jader201 3y agoFWIW, this mostly falls under one of the guidelines of things not to do: Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kzrdude 3y agoIt's not a tangential thing, it was mentioned explicitly as a point in the text by the author.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Fhtitjfi 3y ago[flagged]
- whyenot 3y agoThe "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 3y ago> Andy Samberg and Mark Whalberg Andy Samberg AS Mark Whalberg :)
- anon35 3y agoWahlberg lampooned himself in a follow-up appearance with Samberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYcHxF_cO8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYcHxF_cO8o. So: "and" is also correct.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoI'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 3y ago"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 3y ago"Say hi to your mom for me." -- Biff Tannen, Back to the Future
- OJFord 3y agoAmazing, 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoYou might like Nick Cave’s newsletter, the Red Hand Files
- bigstrat2003 3y agoI 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 3y agoYeah, 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.
- shuntress 3y agoIt'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"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DennisP 3y agoI'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.
- totetsu 3y agoRichest country on earth and still there not enough money to clean up this child's bedroom.
- vidarh 3y agoI'm pretty much the opposite side of the political spectrum to Reagan - as a European left winger he was pretty much the bogeyman for us in the 80s - and I still found it funny. It's pretty much what people would expect Reagan to write if it had been a serious request warranting a reply. What isn't expected, and makes it funny, is the humour of actually replying and pretending to take the letter seriously. I think it'd lose its humour if it was markedly out of character and didn't sound like a serious reply.
- UberFly 3y agoThis is a strange take on a very light-hearted interaction. Non of it was all that serious.
- paganel 3y agoI wouldn't have expected pro-US government propaganda coming from lettersofnote.com, but it is what is, this New Cold War demands sacrifices.
- pantulis 3y agoIt would have been so cool if the mother had subsequently written a letter to Reagan requesting the funds!
- eleveriven 3y agoThe correspondence would have been very smooth and amusing
- blueflow 3y agoWhat tf did Reagan do that every other comment has a "Reagan bad" section?
- anewhnaccount2 3y agoOkay, I'll bite, although I'm afraid it's unlikely this will lead to much substantive discussion. * "Trickle Down Economics": Large tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously dismantling social programs which benefit everyone else * Arming authoritarian and far right militia in South America * Environmental deregulation * Giving a voice to the religious right and their anti-gay/anti-woman agenda
- blueflow 3y ago[dead]
- blagie 3y agoThe basic problem is that everyone makes mistakes. I feel bad if people do things maliciously or in bad faith. None of those, as bullets, feel that way. He did a lot of big things, some of which will invariably be big mistakes. Expanded from bullets (e.g. Iran-Contra) there was badness, but what would be helpful would be to: 1) Expand those out a little bit, to where we can see the bad. 2) Compare to other presidents for level of bad. On the whole, I have complex feelings here. The quality of recent presidents and presidential candidates has been very, very low. I think I'd take Reagan over Hillary Clinton, Trump, or Biden. On the other hand, I think I'd take Obama, Romney, and probably McCain over Reagan.
- hobs 3y agoThe right's obsession with trickle down economics alone and the no new tax pledge is enough to think Reagan was a bad president. We see an entire portion government apparatus effectively obsessed with killing the government, but only performatively. This is what I see as a Reagan special.
- 3y ago