Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now is going semi-professional!
Effective in a day or so, there will be a charge — the Substack-recommended standard, $7 a month or $70 a year — for a full subscription. After a week-long trial, non-paying subscribers will still receive some posts, but not all, and will not be able to register comments. I hereby promise not to badger the free people, even implicitly, to go over to the bright side. But I can’t keep on giving all this stuff away. It goes against my principles. And it must cause other writers to mutter, “Ahem. It is hard to compete with free.”
And now, a vintage promotional announcement:
This notice took up a whole page in The Polk County (Texas) Enterprise on Thursday August 7, 1975:
WARNING TO NON-SUBSCRIBERS
A man who was too cheap to subscribe to his hometown newspaper sent his little boy to borrow his neighbor's copy. In his haste, the boy ran over an $80 hive of bees and in 10 minutes he looked like a warty squash. His father ran to his assistance and failing to notice the barbed wire fence, ran into that, cutting a hole in his anatomy as well as ruining a pair of $10 trousers. The old cow took advantage of the gap in the fence and killed herself eating green corn. Hearing a racket, the wife ran out, upset a four-gallon churn of cream into a basket of chicks, drowning the entire batch. In her haste she dropped a $135 set of false teeth which the family dog burried [sic] thinking it was a new type of bone. The baby, having been left alone, crawled through the spilled cream and into the parlor ruining a $250 carpet. During the excitement the oldest daughter ran away with the hired hand, a stray dog broke up 10 setting hens, the calves got out and chewed the tails off four fine shirts on the clothes line, and the cat had a batch of kittens. All this just to save 15 cents. And in this case, the poor guy never did get to read the latest edition of The Polk County Enterprise. Subscribe Today! POLK COUNTY ENTERPRISE. Sunday and Thursday. $1 for 3 months. $1.50 Out of County.
(Note: As you can tell from the $135 teeth, all those prices are way out of date. Except you can probably find ten-dollar trousers somewhere today. Used. I doubt that anybody sells full sets of used teeth.)
(Another note: Cream-drowned chicks! Oof!”
And now, yet another male-critical limerick:
A pokerface fellow named Neil,
When a woman asks, “What do you feel?”
Will only say, “Well,
I ain’t gonna tell.
Who says that is part of the deal?”
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