Dear Reader (Including the few left who still think jokes about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s swollen testicles are still funny),

I have a very nice note from George H.W. Bush somewhere in my “files.”

I use scare quotes around “files” because to call the scattered piles of policy effluvia and literary litter strewn around my office “files” is a bit like calling the retrieved contents of a Sbarro dumpster a “tasting menu.”

Anyway, it was a brief thank-you note for repeatedly sticking up for him over the once infamous, now largely forgotten, “supermarket scanner scandal.” For you young’ns, here’s what I wrote about it 21 years ago: