Some wonderful person has put my personal e-mail address on a mailing list that is being bought or acquired by folks in the entertainment industry who send out press releases. I do have a special e-mail address for stuff like that. It's press@newsfromme.com and I welcome anything sent to that address. But suddenly, a flurry of e-mailed press releases are coming to my personal address, the one to which human beings send real messages.
A lot of these press releases seem to think I'm a huge website like Slate or Salon and they're offering to set up personal phone interviews for me with TV and movie stars or authors. So far, it's no one I yearn to meet but one of these days, I may just take them up on one of these offers.
The main thing I'm thinking of doing is starting a policy that if anyone sends an unsolicited press release to one of my e-mail addresses other than the one above, I'll write a little sentence about the movie, TV show, product, CD, book (whatever it is) and say it's a piece of dogshit. It'll be interesting to see if that makes the unsolicited press releases stop and if so, how fast. Maybe if I also write that the people responsible for the dogshit are probably sex criminals…