I Hate Reader's Digest

Actually, the articles are terse, informative and interesting but Reader’s Digest WON’T PUBLISH MY ANECDOTES. I’ve written several blurbs for their humor columns, Life in These United States for instance, over the years. I still have a copy of the last one I wrote. It’s a true story:

Our family drove to a planned get-together at the cabin of my parents, arriving the night before we were expected. Finding the lights out and figuring my parents had already retired to bed, we let ourselves in quietly. However, I heard my mother's voice urgently telling my father that she heard noises inside. Unable to get him to check it out, she took it upon herself to walk out of the bedroom and ask who it was coming into their cottage. The next day my mother berated my father for his cowardice, whereupon my father said, "I didn't make it through the Korean War by crawling out of my foxhole to say, 'Who's there?'"

I’ve also submitted a joke I made up myself:

Long before the Kurdish people were part of Iraq, they had their own country of Kurdistan. During one of the tribal wars then, a doctor treated a Kurdish infantryman for his wounds. The wounded man could not pay, but insisted the doctor bill him in his native town. The doctor agreed. Later, the doctor treated a horseman, who also insisted he be billed. The doctor had his assistant chisel out his bill on a slab of granite, since paper was not available. When the doctor asked his assistant to chisel out another invoice on a second piece of granite, the assistant had an inspiration. Since both the horseman and the infantryman resided in the same town, why not just chisel the second bill on the reverse side of the granite slab. Thus, the doctor’s assistant went down in history as the first man to bill two Kurds with one stone.

I heard nothing from Reader’s Digest on either. Well, not exactly nothing. By sending them my anecdotes, I ended up on their mailing list. So I get mailers every so often asking me to subscribe. I got another last week. Guess that’s life in these United States.