I got a chain letter and a circular item in a square envelope in the snail mail this week.

This was the first time I ever got a chain letter in the mail. (I’ve gotten chain letters in email from people who clicked on the naughty bits and got a spyware infection on their computer.) This chain letter stated that you too can make $800,000 USD per week, as seen on the “Oprah!”, if you send a dollar bill to the following five people and add your name to the list. Yeah, right. Straight to the recycle bin. Although it’s bad luck to break a chain letter, I’m still working off all the bad luck from all the mirrors I accidentally broke as a teenager. The emails from a former Nigerian minister wanting my bank account info to smuggle a huge fortune out of his country are more entertaining than this.

The circular item in the square envelope was smaller than an LP record, larger than an 45 record, and too padded for a CD or DVD disc. The mysterious object was a mouse pad for subscribing to The New York Review of Books. Whoopee-a-do. The funny thing is that I don’t recognize a single literary author from the pencil drawings on the mouse pad. Although I took many literature courses during my first tour through college in the early 1990’s, I guess I missed the course on early 20th-century literary giants. You would think that the NYRB could update their pencil drawings to include latter 20th-century literary giants like, say, Stephen King.