Mike Tharp: All the news unfit to print

These people live among us.

Most of them, thankfully, not anywhere near Merced County. You'll soon see why we should be thankful.

"Over the transom" is a phrase used by old-time newsies to describe tips, proposals and story ideas that find themselves into a newsroom in unorthodox and unsolicited ways.

Mike Tharp

They can be a phone call, somebody wandering in to the Sun-Star front counter, a letter -- some of the barely legible handwritten ones or those typed in all capital letters might as well be stamped "Kook Alert!"

Those often purport to contain secret knowledge about who really killed JFK, how the government, with henchmen in black helicopters, has implanted ID chips in citizens' buttocks or the writer's experience while being molested by "the Grays," a certain breed of alien.

This is one reason we have a big blue recycle bin in the newsroom.

But in the Internet age, they come out of the ether. Specifically to an online queue called "Editor" at the Sun-Star. For reasons known, maybe, only to the senders, these messages arrive from all over the world. Daily. Hourly. At last count, 9,215 of them awaited an editor on his return from overseas.

A handful are legit. Letters to the Editor, news releases about local and Valley events and issues.

But the vast majority get, and deserve, the "delete" key.

To show you, our audience, part of the process how we weed the chaff from the wheat for your consumption, here are some examples.

Keep in mind that these are typical.

Keep in mind that these people live among us.

IHRO sends us a story that an Iranian dissident killed in June may have been killed by the CIA -- not by the mad mullahs in Tehran. IHRO is the International Human Rights Organization of the Indian subcontinent.

Dr. Mustafa Kamal Sherani, LL.D, also in India, sends a poem called "Oh my brother Michael Jackson!"

Inamjohari Abdul-Malik of worldpress.com "was born in 1956 and grew up with 'the Jackson 5.'" He's sorry, he writes to Jermaine, c/o the Sun-Star, because "I don't think we have been there for you, your brother or you family."

Back home in the US of A, the Constitution Party thunders that it has "joined a massive effort to stop the country's largest (per capita) spy cam program." The program is located in Lancaster, Pa.

Overseas again, Farah Chaudhry offers these stories at only "$150 each!" Many hungry Africans "have resorted to eating wild fruit." Plus, "Malawi's farmers are being taught on what to eat in order to survive."

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms warns that you may be "on a terrorist watch list without your knowledge." The list has more than a million names. And did you know that since Obama was elected, "3 people make a donation to an anti-gun group every minute?" We didn't.

Dale Carnegie training. Whoops. That's a real news release.

Five commenters, including "Gunner," praise an early 20th century poster of Gen. "Black" Jack Pershing. Before World War I, to quell a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines, he had his men slaughter two pigs in front of 50 "terrorist" prisoners. Forty-nine were shot by a firing squad, their bodies dumped into "a big hole" along with the bloody pigs. The 50th terrorist was let go. "And for the next 42 years there was not a single Muslim terrorist attack anywhere in the world." Hmmm.

"Jack Lancaster" hurls numerous e-mails a day. A recent one tells us that the European Union has protected "kosher slaughter" and includes a photo of a butchered bleeding cow. "Continuing the fight for a better world," Jack concludes.