DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Jon Carroll published a fascinating idea today. If it catches on, it could permanently scar the junk-mail industry, by making the perpetrators pay a lot more than they bargained for.

The idea, in a nutshell, is to send back, empty, the free reply envelopes included with the junk mail. This forces the sender to pay the return postage.

Imagine the millions of pieces of trash some of these companies send out every day, which go straight into the recycler or (worse) into landfills. Now imagine millions of enterprising junk-mail victims returning the reply envelopes empty, burying the junk-mailer’s processing center in a deluge of what appears to be legitimate business. The processing center hires additional staff to open all these envelopes, only to find that most of them contain nothing but perhaps a little love note, something along the lines of “junk mail sucks, and it’s a real pity I’ve helped drive you to financial ruin, not.” Heh.

It’s damn intriguing. Here is the column in full: Let’s save the Postal Service

I have spent approximately 24 hours over the past two weekends cleaning my house: steam-cleaning carpets, purging files, cutting and recycling cardboard boxes, caulking baseboard trim, rearranging furniture. Why would I do this? I’m afraid to say it’s evolutionary, a forgotten gene deep in my DNA that has awakened and is now guiding my actions, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly when he inadvertently rewrites his gene structure in a freak teleportation accident and subsequently turns into a nightmarish, 185-lb. housefly… one day he’s a quirky scientist, the next day he’s barfing on Entenmann’s and hanging out on the ceiling.

Becoming a housefly is not the problem, but the transformation I’m facing does have symptoms. Here’s the diagnostic checklist:

• white T-shirt — check.
  
• wry smile — check.
  
• gold hoop earring — check.
  
• exaggerated upper-body musculature — working on that.
  
• bald pate — working on that too.
  
• spotless floors — check.

My worst fears are realized: I’m becoming Mr. Clean!

The BBC reports that Douglas Adams has died of a heart attack.

This is brutally sad news.

He sped home, leaning shakily into gravel-strewn corners, sending pebbles skittering out at tangents to the arc of the turn. The motorbike wobbled as he straightened out of the corner: the trembling had already started.

The bike was left on its sidestand in the garage. In his haste, he left the key in the ignition too.

It had been less than 24 hours and he already needed a fix. The intervals were getting shorter, and the doses larger. This is the cycle of doom; the body becomes conditioned to the stimuli that indicate that a dose is imminent, allowing tolerance to build, requiring ever-larger amounts to be ingested. Addiction.

With spastic hands he selected his implements: a long serrated knife and a shorter, duller knife too. He sliced the bread thick, toasted it for 75 seconds, covered one side with peanut butter and ungraciously stuffed the entire thing into his mouth, whole.

Sigh.

I’ve been upgrading my incandescent light fixtures to compact fluorescent (CF), to take advantage of the huge energy savings. (70+% savings is typical. That is, you can replace a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 25-watt CF, which produces a roughly equivalent amount of light.)

The first CFs I purchased were Feit Mini-Twist Ecobulbs from Costco. They’re not wonderful; the bulb is very long, so it doesn’t fit in most fixtures, and the color temperature of the light is probably 2600° K, so the light seems overly yellow/orange and somewhat dingy. Standard household bulbs range from 2800° to 3000° K, depending on wattage, so these CFs weren’t far out of range but do cast a sickly light.

The second set is radically different. I purchased three 15-watt full-spectrum bulbs from fullspectrumsolutions.com for a tiny, dark bathroom. These bulbs have a color temp of 5500° K, or about the same as midday sun. The result is fantastic; from outside the bathroom, it now looks as if the room has a large window above the sink. Inside the bathroom the light is almost unnaturally white (which is ironic, in that it mimics perhaps the most natural light there is). This light is definitely different, but it appeals to me, possibly for the same reasons full-spectrum bulbs are used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder. (Full-spectrum light stimulates the endocrine system, and who wouldn’t want their endocrine system stimulated? Certainly not me. I’m always up for a solid jolt to the endocrine system; in fact I have a pituitary massage scheduled for Tuesday.)

If you’re researching compact fluorescents, here’s an interesting article: Compact Fluorescent Lamps: What You Should Know.