A Famous Person E-Mailed Me

Yes these are quite skimpy, but who cares. I'm putting them up. Where are your celebrity letters?

Scott Adams ("Dilbert" creator)

I love Dilbert. I read an interview with creator Scott Adams in some magazine and it was struck by the number of eerily similar interests/lifestyles we both shared that are somewhat unusual … such as working off a G4 at our home office (not so unusual) which we both set up to share a monitor/keyboard with a Dell (I thought I was the only one), dealing with hundreds of incoming e-mails via highly engineered Eudora filters, frequent checking of our books' ranking on Amazon, even technolust for the same specific gadgets. In regards to the latter, he said he just got a Tivo, which I had just purchased. So I was inspired to write him. I didn't expect a reply, but here it is.

From: ScottAdams@aol.com
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002
Re: fan mail and Amazon tip

Anne-Marie,

That is indeed a spooky coincidence.

I lust after your newer Tivo. Mine only records one show at a time. I must upgrade.

And if you don't already have a talking navigator in your car, you really need one. They are great fun.

Scott Adams

Guy Kawasaki
The Chicago Tribune's computer writer wrote a front-page story when Microsoft invested some money in Apple, and made it seem that Apple was going down the tubes. I wrote a very long, full of statistics letter back to them and cc'd Guy Kawasaki, Apple's first "Software Evangelist" as well as other Chicago media outlets. The Trib never responded, but it got me 2 appearances as a panelist on TV's "Chicago Tonight with John Calloway" as an Apple defender.

Subject: Re: Inaccurate Trib article
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 97
From: Guy Kawasaki

Anne-Marie:

It was a great letter! I'm not posting calls-to-action on Evangelista these days because they may be doing more harm than good, but I was surely tempted by yours!

I really appreciate your doing this!

Guy

John F. Kennedy
Conspiracy theorists: Is it completely inconceivable that JFK's death was faked, he was relocated to Japan and in 1997 he was on a web design listserv? And he "appreciated my informative posts"? Check out that sig — a reference to the eternal flame? Hmmmmm? Seriously, the From: field made my eyeballs pop when I scanned my InBox that day ...

Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997
From: "John F. Kennedy" <jfk@gol.com>
Subject: Re: Learning Javascript?

Hi Ann-Marie,

I mainly lurk on the list (I'm a mega-beginner). I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your informative posts. You seem to have something interesting and useful to post on just about everything!

John F. Kennedy
Tokyo, Japan
"Flame not lest ye be flamed"