For years we have suffered from the incredible volume of junk mail delivered by our carriers. Usually, after each mail delivery I stand by the trash basket and sort through the material.  Most of the items are immediately assigned to the trash, and more than half of the remaining items are discarded after examination.  Finding something really worthwhile is like discovering a pearl buried within a bed of oysters.  Every year it seems that the volume and percentage of junk mail increases.

As an illustration of the worthlessness of most of this material, I tell you the following story.

Sometime in the year 1970, shortly after our move to Columbia, I received an advertisement from a publishing house in New York city.  On opening, it turned out to be a brochure extolling the benefits of a Danish produced “how to” manual on sexual technique. In return for my investment, the publisher promised to deliver me a book (with appropriate illustrations) that would transform me into a “Danish Sex Dynamo”  —  a veritable “Scandinavian Superman.”  I showed the material to my wife, and we both got a good laugh before consigning the brochure to the trash basket.

A few days later, I decided that I might make a little money off the incident.  I wrote a letter to the editor of Reader’s Digest’s American humor section.  The letter read as follows:

Dear Editor:

I don’t know how or why, but I received a letter from a publishing house in New York that promised, in return for a sum of money, to deliver instructional materials guaranteed to transform me into a ‘Danish Sex Dynamo’ — a veritable ‘Scandinavian Superman’.

I showed the ad to my wife and we both got a good laugh from it.  However, despite a certain gleam of interest in my wife’s eyes, a survey of our family’s resources, including our five non-Danish sons, convinced me that neither the family’s economy — nor the nation’s ecology — could stand the possible strain.

Yours, etc. 

I thought it was funny, but perhaps the Reader’s Digest editor thought otherwise. He didn’t respond, and my letter wasn’t published.

I told some of my friends at work about the incident, and the story spread like wildfire.  For many months afterwards I was known as the DSD – the Danish Sex Dynamo.  During the following months I did nothing to demonstrate my sexual prowess, so my fame slowly faded