Everybody’s business

Dicking around
Finally, the day has come for all men named Dick. For a small fee, they can now become card-carrying members of the official Dick Society and show off merchandise celebrating the most phallic of names.

The Web site, www.thedicksociety.com, went up last week, started by a Chico man named, guess what? Dick.

Dick said that in part because of his prominence in the community, he’d rather keep his last name secret. I told him that since fictitious business name filings are public record, that makes him kind of a, well, dick.

That’s cool, he said. ‘I’m not doing this for me.” Rather, the top Dick wants to celebrate Dick heritage worldwide. ‘Our name is wonderful. And people make fun of our name.”

Your name doesn’t have to be a derivative of Richard to join the society. Women can even join and purchase a T-shirt proclaiming, ‘I married a Dick.”

Other products, available in various ‘packages,” include golf balls and wine openers. ‘It’s very classy,” the big Dick said. ‘Everything is top of the line.”

He said there are already 25 members, many of them Dicks and friends-of-Dicks he happened to know. In 2005, a Dick Convention will be hosted in Las Vegas.

Time is Goldsmith
Online radio pioneer Bill Goldsmith, profiled in a July 2003 News & Review story, has now made the pages of Time magazine. I hesitate to say that gives the Paradise resident just a mite more exposure.

Bill is featured in the lead photo, and he and his wife, Rebecca, are quoted in the article, “The Revolution in Radio,” in Time’s April 19 issue.

Goldsmith, you may remember, has been running a popular Internet radio station (www.radioparadise.com) from his home and is teaching others to do the same. The Internet stations, along with their satellite counterparts, are an alternative to the predictable corporate programming of commercial radio.

The comical
And now, a personal story. Back in October, a guy came to our house and offered to sign us up for three months of the San Francisco Chronicle for $20. My husband, a newspaper junkie, forked over the dough. When I found out, I was kind of annoyed, both because he tends to leave the papers strewn all over the house and because I never believe these promotional deals will stop on time.

Sure enough, we started getting bills from the Chronicle. Every time, Tom would call and tell them we were on the three-month deal and they’d apologize and promise to take care of it. So what should we get in the mail last week? A notice that we’d been sent to collections. The Chronicle was trying to screw up our credit for something we’d already paid for.

Boy, was Tom steamed. He called up the paper and told them they’d better call off the collection agency. The supervisor agreed and also revealed that we—and the Chronicle—had been scammed: The fellow who came to our door signed people up for the paper all right, but he never passed along the money.

The moral is, never trust anyone. Or something like that.