Of Monkeys and Email

A few years ago, Gund—the plush animal manufacturer—came out with a new product: Garstang Gorilla. I was shocked when I heard about it. The thing was cute, but what the heck kind of name was Garstang for a stuffed gorilla? I contacted the Gund Corporation and was informed that the CEO had been driving around in the northwestern part of England where Gund has a manufacturing facility and saw the town of Garstang. He thought it would make nice alliteration with “gorilla” and so the name was born. The rest of this is conjecture, but someone must have pointed out—after the product had been available for some years—that the monkey in question looked more like a chimpanzee than a gorilla. Now the product is available as Garstang Chimpanzie. The alliteration is gone, and I’m guessing the product will disappear. (In fact, I can’t find it on the Gund website, although it’s still available from toy stores and Amazon.com. And I bought a couple of them for myself.)

But here’s a chimp of a different sort—MailChimp. In preparation for the publication of my new book, I began to explore using MailChimp, the email marketing campaign site, to make things easier, manage my email lists, etc. And today, my very first MailChimp email went out. I was excited to get responses from people, and only a few complaints. Believe me, I won’t be sending out very many messages to my list, but I apologize if the emails inconvenienced anyone. It’s really easy to opt out, if that’s what you want to do. If you didn’t get the email but would like to receive future notices, it’s also easy to opt in. Go to the home page of this website and complete the form in the upper right corner.

Thank you!

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