I had a dream

In my dream, books weren't shackled to shelves by jealous owners, their pages rarely seeing light. Instead, they roamed free, disseminating their contents amongst readers everywhere, treating the world as their library and all in it as their readers.

I called my dream 'readcycling', and began to create a site to promote the idea and record the movements of member books.

I did not know that the idea had already found a receptive mind and borne fruit as early as 2001.

I got a call from a very excited Zara on Saturday. She, of course, knew about my plans and called me immediately when she found a novel with a panel on the inside front cover proclaiming it a 'roaming book' and exhorting the discoverer to log the find on BookCrossing.

As satisfying as it was to be told that the books had already been freed, and to see how well BookCrossing is doing it, it was also deflating. I'd had a novel idea that excited me and looked to be an interesting challenge. Now it's back to the mundane warp and weft of life until the next mind seed germinates.

Good advice is worth sharing

Some techniques for turning petty irritations into vengeful satisfactions:

Telemarketing calls

Three little words that work: "Hold on please..." Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt. Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep" tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task.

Machine calls

Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end ? This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a sales person to call back and get someone at home. What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. (untested)

Junk mail

When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away. When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 24p postage "IF" and when they receive them back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 29p before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in their postage-paid return envelopes. For example; send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them. You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 24p. The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it - twice! Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again.

I'm not normally in the habit of spamming my own blog with this sort of meme, but these happen to be three things that make my brain curdle, and I quite like the responses advocated. I'm not particularly fussed whether they cause a paradigm shift in marketing or not; I just want petty revenge!

Chalk one up for the animals

Prison for spin wash cat killer

Darn skippy!

The daddy of protection rackets

We're tuned to Heartfm in the office today, so I had the privilege of hearing our government pursue their extortion policies with an unusually ham-handed approach. An information advert encouraging payment of fines issued the warning, "If you do not pay your fine, a civilian officer, or even the police, will come knocking, and you won't like what happens next." I thought statements like that were the sole domain of Mafia maulers and similar neighbourhood nasties. It seems the effectiveness of loaded threats is a lesson learned from the biggest racketeers of them all - Government. The only difference, until now, has been the prudence with which the g-men have followed their brief but, in a world gone mad¹, the kid gloves have been lost in the stampede. Not even the elderly are immune, as the recent spate of pensioners imprisoned for dissent over their extortionate council taxes will show, so heavens help the rest of us.

¹and a thousand elephants

Admin note

Sorry to do this, but I've been plagued with bot spam in my comments, and the only way to prevent it in Blogger is to have word verification on the comments. It's an unwieldy solution, I know, but the only one I have available to me.

What would Jesus draw?

So, it's been discovered that mischievous engineers have been etching their own additions on microchips. Hardly surprising, though, considering the de facto assumption of easter eggs and back doors in almost every piece of software floating around out there. Graffiti does seem to be a hardwired human response. It makes me wonder what we're going to find scrawled on our DNA once we can resolve it in sufficient detail. After all, if we were made in a god's image *cough* chances are the same impulses will have been at work during creation. My money's on "Evolution negates warranty." What's your bet?

If you go down to the woods today

These teddy bear spies manage to be simultaneously creepy and perverse. Somehow I still find myself wanting one. Ah, yes, that would be the 'perverse' kicking in.

Next stop: Tai-Pei

I had the most disorientating experience this morning. As I arrived at Bayswater station, and was climbing the stairs to the exit hall, the tannoy come on with a general announcement. Not too unusual, you might think, except that the announcement was in Chinese or Japanese! It stopped me in my tracks as a cold shiver went through me. I actually felt the hairs on my arms fluff out as my brain insisted that I accidently disembarked in Kyoto. The short circuit only cut out when another announcement followed, this time in Spanish, and my common sense kicked in just enough to rationalise the presence of a foreign language¹ on MY station. Weird moment, though.

¹heavy foreign presence on Queensway due to plethora of youth hostels in the area

Kitty goodness

(snaffled from Kitty, for the amusement and merriment of all)

The End of the Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe's Cat

Hallmarks of Felinity