Howard Stern

* I am at a loss to find a point in Al Martinez’s Dec. 5 column disparaging Howard Stern, his fans and apparently modern life in general. Like Miniver Cheevy in the poem, Martinez mourns “Romance, now on the town and Art, a vagrant.”

He further stereotypes Stern’s fans as wearers of backwards baseball caps, shirtless at football games and howlers at rock concerts, yet offers no source for these demographics. I for one have two advanced degrees, run a multimillion-dollar corporation, and find Stern brutally honest and hysterically funny.

To even intimate, as Martinez does, that Stern is a creation of the media is the best evidence of his ignorance; Stern has succeeded in spite of his treatment by the media, not because of it.

RICK LESSER

Redondo Beach

* When you consider the high rate of uninspiring idiocy displayed by the general public when it comes to “star worship,” I think 15,000 first-day book-buying Stern fans is a minuscule number.

SHIRLEY WOLF