Thurston Thornton is an outspoken and inflammatory political columnist for Somebody's Webpage. His work has been published in Weekly World News, Soldier of Fortune, and Highlights for Children. We, the staff of this website, would like to emphasize that we do not endorse or approve of anything that he writes. The inclusion of his material is a matter of financial convenience to us, not one based on admiration for his work. We arrived one day at our downtown office to find Mr. Thornton making himself at home there, puffing on a cigar and drinking one of the cokes he had found in our mini-fridge.
He revealed that he was the landlord of our building, and informed us that, after conducting a brief inspection of our office, he would be unable to replace the worn carpeting and broken floor boards at that time. He also commented that the rodent problem we had been experiencing was easily remedied with mouse traps, and that the radiator worked just fine, but the boiler in the basement was very old and took a while to heat up in the morning, therefore the tenants should always wear an extra layer of clothing in the winter time. The website editor then began to bicker with Mr. Thornton about the ridiculous amount of rent he was paying, and informed the man that he was legally obligated to make the improvements that had been requested. The crafty landlord replied, "Now, now, let's not be so hasty," and offered a solution. During his snooping around he had discovered the nature of our modest Internet publishing venture. With a boyish gleam in his eye, Thurston mentioned that he had always enjoyed writing editorials, and proposed a 25% reduction in our rent as long as we posted his columns on our website. Thus, an uneasy alliance was formed and will apparently continue until the unlikely day when Somebody's Webpage becomes lucrative.
A man rumored to be
Thurston Thornton
Mr. Thornton was born in a small and picturesque town in the United States that has remained largely unchanged since the 1950s, with the exception of the ongoing crystal meth epidemic there. Thurston worked with his father, Zebediah, to evict renters that were laid off when the local textile factory shut down in the 1960s. From his mother, Eureka, he learned a deeply conservative and patriotic fundamentalist Christian faith. After dropping out of college, he held several low paying jobs but was fired from each one after less than a month, a fact that he stubbornly denies in spite of the many disturbing anecdotes, still circulating around town decades later, about his legendary on-the-job exploits, one of which involved squirting mustard into the face of a male customer with long hair. Intially drafted for military service in 1971, he was summarily disqualified by the interviewing psychologist for "expressing excessive enthusiasm for committing wartime atrocities."
Fortunately for Thurston, his father died in 1974, at which time he inherited the latter's extensive property holdings, and he began his long and continuing career as a landlord of low-cost rental housing. Married in March of 1975, Thornton divorced in April of 1975 after his mail-order Russian bride emptied his bank account and ran off to Las Vegas with some guy named Trent. This episode left Thornton with a deep-seated hatred for all things communist and socialist, and precipitated a mental breakdown from which he has yet to fully recover. Prescribed a potent cocktail of psychiatric medications for the last several years, he only takes them sporadically, and when off his meds has been known to wander through town barefoot reading loudly from the Book of Leviticus.