Reader's Digest

When I was a kid, I was forced, FORCED, I tell you, to either go to the beach or go sailing every weekend.  Yeah, life was hard.

At the beach, I would read one or two stories out of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and also every story out of the magazine.  We must have had 100 of those Condensed Books volumes at home.  I mostly read thrillers; I think The Jackal (Abridged) was the most memorable story.  Oh, and The Terminal Man (Abridged).  That was a good one.

*Sigh*.  Now Reader's Digest has gone bankrupt.  But at LRC.com I read that Reader's Digest was a CIA front.  (If you believe LRC.com, everything is a CIA front.)  But, in one of life's great ironies (since Reader's Digest was supposedly edited at the sixth grade level) I have learned a new word from RD's demise:  sinecures.

But wait, a little Googling and we learn this is a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy:  that's the kind where a company files for "protection from creditors" and expects to leave bankruptcy a healthy company.  Which sounds great until you read that this is RD's second bankruptcy in 3 1/2 years.

I guess the CIA just doesn't pay the way it used to.