Magazine publishers are getting desperate. I’m sure they have fallen on hard times. No one wants them anymore. Take “National Geographic”, for instance. I have never subscribed to it. There’s no need to. Any doctor’s office has them which you can steal if you need to have one. You have many friends who would gladly load you up with all you can carry, just for the asking.

So, I get this official looking envelope in the mail yesterday with one of those notices in it telling me that I MUST reply within the next few minutes or the FBI will knock on my door at 3am tomorrow. For only $175 I can have this slick highbrow magazine for the next couple of years delivered to my mail box. Now, understand this: I never communicated in any form with these people. This is a scam and should be illegal. Some poor slob is writing out a check now terrified that the Federal Storm Troupers are going to haul him off to some Gulag in the wee hours tomorrow. OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit. So what? You get the point.

The other scam is when you actually have a subscription to a magazine of your choice, and have two years before it expires, you start getting notices on a monthly basis telling you that you can renew for some really cheap price if you do it today. This is a simple scam to give them operating money in an interest free loan. You don’t owe them a dime for the next two years! If you just want to send them money, have your lawyer send them a bill for the interest you will charge them for using your money years before it is actually owed them. What are these jerks thinking? Oh, sorry, I forgot: they think we are stupid. Often enough, of course, they are right.

My solution is to dump them all and if you do want to get a magazine, do it on your iPad or Amazon reader or Nook, and avoid the clutter while feeling green at the same time.

Under the “It Ought To Be The Law” category we should be able to stamp all unsolicited mail with RETURN TO SENDER and the post office would have to take it back to them. That would be he day!