Stupid hairy whining idiot inspires same

You might think that people who assumed spluttering responsibility without asking on behalf of old soldiers who'd fought in wars with guns would win the best marrow prize in the garden fete of vocal outrage, but you've reckoned without comfortably middle-class 14-year-olds who aspire to be American and blame everyone but their idiot hero when their idiot hero kills himself.

AP39's CAM WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY: I think it was Kurt, in the garage, with the shotgun.

Hoo lordy. The postbag we got for this one outweighed all others, with straggling handfuls of abusive letters lingering over several months. How DARE we? Lovely Kurt CHANGED LIVES. We would LOSE OURS. Cam would be HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED. Lovely Kurt would LIVE FOREVER. And so on.

The volume and ferocity of hate mail was such that Cam took the exceptional step of explaining himself in AP42's Do the Write Thing, in a reply to a typical Lovely Kurt letter.

"CHANGED MY OPINION"

Dear AMIGA POWER,
I have always been a reader of your mag and enjoyed it so much that I became a subscriber and had the bonus of an excellent free game and subscriber letter. I've never had a thing to complain about in the magazine, until I was looking at the contents page of issue 39 and was reading the little messages and noticed that one of them said "Cam would just like to say: 'I think it was Kurt, in the garage, with the shotgun.'"

I found this deeply upsetting as I have long been a fan of Nirvana and was very saddened to hear of Kurt Cobain's death. This has seriously changed my opinion of AMIGA POWER and I will have to think very hard as to whether I'll continue to get your mag.

Yours sincerely, Nirvana Fan

PS When Cam fell off his bike I hope it caused him a lot of pain, and I hope his bike was a complete write-off.

Cam says: "Well Mr Fan, I've mended well and my bike's in top condition too which, let's face it, is more than can be said for Kurt. John Lennon's untimely death was unavoidable and therefore a tragedy. Kurt Cobain's was just plain stupid. I think it's pathetic to see such a rich, talented and famous pop star ignore his privileged position, wallow in self-pity and then top himself. Thanks for the concern about my near-fatal collision with a car, though."

You might think that this calm, well-reasoned reply (that let Lovely Kurt off rather lightly, tactfully deferring from mentioning how his idiot selfishness smashed up his family) would have been the end of it. Nope. We were picking shards of postal abuse from Lovely Kurt fans out of our hair at least for the rest of the year. Good job THNTRNTeiee wasn't around at the time, really.

Coincidentally, two letters in the same ish complained about Andrés Escobar's appearance in Points of View at around the same time. Roy Harris of Bolton "failed to see the funny side of it," took us to task for our "totally unjustifed" "insensitive comments" and then attached exactly as much weight as his righteous disgust to a missing review of a Sensi data disk in his next paragraph. More AP-ly, "Yours, seagulls-for-champ-iously, Kate Flannagan, Worthing" called it "a bit off" while posing some football- and kitten-related questions. And wee-work-experience- lackey-to-be "Rick" Doidge popped up in And Another Thing... above someone congratulating previous wee work experience lackey James Attwood on his good fortune, though without the thicky pop star/hapless kickabout angle.

This just goes to show something, although we're sure we don't know what.