Unemployed

Unemployment is the scourge of the day. Look where ever you like and there will be a story about job loss and many have already made up their minds who is to blame. The culprits are as wide afield as you can get, Bush to Obama, Illegal workers to the labor unions, Wall Street to Foreign investors and every millimeter of the spectrum in between but maybe the problem isn't as simple as that?

Technology has changed society and automated most tasks, things like going to the bank and getting gas - replaced by a machine interface. Rental cars, airlines and movie tickets, all available online without having to interact with anyone. Nearly everywhere a repetitive or confrontational task is you can find a machine doing that job, like going to the registry or paying a parking ticket. Convenience rules the day and most don't seem to mind scanning their own groceries, it saves time, right?

As for American industry, we are all happy to see someone else do the dirty work. Not even the people who are out of work buy American, they all head to Walmart to get cheap, chinese crap because it costs a few cents less than the Made in U.S. stuff. Frankly, it is often of far greater quality, American's expect too much pay and all that workplace safety stuff isn't cheap. American cars are a good example of just how crappy our industry can be, no one was surprised when that tanked. It isn't only American cars, U.S. financial products have become pariahs on the world trading floor. No one wants to touch that crap either.

Piss poor management can't be discounted. How many times have I had to work overtime to cover a boss' mistake? I would argue that a lot of the problems we see are the fault of a few idiot managers. It's no secret that big companies hired way too many people to get a bump in stock or they eliminated lower level managers and heaped too much responsibility on the already overworked staff. Poor handling of other people's livelihood was certainly more of a factor than anyone wants to admit and to blame the "economy" is like blaming the weather. If you are laying off a few thousand employees - my friend, the problem might be you.

While we're admitting unpleasant realities, there is the problem of personal incompetence. I lost plenty of jobs to a shitty attitude. Maybe I didn't like the boss or the task or the circumstances but in the end it was usually my fault when I got shitcanned. Not to mention the mistake of getting a job and thinking it's yours forever, it's always a good idea to stay abreast whatever industry you are in and if you require someone to print out emails then don't be upset when you're not the boss much longer.

The point of all this being, things change. Sometimes it sneaks up gradually, sometimes it's all at once. If you should be good at anything - be good at change. The job that pays the bills today might not be there tomorrow and anyone who thought they could go on working at the video store forever - they thought wrong. We all want the easy life, the American Dream, the big fat paycheck without a lot of hard work but that is not how it is to be. While you were on hold with the support guy from India about that Chinese computer it all slipped away...

Energy Audit

Most electricity suppliers will give you a free "energy audit" to determine where and how you can save electricity in your home. Because the place I live is a sort of apartment building where all the units are virtually identical it was easy to make a lot of progress with one visit. We all got free compact fluorescent light bulbs and they installed some new thermostats, which was cool. I mention this because - it works. Saves them extra work supplying juice and you could save yourself some money-honey, so contact your electric people and see what they have to offer.

Moral: Sometimes we all win.

Oil is Finished

This oil spill is a holocaust. 11 men dead, an ecosystem destroyed, possibly forever and the damage continues with no sign of stopping until August. The cynicism and incompetence demonstrated by the oil industry is beyond the pale and I personally think the responsible parties should be put to death for their crimes. There will be no public hangings though, nor will there be recompense - dead birds don't cash checks, our system is too dependent on oil.

Why then do I assert that oil is finished?

I made up a thing I call "generation bias" (just now I did). It's the preference that a generation gives to a common cause, based on similar environmental conditions and life experiences. I didn't live before the civil rights era and have no problem with my kids going to school with black kids even though my parents generation did. Indeed, its hard for me to make sense of exactly what all the fuss was about, different color skin, so what? Pick a cause and the generational bias will be there:

- Cuba for example was about the spread of communism. Find me anyone under the age of 15 who even knows what communism is, let alone why we should fear it. To the young, communism gives us inexpensive electronics from China not the red menace that inspired fear and the resulting invasion of southeast asia, followed by that stupid "cold war" which just siphoned resources away from more important things.

- Gay marriage, only old people who go to church seem to have a problem with this because they confuse marriage with the sacrament of matrimony, where a couple is joined in the eyes of the lord god in an unbreakable bond. Fifty years ago it was the only way you could get laid with any regularity because no one did it before you were married. Now marriage is less religious and you don't go to hell if you divorce, I would argue that same sex marriage saved the ceremony from cynics.

- Privacy, this is one that catches me. Young folks don't seem to care about protecting their privacy like I do. My generation didn't even like to have our phone numbers public but kids today have mobile phones set up to constantly update their current location. This gives me the willies but really, why should I be concerned if people know where I am (since I am usually at home anyhow)? Not like I'm ducking a death squad...

This is my basis to assert that oil is finished. My generation is sick of oil but we aren't as versed in alternative fuels. We even call them "alternative" which should not be the nomenclature for wind, hydroelectric and solar power - all proven forms of power generation. The young will see this disaster for what it is, A DISASTER. They will grow up knowing that fossil fuels are that, FOSSIL FUELS. Petroleum and its industry as a whole has given us the gulf war, the recent spike in oil cost that ruined the auto industry and the mine collapse that killed all those men because they were trying to save a few bucks by not venting the shafts. We won't live to see it but our kids will do away with this stuff. They will view as quaint and filthy, like vinyl records, an artifact of an ignorant older generation.

Moral: Use less fucking oil, shit is nasty.

Back on the Stick

As the first minimalist blog in the fucking universe I feel compelled to restate my purpose. There are a few other minimalist blogs out there now but back in the day there was none and a search for minimalism bore some disappointing fruit, just new age nonsense and heavy eastern philosophy cut and pasted from gutenberg.org.

I did this because I was moving and I was a slob and didn't want to carry all that useless junk up three flights of stairs, instead I declared myself a minimalist and confronted my irrational attachment to clothes and books and all sorts of miscellany that defied definition. I started to write about it because it worked. My big empty house looked clean, the few things I kept were organized. Instead of spending hours sifting through piles for a tool to fix another thing in another pile that I didn't even really need, I had all this free time. I was inspired and sought out other ways to change, keeping all this goodness to myself seemed... rude.

Next came a hundred or so posts about biking and clothing and grocery bags that really weren't that interesting, in the last few years I really wasn't a minimalist at all, my place was crowded with junk as I settled into old habits, got fat and lazy and started grabbing things out of the trash again. The walkways and piles reappeared and I became hypocritical. To my credit, I did stop proselytizing minimalism to people when I discovered I had lost my way - but here I am again! Reborn!

This time there was no move, only a steady slow build of loathing. The retail shopping experience is a particular source of unpleasantness but to post the simple fact that I don't like something without some kind of viable alternative was really just a waste of everyones time. Who the fuck cares what I think, I don't care what you think, I even turned off the comments and never check my email. I wouldn't want to read about how much you hate the TV show you just saw or how you bought an iMac and it was not the quality product you'd expected. Its a matter of courtesy.

There is a need for minimalism now, that is what changed. The "new poor" are not adjusting well to their new financial status and the youth don't learn shit in school about the simple economics of the home. People need to know how to reconstitute dried beans and make soup, they need to know that biking is cheaper than driving to the gym to ... ride a fake bike. That things you buy in the store can be FIXED when they break and you don't need to buy a new one. Green blogs are mostly bullshit, selling bamboo novelties and solar knapsacks (GOD, how I hate those things....) and its really just the same model with different suppliers. A cellphone that gets buried in the ground and a plant grows out it? I'm sorry but that is stupid.

This is me getting back on the stick.

Moral: Don't say it if you're not going to do it.

It is not widely practiced but those compact florescent bulbs are not supposed to be thrown away, they are supposed to be recycled. They contain trace amounts of mercury which isn't dangerous but over time it can build up in landfills, not to mention the particularly horrible methods used in mining mercury. The problem is - not many places participate in the recycling programs, in my area there is only the Home Depot.

Still Mad

Changing the clocks is still dumb.

Daylight Savings

The endurance of many cultural relics baffle me, the imperial system of measurement, the vast varieties of racism and sexism - Ugg boots, just to name a few. Today is daylight savings. I gave daylight savings a half hearted googling to see what all the fuss was about and I was overwhelmed with lack of interest. It was invented by some english guy so that people could have more time in summer afternoons, though this origin story is disputed all over the place. I found origin stories dating back to before there were even clocks and some as recent as the depression - truth is - I don't care. No one really does. Daylight Savings is just one of those things we do because, well... we just do it is all.

What is really the benefit of Daylight Savings? I turned up some compelling arguments for it and against it. Studies have revealed there are fewer automobile accidents in the long afternoon, though there is a spike in careless driving at the time of the actual change. It has also been hinted that the result of it being lighter, later, is reduced energy consumption. I don't lend a lot of credence to these studies, studying the effect of daylight savings in not a well honed science, nor does it have much bearing on the decision to change the clocks or not. We would still do it no matter what anyone says because, well... we just do it.

To be clear, I am suggesting that fiddling with the clocks is wholly unnecessary. Surely there is some equitable median that would allow us to have a single time, all year long, without the need to upset the clocks. For example, how about setting them to the half hour in between and leave it at that? Why have just long afternoons in the summer? Why set them ahead again at all?

Moral: Its not good to further a tradition without examination. Read "the Lottery" by Shirley Jackson for clarification.

Shopping is Ultra-Creepy

If you have been shopping in a retail store lately you have experienced the super-creepy disingenuous greeting ceremony. When I went looking for a new television I was "greeted" by three people before I made it to the Tee Vee section and the whole experience skeeved me out. An untidy metalhead, a latin gal with bigger rings and nails than I had ever seen and an afro'd tuff who snuck off to text someone in an abandoned aisle. All offered to help me. When I found the Tee Vee I wanted they were out of stock. I asked to buy the floor model and two of them went off to axe a manager or something and I seized my chance to ex-scape.

My next attempt was at another big box chain and I tried a different tactic. When the greeter accosted me kindly - I accosted him kindly right back. I already knew what I was looking for so I insisted he lead me to my desired item, which he did in broad, trepidatious steps. Since I was already being led by a greeter the others grazed off to the sides, texting on their sidekicks and watching for management. We found it on the shelf and I pointed at it and told him to carry it to the check out for me, which he would not do, but whatever.

Since that time a Staple's has opened near my house, which is kind of cool for me since I used to love the old zines and would spend hours in a Kinko's with zine pals copying and stapling. The static smell of copiers and white out is a nostalgic joy from my youth,  but there is no joy to be found in Staple's. They take this greeting ceremony to another dimension because they offer to help, knowing full well they cannot help you, and when you say "Yes, help me find _____" they have to look for a senior staffer. At the check out they give you a minor address about their commitment to you and offer, Hare-Krishna-Uninterruptible-Style, a magical card that takes something off something or something. The speech sputters off near the end since no one who does not have the card, wants the card. Just for good measure the shoplifter alarm goes off and you feel nice and uncomfortable and forget to check the receipt since they are focused on the speech and not the petty "cash transaction" stuff.

Consumer confidence is at an all time low. Lower than last year and the year before. With Christmas upon us there is not much signaling a great rebound in the retail sector. Polyester pique golf shirts and khaki pants, loyalty cards, creepy greeters and that guy who looks at your receipt on the way out the door - the whole experience is an invasion of personal boundaries and wicked skeezy. Shopping has always been escapism for the American people, we like to go where people we don't know are - and look at things we can't afford. Its exciting to be in front of a wall of televisions twenty feet high with noise and lights. Its fun.

Or rather, it was fun. Now its all creepy uncle and those who know how just buy online.

Moral: Get your GED, take some night classes, stop smoking weed and pay that child support. make something of yourself man, you don't want to work at Staple's...

Bike Thief

We have all had bikes stolen, its just a fact of life. Urban entities accept bike theft with a hardened, passing sigh and start the long walk home, leaving just a twisted, razed lock behind as warning to the other cyclists. I lost one about a year ago and I swore "If I ever find the guy who stole my bike... I am going to kill him. Kill him ... and eat him."

Here is an elegant solution to the bike theft problem, an exploding lock! Just as banks insert exploding ink packs into bags of cash, the lock would spray a marking ink all over the culprit and bike when cut, notifying authorities or anyone else that this is a bike thief/stolen bike. You probably wouldn't get your bike back, but at least it would be a pain in the ass for the thief, which is really all you can do. After all, It isn't a matter of - how can I keep my bike from being stolen, its HOW LONG can I keep my bike from being stolen.

the Pen

OK, back to minimalism. The disposable pen is one of those everyday things we take totally for granted and give no thought whatsoever to a low arc toss into the wastebin. Recently the BIC company announced the sale of their 100 billionth disposable pen. First introduced after the final days of WWII, the early pens replaced fountain tips which were very messy. The appeal of the disposable pen became universal and the entire world quickly adopted it as the new standard in writing instrument, no more ink bottles or spills to clean up, just a simple plastic tube with an ink barrel that no one gave a shit about and threw away when no longer useful. This success inspired BIC - and many other company's, to reconsider the needs of daily life and quickly produced disposable razors and lighters, setting off a "disposable revolution" of sorts.

100 billion pens. Every single one destined to be thrown into the trash.

I went looking for a refillable pen after this announcement and I have to admit, I had a hard time finding an alternative. Ball point pens are hardy creatures, reliable and dependable with few faults. I got quality ballpoints and reloaded them with new ink barrels, but admittedly after three or so refills I just dropped them in a drawer. I decided to go for the old school fountain pen because they have a quality that inspires good penmanship. There were a lot of options I found, but these pens are more for symbolism, given as gifts to bankers and the like who would use it to authorize a big money deal - not for daily use. I found a good many prohibitively expensive pens and few modestly priced calligraphy type pens, but they both had the same disposable ink cartridge that held a limited reservoir of ink.

In the end I went with a pen that I found kicking around the house. Years ago I picked up a set of drafting pens from somewhere and they turned out to be the perfect pen. Large ink reservoir that can be easily refilled from a bottle and since it was designed for production work they are easy to clean and maintain. I am still apprehensive about throwing it heedlessly into a backpack, but for daily use it has totally replaced ballpoint pens in my life. Frankly, with computers there is little use for pens, so why even bother with disposables?

Moral: If its made to be thrown away, how much can it be worth?

I'm Poor

I recently caught myself doing something that I hate other people for doing. It hard to explain, but basically I was pretending like I was rich. This is a consequence of a credit based society, we all like to pretend that we have a lot more money than we actually do. This is everywhere I go, Gucci bags on the bus, Dolce Gabbana shades in line at the social security office. I succumbed in the form of a fancy stereo that, admittedly I got off the craigslist, but to hear me talk about it you'd think it was built to my exacting specifications by eastern european watchmakers. A stereo had somehow magically lifted me out of my station and made it so that I could talk with my social betters as peers - as equals, at least on matters of media playback. I found myself scoffing at those who would accept a tinny treble or blown out bass. That was when the mailman brought the bills and grounded me.

America is a class based society, but there is nothing shameful about being poor. In my opinion the only really shameful thing is living beyond your means and you don't have to be poor for that. Noted idiot Sean Combs was recently in the news because he was forced to ground his personal jet and fly on a commercial aircraft. Funny that he never thought to "Plane-pool" with other strapped celebrities. As for the rest of us, we get used to being a little colder and a little sicker for a little longer. We get good at waiting for things. Disappointment becomes parenthetical and has the breadth of a breath. While Wall Street booms, we flip burgers and sweep up for minimum wage. Now that its tanked, our circumstances are very much the same. 

So why the front? Why break the bank on a Chanel handbag and have no money it? Why pull the Benz up to the Drive thru and order off the dollar menu? These are rhetorical device, we all know why. Its the aspiration for a better life, the outward sign of the inward wish. No person of means will respect anyone because they have on the same coat. Burberry's famously killed their patterned ballcap when local louts started wearing them. This kind of retaliation against class trespassing isn't limited to the rich, I still would not feel comfortable wearing an old school rap "Africa Necklace." Time bears out all trends and rights itself, which is one of the reasons I try to choose minimalism.

As for pretending to be rich, well I will try a little harder to represent myself as I am. Instead of a fancy logo on my shirt I might just print my credit score.

Wall Street is DEAD

I am surprised that anyone is surprised that our entire financial infrastructure has been destroyed. For the last five years we have all been operating on CREDIT. The average american carries something like $5,000 in debt annually. Now I ask you - If the people don't have any money - what are we going to put in the bank?

cancer

I have a visceral reaction to bogus cures for legitimate diseases and so does the the Federal Trade Commission. They have decided that enough is enough when it comes to the proclamations that "Miracle Water CURES Cancer!" and have begun enforcing trade rules that require you put up or shut up. Action will be taken against eleven companies who sell products or systems that claim to cure cancer. That's right, CURE CANCER.

What kind of an idiot believes that vibrations in water or an ancient chinese herb can really cure them and who cares, fuck them, right? Well, to you I say don't be a cynical dick. Being diagnosed with cancer and having an experienced doctor provide tests that affirm the fact that you have cancer and then he says that as far as empirical science is concerned there are few options to treat cancer and no known cure, well that would drive me over the deep end. I would be willing to believe that a patchouli hippy or a failed sociopathic dentist had discovered something  that "the man" didn't want you to know about. I can see me megadosing vitamins, drinking my own urine or downing inedible herbs by the fistful. Add to that - no insurance - then the whole scenario makes even more sense. Its not morons who fall for this bullshit, its normal desperate people who just don't know any better.

As for these companies, draw your own conclusion. Anyone who claims to cure cancer - knowing that they can't cure cancer - and takes your money is either deluded (best case) or a total fucking slime. I imagine that they start out as "compliments" to treatment. Ancient Chinese herbs and magic water are little more than food and drink as far as efficacy is concerned but if the salad and cold drink make you feel better, what is the harm? The fact that it doesn't actually DO anything is overlooked and before you know it you drop the chemotherapy, which isn't as good as the salad, and go whole ass for the fake shit. The result is real death, financial ruin and the disgrace of having fallen for a scam.

I say Hooray for the FTC. Its about time that the focus fell on these leeches to our sick. We will never be rid of the carnival barkers hawking snake oil, be they clicks on a sponsored google ad or a yuppie dojo downtown where therapeutic rocks (?) on the spine ... cure ... something...

Moving Day

Today is the unofficial holiday in any University town, September 1, known as "Moving Day." Jittery parents deliver excited students to their dormitories or first apartments and leave them unsupervised for the rest of their lives. In Boston there is an influx of nearly 100,000 new residents annually, whole neighborhoods will pack up on the 31st and be replaced on the 1st. There are traffic snarls when Uhaul trucks are driven into overpasses, there are fights over parking spots and frequently you will see someone moving out at the same time as someone moves in. This is the result of SCUMMY FILTHY REALTORS and SLIMY DOUCHE BAG LANDLORDS, who exploit the lack of housing for students to double rents and pack apartments with too many people. This september 1st cycle is maintained by them artificially because why work all year when you can half ass everything once?

For the weeks leading up to the first there is an avalanche of garbage on the city streets. Sofas, shelves, desks, furniture of all sorts. For the scavengers of garbage this is the ideal time to find nearly new or at least not quite ruined items by the curb. I admit that I have found bikes never ridden because of flat tires and books, even Compact Disks have started popping up, but I no longer cede the urge to carry this stuff home. I live on the third floor now.

I guess the point is, its an awful shame. Most of us that don't move make ourselves scarce this weekend, part to save our lumbar regions from needy contemporaries, part because its just an awful sight to behold. No mass evacuation gives anyone a good feeling, unless you are a GREASY SLUMLORD packing 5 kids into a three bedroom apartment.

Bigfoot

When I was a wee thing only knee high to a grasshopper I believed all sorts of things, like when a tooth fell out a mysterious entity would put money under my pillow. I later learned that it was actually my mother doing some bedtime sleight of hand rather than allowing a stranger into her child's bedroom to take his tooth from under his pillow. This took the edge of losing teeth. Sadly, I would go on to lose far more teeth than the alloted "baby tooth" sum and there was no money under the pillow for those, but that is another story.

Recently Bigfoot has died, both literally and figuratively. Two lads from Georgia found his sad carcass in the woods then dragged the several hundred kilogram creature for several stinky hours back home to stuff the well over six foot creature into a freezer where it has stayed for several months. At least that is what they told the Tee Vee people. Turns out all they did was fill a wookie costume with roadkill and the whole joke just got out of hand. An overzealous "bigfoot hunter" who was himself notorious for scamming the true believers, called a press conference and used it to promote his website. 

I am surprised anyone was taken in by this photo. The intestines are located behind several thick layers of yeti fur, skin and fat, but here they are just sitting on the top with no cavity opening apparent. Another give away was the tongue. Rodents eat the eyes, the tongue and usually will core out the anus of a dead animal because those are the soft parts of the body. No tough skin to get through. The eyes, apparently eaten, but the tongue left alone, just dangling there. Lastly, the surest way to know if you are dealing with a hoax? They call a press conference. Not that Georgia doesn't have some fine universities or biologists or even a morgue that specializes in the proper storage and inspection of a body... Let's keep it in a freezer instead and call Fox News.

I didn't believe it, but I wanted it to be true. Lights in the sky were gods once, then briefly they were zeppelin's finally settling into the crafts of little green men. I no longer believe in the little green men or the gods, now I have to add bigfoot to that list. It felt good to know a huge peaceful man/ape cousin was out there living in the spaces between. High on the mountain or in the deepest darkest wood slipping by unnoticed. Sure, the evidence was poor, grainy video or unfocused kodaks, all of which amounting to nothing but it was fun to believe.

Now Bigfoot is dead. Killed by two hicks with a fucked up sense humor and too much time on their hands. Our culture has sustained yet another blow to its collective imagination so that a con man can get a few more hits to his website. It sold a lot of papers, but at what cost? What will we dream about now?

Rest in Peace Sasquatch, we hardly knew ye...

Pizza Shears

To me, this is pretty goddamn funny. Not that any pair of scissors wouldn't work to cut a pizza, or that you might ever find yourself with an uncut pizza. There ought to be an enormous tax for kitchen junk that is used once and then stowed for an eternity in the back of the bottom shelf.

Veggie Burger

Sadly, I cannot let this one go. Tonight I ate at Woody's. Its a pizza place/draft beer joint that uses wood fire for their ovens. The flavor is not as strong as other pizzas cooked in wood ovens, you probably wouldn't know about this extra step were it not plastered all over everything in the place. Not the best pizza in the world, but not at all bad. The location isn't on the main drag, so it isn't noisy or overcrowded, its just right.

Why does this merit attention? Feeling experimental, I also ordered a veggie burger. Any vegetarian worth his salt knows to stay away from the veggie burgers, especially in restaurants. They are either the disappointing store bought hockey pucks or they are a horror show of creativity by an over ambitious chef. I knew better than to order it even when I ordered it, the menu said it was made on site from fresh ingredients and like a fool, I fell for it. The thing arrived and I knew right away that it was bad without taking a single bite. It was grey. Like - a brain. It looked like a brain. It wasn't cooked on a grill or fried in a pan, it was through and through grey. When you put "burger" at the end of anything a customer has a certain expectation that either flavor, texture, or at the very least appearance will be of a "burger", so when it arrived open faced and by all observation uncooked it was clear that I had ordered badly. Imagine a patty of grey mashed potatoes, tepid, and falling off a bun with sliced cucumbers - CUCUMBERS! Not even pickles. Just a squirt of some 1,000 island dressing.

I took a bite. Without pause I slide the whole presentation as far away from me as possible. Some things you know are beyond rationalizing and I knew without so much as a flinty spark of neural effort that I wasn't going to eat this contemptuous thing. Fortunately I am in the habit of ordering way too much food and had a whole pizza that I planned to take home. Eating out is a gamble. When I used to travel I coined the term "beat for breakfast" which is drug buying slang, paying for one thing and getting a fake version or much smaller quantity than requested. Whenever eating out, particularly breakfast when cooks are hung over or sleepy, someone always gets a fucked up meal. You can send it back, but you send it back to the same person who fucked it up to begin with. The future holds only dissatisfaction.  Better to diversify in case of a disaster. 

The waitress saw the plate on the edge of the table and after a few passes it was clear that I was not happy with it. She did the usual "How is everything" check. Calmly and definitively I said:

"That is the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten."

A very good waitress was she, bantering "Tell me how you really feel..." and the item came off my check. I love the waitresses and I wondered if I was the first one to order this item and send it back or if I was the first one honest enough to articulate that it was disgusting (a la emperor's new veggie burger). I didn't see how it could have been prepared in a way that would make it appetizing and it is a permanent menu item...

Anyhow, Woody's does everything else right, just never order a veggie burger.

Animal Hospital Print Movie

Stop motion indie rock action

Die Autodialer!

I was born an evil person, and so being, peace with the dark side can come in handy. Recently I moved and was issued a new telephone number. The young lady who had my number before me, as I quickly discovered, owed money to people who only had one phone number to contact her. What followed was a series of predictable calls from all manner of collection agents. My machine was instantly full of misdirected calls to a Maria Ga-something, urging her to get in touch with some greasy guy who was prepared to ruin her credit forever, et cetera. 

This was a minor annoyance, since an autodialer left a prerecorded message, which I simply deleted. It wasn't until the real people started calling that things got really... interesting. The first call that I got was from "Patrick" who was very polite at first. He wanted desperately to speak with Maria because her credit rating was in imminent danger of being spoiled like so much milk left on the counter while you go off to work. I replied that he was mistaken, I lived alone and knew no one by that name, that I had inherited her phone number and all her angry creditors. He agreed that was quite a pickle for us both, but could I supply her whereabouts - since that real world scenario was too plausible and therefore too fantastic to believe. The conversation went downhill from there. I have made several bad career choices in my life and needless to say, I know the very thing to say at the right time in just the right way to make someone very, very upset. Its an art form that surprises even me sometimes. To my dismay, my request to "take me off their list" went unheeded. 

The phone rang many more times after that and I had similar conversations with many staff members, I even employed the rare drastic measure of dialing *57 and filing a police report after a young lady called me three times in one night. She blamed the autodialer for constantly connecting us, and this having been said I had an idea.

Asterisk, as it is known, is a powerful PBX system that is free to run on any beige box computer. Its memory and processor needs are so few it literally runs on garbage computers that people throw away. I planned to configure the PBX with a whitelist of friends that would ring through, a greylist of unknown numbers that could leave a message and a blacklist of  1-877 numbers that were the hallmark of these collection agents. The blacklist calls would be answered and patiently wait for a human voice at which time it would play any number of incredibly loud, incredibly unpleasant MP3's from my collection of terrifyingly awful music.

No, I never did it. I did set up asterisk, but I never unleashed its awful purpose because, why? True that I was dubious about how legal such a thing was, but really, what would I possibly gain from this? Did I really want to set up a computer to run continuously as an answering machine so that I could deafen someone with a shitty job who had the wrong number? Vengeance is a fine subject for cinema, but in real life it is utterly impractical. I was ashamed of my conduct and embarrassed that I had actually exhausted my technical skill and creative energy realizing this ridiculous plan, when all along there was an alternative.

I submit this tawdry tale for a reason. We are approaching an election, and as you all know, the phone banks will be working overtime to solicit funds, motivate the enlightened or just poll inanely. If you are like me and enjoy privacy I recommend this solution from lifehacker. Simply put, record the "number out of service" tone before your message. a human will leave a message, but an automated system will report your number out of service. Had I done this from the beginning the autodialers at the collection agency would never had pierced my fortress of solitude. I can vouch for this elegantly simple solution, I did it and it works.

Moral: Why be a bigger asshole than is necessary?

RepRap

This is a Reprap. Its a 3D printer under construction by the open source community. Printer jets lay down a polycarbonate goo in layers from digital templates, meaning that it can print out 3 dimensional plastic shapes. 3D printers are not new, they are employed largely for prototyping or making casts for large scale production and cost a great deal of money. This device, however, can be built for less then a thousand dollars using off the shelf components and the plans are available for free download from their website. The prototypes are in use refining and printing the components of the reprap itself, so in its own modest way the device is in use creating itself. 

The possibilities of this device are enormous. The ability to make things without need for factories or shipping would greatly improve the quality of human life globally. It would have the same effect that inkjet printers had on displacing the photographic lab industry. Plans for anything could be downloaded from the internet and printed as is required. Not everyone will have one in their homes, but there will probably be one available for public use at a local hardware store. Since it makes many things from one recyclable plastic the supply chain would be streamlined instantly. Inventors, educators and artists are the most immediate beneficiaries that come to mind, but medical devices like hearing aid housings or eyeglass frames could be made cheaply where they are badly needed.

Moral: open source is awesome.