The sensible Toronto friend who sent me the Negroni article, when challenged, wrote me this: Oh, I never believe in Conspiracy Theories; I just enjoy the intellectual exercise of constructing these Castles In The Air*.

My admiration for a well-crafted conspiracy theory started with the letter columns of Marvel Comics and their famous "No-Prize" winning letters. Marvel got sick of people writing in and complaining about, often trivial, continuity mistakes in their stories: after all, who can keep track of the hundreds of Spider-man issues and so on? So they said that they would only publish letters pointing out such mistakes if the writer also explained why, if one looked deeper, they only appeared to be mistakes but were, in fact, indications of background stories inside the published ones. If they thought yours was a really good theory they would send you a prize in the mail.

But then the Postal Inspectors said that they couldn't send prizes and premiums through the mail using the kind of Postal Permit that Marvel had. So they sent the favoured writers a notice that they hadn't won a prize. Just to keep the pesky Postal Inspectors at bay they made things very clear by putting a notice on the envelope that said "This envelope contains NO PRIZE".

*Well, if it's a good CT. I'm terribly disappointed in the feeble attempts of the 9/11 Truthers and the Obama Birthers.

This whole story about the No Prize Prize might also be an urban legend, although my friend is normally reliable, perhaps obsessively so.