Kiwi Monkey Tricks World's Letters Editors

An anagram reveals that MONKEYS WRITE the NEW YORK TIMES. A mischievous monkey from New Zealand named Andrew Prieditis has fooled the New York Times' owned International Herald-Tribune's letters editor into publishing a letter showing a fake address.


What's more, using other false addresses, he has similarly tricked leading newspapers in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and the Philippines.

Facing falling revenue from sales and advertising in the global economic depression, newspapers, some on the brink of bankruptcy, have slashed staff numbers. Overworked letters editors often have little time to check the bona fIDes of their correspondents, so Prieditis gets his opinions published by using phony addresses.

His greatest success was a story headed "My plan to be president" which made top place in the August 1 Opinion blog of the Dallas Morning News in Texas:

If I were a Republican interested in becoming president, I'd hitch my star to Sarah Palin's wagon. She will run for president in 2012.

I'd stay so close that after her nomination for president by the Republican Party, she'd have to choose me as her running mate. With her charisma and conservative views, our ticket would be elected.

Then, after two years of serving as president, when she tired of a probing media, outside agitators and an uncooperative Congress -- and became convinced that she could help the nation better being outside of government -- she'd resign. Then I'd be president.

--Andrew Prieditis, Dallas.

Right alongside it was an editorial introduction: "This Blog was the first in the nation created by an editorial board to give readers a behind-the-scenes view of the discussion that goes into crafting the newspaper's daily editorials."

Prieditis's epistle, also published by The Seattle Times and other newspapers, set off chains of readers' comments, for and against Sarah Palin.

In another Texan city, journalist Kevin Whited wrote:

Although the Houston Chronicle has 'an informal 90-day waiting period between letters being published,' Mr. Prieditis of Houston managed to get two letters (one on Sarah Palin on 3 August and one on Joe Biden on 7 August) published within days of each other.
'Punking' the Hearst daily -- especially now that former letters editor Judy Minshew is no longer around... is a little like adults taking candy from children.

Dubbing Prieditis "a citizen of the world," Whited said "Mr. Prieditis isn't a one-trick pony, nor is he just a man of this nation. He has managed to get letters on various topics published all over the world."

Googling his name, you can find letters published by the New York Times from Andrew Prieditis of Hamilton, New Zealand , the London Independent, from Andrew Prieditis of Elland, West Yorkshire, and the Jerusalem Post (Israel) from Andrew Prieditis of Washington. The Birmingham Post published a comment from Andrew Prieditis, from Lionel Street, Birmingham. The headline was "Olympic Games Must Go Back to the Future in Search for Renewed Credibility." That's what Andrew needs!

Down Under, Rupert Murdoch's national newspaper, The Australian, ran this letter from Andrew Prieditis of Torquay, Queensland on August 6:

WHAT does Somalia have in common with Australia? Until recently, almost nothing. The two nations, if Somalia can still be called a nation, had basically zero historical, economic and cultural links until the Department of Immigration began accepting some Somali refugees to Australia.

Now we are told by the Australian Federal Police there is a direct link between the violent mayhem in Somalia and an alleged plot to attack and kill soldiers at the Holsworthy army base in Sydney.

Even if these arrests do not survive the scrutiny of the legal process, they are a reminder that our security services have a constant and difficult task of sifting through the mountain of daily communication and identifying danger. Tuesday’s raids were a reminder of what they are doing and why.

In his home country, the prolific letterwriter fooled Auckland's New Zealand Herald, which published a letter from Andrew Prieditis of Kaitaia, urging Kiwis to eat less sugar and take more exercise, . Then down in Invercargill, the Southland Times ran an email from Andrew Prieditis of Hamilton urging them to "shake off the ghosts of the Rugby World Cup 2007."

He even proffered advice to New Zealand's Prime Minister, John Key before Key was elected to that position. It's still there on the PM's video journal:
John: I've recently returned from living 6 years in the United States. It is there that my eyes were opened up to the principles of limited Government in action and lower taxes. I do hope that in the next election, the National party pushes taxes as a big issue as I think, with enough persuasion of the NZ public, it could be the single factor which pushes the party over the winning line.

Where does the mysterious scribbler really live? In the US or New Zealand? Perhaps the answer is on the website of his old school, Kamo High, near Whangarei, two hours' drive north of Auckland. He wrote:

I was a student at Kamo High School in 1995 and 1996, the latter being my 7th form year (I'm amazed at how fast time has gone since then!). I then went on to study applied mathematics at the University of Waikato, graduating with a BSc in 2000.

After that I headed for the United States, and I'm now living in the state of Maryland (near Washington D.C.), working for a real estate transaction company as a Technology Coordinator. I am now also married to a lovely American woman!

Another verbose writer, Oscar Brittle, invaded Sydney's four daily newspapers' letter pages with a hilarious series of posts that infuriated thousands of readers. You can read about him in OhmyNewsInternational: Australia's Funniest Ghost Writer.

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Australia's Funniest Ghost Writer

This story was first published by OhmyNewsInternational. To read their version, with interesting illustrations and live links, please cut and paste this address: http://tinyurl.com/ct5z7s

Oscar Brittle stirred and disturbed his readers

Animal lovers, rejoice! Oscar Brittle has been gagged at last. He would have upset you had you read this letter to the Sydney Morning Herald:

I believe that I have eaten more types of animal than anybody else on the planet. I have eaten (not necessarily in this order): cow, sheep, pig, shark, goat, camel, horse, kangaroo, wallaby, wallaroo, potoroo, bandicoot, duck, chicken, pigeon, whale, wild dog, wild cat, cat, fish, catfish, dormouse, python, toad, turtle, monkey, impala, sea urchin, slug, jellyfish, fox, grouse, alligator, llama, vulture, mole, lobster, mongoose, daddy-long-legs, salamander …"

That letter was just one of hundreds Oscar sent to the editors of Sydney's four daily newspapers in an 18-month writimg frenzy. Like many other letterwriters, talkback radio callers and bloggers, Oscar was an opinionated blowhard who wrote stacks of provocative nonsense and misquoted facts.

Here are extracts from a few of his letters, which often drew heated replies, mostly as email comments to the newspapers that had published his rants:

o Dear editor, I turned on the television on Saturday morning and saw a video clip for the first time in years. I have discovered that 68 per cent of Federal MPs are obese, showing off the tops of their bottoms with apparent impunity.

o Tomorrow, I and I suspect many of my ilk, will once again firmly stamp my ecological feet and take the car to town. Climate change is one thing, but passenger comfort is not to be undervalued.

o Whatever happened to manners on the road? At present, there seem to be more road rages than ever.

o Recent research shows that young people are having sex younger and younger. … Dear, oh dear!

o Video clips have come a long way in 25 years. For three horrible hours, I watched in disgust and denial as young women gallivanted about the place in tiny swimsuits, braziers, underpants and other garments that a man should only see in the boudoir.

o Does anyone have any information about shutting the internet down for good, or is it too late?

But Oscar wrote too many letters for his own good. Eventually, Amanda Meade, aptly-named media diarist in The Australian newspaper, became suspicious. She wrote:

An Oscar for Best Actor.

DIARY calls on prolific letter writer "Oscar Brittle of Killara" to identify himself. After a series of curious letters were published in The Daily Telegraph, we tried to verify that Brittle was a real person. Here is Brittle on public transport: "The morning trip was pleasant enough, as I sat next to a handsome, lightly perfumed young woman, read the paper and even attempted a Sudoku puzzle" ...The opinionated Brittle is not listed in the White Pages and he does not exist on the electoral roll. But he has popped up in Column 8 in The Sydney Morning Herald and on the letters pages of The Australian. So beware, letters editors everywhere, there may be another phantom on the loose.

Meade was right. It turned out that Brittle was a ghost, the brainchild of three young Canberra writers, Glenn Fowler , Christopher Smyth and Gareth Malone

Interviewed in Australia's ABC-TV Stateline program, http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/act/content/2006/s2535731.htm author Fowler described Oscar Brittle:

He is generally a fairly conservative, indignant older chap from the leafy, neat, established northern Sydney suburb of Killara. Very opinionated.

What we tried to do was create somebody who has that combination of ignorance and outspokenness. He's got an opinion on anything. He's got ideas about anything and he's quite prepared to share them. He doesn't check things very often. He gets things wrong.

We tried to create maximum confusion and maximum offence with many of the letters, and we wanted the readers of the letters to be shocked. Obviously, first of all, that would be the editors doing the reading, and if they then got published and other people read them, we wanted to provoke responses, we wanted people to write letters back. And, fortunately, that happened in a lot of cases. So, Oscar offends virtually everybody on the planet in his letters, unless they're exactly like him.

Dear Editor... The Collected Letters of Oscar Brittle have now been published as a highly entertaining book.
http://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9781742230115.htm

The publisher's blurb says:

In an eighteen month campaign to wrest control of the debates in the nation’s newspapers and magazines from the wishy-washies and the weaklings, Oscar Brittle became (arguably) the most significant and powerful contributor to public debate in contemporary Australia.

This book is a collection of published letters and their originals, published replies from various correspondents, email exchanges between Oscar and editors, as well as the rejected letters, all interspersed with gorgeous illustrations throughout.

There really was a man who devoted much of his life to tasting as many different animal species as he could find. Dr William Buckland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland (1784-1856), Dean of Westminster and a professor at Oxford University (UK) tried to eat specimens of every living thing.

He was a frequent visitor to London Zoo, as he lived nearby. When an exotic animal died, he took the opportunity to taste its flesh. On one occasion, a leopard died and was buried while he was away on holiday. Returning to London, he dug it up, to taste leopard steak in the name of science.

The dean pronounced moles and bluebottles (flies) to have the worst flavors.

He taught his son, Francis Trevelyan
Buckland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Trevelyan_Buckland (1826-1880) to enjoy the flesh of exotic animals by participating in banquets of ostrich, crocodile, hedgehog and mice on toast.

Frank inherited his father's interests. While studying at Oxford, he complained of the “horribly bitter” taste of earwigs. Frank became a popular scientific author and lecturer.

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