[Magdalen] Gary Dahl, RIP

[Jim Guthrie]

Gary Who????

The "inventor" of the must have Christmas Gift of 1975: the Pet Rock

It was a craze to rival the Hula-Hoop, and even less explicable. For a mere 
three dollars and 95 cents, a consumer could buy ... a rock — a plain, ordinary, 
egg-shaped rock of the kind one could dig up in almost any backyard.

The wonder of it was, for a few frenzied months in 1975, more than a million 
consumers did, becoming the proud if slightly abashed owners of Pet Rocks, the 
fad that Newsweek later called “one of the most ridiculously successful 
marketing schemes ever.”
Read it all At

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/us/gary-dahl-inventor-of-the-pet-rock-dies-at-78.html

And don’t miss the fact that Dahl:

was also vastly proud of having won, in 2000, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 
which honors deliberately dreadful prose. (His winning entry began, “The 
heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, 
hunched precariously over the moors.”)

Cheers,
Jim

"The enemy isn’t liberalism;
the enemy isn’t conservatism.
The enemy, is baloney." - Lars Erik Nelson