DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

It’s a sad day for online journal fans… two of my daily reads (dack, eod) have gone off the air.

The phone rings.

“Yes, hello?” I say, practicing my radio DJ voice, deep and mellifluous.

An accented and agitated female asks an odd question: “Who’s bacon?” It’s Agent Starling! But why is she asking for bacon? It’s not even breakfast time.

“Who’s bacon?” I say back to her. While there are no doubt hundreds of witty responses one might employ when a caller asks, “Who’s bacon,” exactly none of them came to mind. I did wonder if this was a Hannibal reference — maybe she’d stumbled across a serving of hickory smoked bias-cut while on the trail of Hannibal Lecter and wondered about the source. That is, maybe the question wasn’t “Who owns that bacon,” but “Who is that bacon?” But in the moment, as now, I was unable to distill that joke into a pithy 3-4 words.

“Who’s baking?” she said, somewhat more clearly. I marvel that I’m discussing breakfast foods with a Hollywood celebrity.

“Ahh, baking. I might be, later, but…” I can’t imagine how she would know that. Is there a camera crew shooting through my kitchen window? I imagine the operator zooming in on a jar of sourdough starter bubbling quietly on the sink while television viewers worldwide sit on the edges of their seats, listening to my baffled responses through a crackly satellite link to the broadcast station. “Can I ask who’s calling?”

Alas, she didn’t own up to being Clarice Starling, or even Jodie Foster. She muttered something about dialing the wrong number — a likely story! — and hung up on me.

I’ve had a dedicated net connection for over three years. The result: 95% of the books, CDs, computers, disk drives, RAM and CPU upgrades, printers, scanners, monitors, and pieces of furniture I’ve purchased in that time, and probably half of everything else I’ve bought other than food, has been mail-ordered via the Web.

Which means, among other things, that once or twice a week some uniformed truck-driver guy comes to my door with yet another box, to ask for a signature and chuckle at the enormous jumble of the carcasses of previous deliveries in my garage. Four times a year I spend a Saturday afternoon cutting down boxes to be recycled, in what I consider to be a modern analogue to traditional pantheistic seasonal celebrations.

Modern man is not particularly reliant on agricultural cycles and so has little reason to feel connected to traditional Spring and Fall celebrations — the only thing I “plant” is my ass in a chair, and the only things I “harvest” are the log files from my server. So, whereas ancient civilizations celebrated the Vernal Equinox as the start of the breeding and farming season, I celebrate the Vernal Equinox by cutting down cardboard boxes. And when ancient civilizations celebrated the Autumnal Equinox with the Fall harvest, my celebration is cutting down more cardboard boxes.

The pantheists also celebrated the longest and shortest days of the year, the Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice. I have modern analogues for these celebrations too, because as a benefit of modern civilization I am able to mail-order books and CDs and so on all year long. So every December 21 I dedicate some of the very few hours of sunlight and — you guessed it — cut down cardboard boxes. I do the same thing every June 22. If you’re wondering why I’m a month early this time out, it’s because I have so many damn cardboard boxes.

My gym goals for the summer:
a) bench press my body weight
b) perform ten bar dips without power assist

I’m 30-40 lbs short of both goals, which means I either have a tough few months of training ahead of me, or I’m going to have to amputate one of my legs.

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