Alaska, eh? (no, Georgia....)

[syntonic_comma]

Someone posted a photo of this letter in mock_the_stupid:

I poked around and found it was from the Peninsula Clarion of Kenai, Alaska. [Site link requires registration.]

Letter to the Editor
Web posted Monday, January 29, 2007

Reader voices strong opinion on atheists
Letter to the Editor

Comments

[crwilley]

The really sick thing is, someone did some Googling, and found the same letter, word-for-word through "Get off of our country.", printed in the Augusta (GA) Chronicle in October 2001. Alice couldn't even generate her own badly-written screed.

[syntonic_comma]

Thanks for that info and the link. I wanted to find the 11 Oct 2001 article on Gail Pepin that triggered this earlier letter, so I registered on the Chronicle's web site. Their registration is identical to Peninsula Clarion's. Maybe it's coincidence that they use the same company to build and maintain their websites. Or maybe both papers are owned by the same company.

[eviltomble]

That was rather wince-inducing, but...
...did you see this? I'm not sure if it's true or not I'm afraid, as the link wanted registration, but it seemed plausiblish.

[syntonic_comma]

That's the same letter, text and photo link above. (It's a different photo, but a photo of the same letter from the same newspaper.) I went ahead and registered, and the paper is the Peninsula Clarion of Kenai, Alaska. But crwilley's comment above sheds an interesting light. The letters are on the two newspapers' web sites, so I'm going to treat them as true unless someone wants to go to Augusta or Kenai and check the newspaper morgues or public-library archives.

Following those writers' own logic, freedom of thought should require them to THINK. I say we kick them out so they can live some place where they don't have to think.

[crwilley]

It's possible that "Alice Shannon" saw the original letter somehow and used it in the alleged bit of...performance art, for lack of a better term. Most people don't seem to have picked up on the original letter - I saw it mentioned on a thread at Pharyngula - where, after I stopped reading the thread but before I looked it up just now, someone also posted that there is no Alice Shannon listed in the phone book for Soldotna.

The original letter from 2001 appeared on a page with two others criticizing the same column written by an atheist, which gives it a bit more credibility.

[syntonic_comma]

I had tried googling for >>-Alice Shannon Soldotna AK<<, hoping to find any Shannon family listing (phone could be in a spouse's or parent's name), but came up empty. (There's a lot of people up there with a first name of Shannon though.)