Waaay back in the dark ages of the Web (somewhere between 1994 and 1997) I discovered a weekly email newsletter called “This Is True.” It collected strange-but-true news stories from around the world, summarizing each in a short paragraph with a witty one-liner at the end. I subscribed to the free edition, and later to the full version, which had about twice as many stories. I even picked up a few of the books collecting past stories (at a con, I think, but I can’t remember which con).
Eventually I got too busy to read them, and the back-issues piled up unread, and I decided to let my subscription lapse. But earlier this year, I decided to re-up with the shorter, free version, and it’s still as good as ever.
Here’s a sample story, with a subscription form:
Update: It looks like Internet Explorer doesn’t understand how to convert from the character set on This is True’s website to the character set on this one. So IE users, you’re stuck with broken quotation marks and apostrophes. Firefox, Opera and Safari all convert them properly.
Way too weird.