Nothing nothing nothing

[boatman]

OK, so I moaned about the abank being deluged with that riddle (Paul Harvey Riddle, etc.) to which the answer is 'nothing', but now I've come across it all over the place so I'm getting interested. Where did it originate and who the hell is Paul Harvey?

[Larisa]

I don't know about the origin of the riddle. But Paul Harvey is a talk show host in the states. He does a morning bit that is syndicated for a lot of AM morning shows, and he does ammusement, irony, stuff like that that is real. This riddle doesn't sound too much like him though...

[libtdb]

If you search Google for Paul Harvey Riddle you'll find: http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/harveyridd
le.html which suggests that the riddle was tacked on to the end of an email chain letter to encourage people to send it on: "Send this to 10 people and then press shift and you will get the answer". Yeah, right! "The title of the email chain letter was 'These things I wish for you'. The real author was Lee Pitts and it was published in Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul in 2000" (so you can imagine what it is like!). "The Harvey attribution may be because the theme of the essay is similar to other essays that have been misattributed to him, or it could be that Harvey read it on his syndicated radio show in 1997." Not sure how he read it out 3 years before it was published though...