... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

187: It's On (Mr. Postman) 187um junk-maila

The letterbox flapped and I glanced out of the window to see the postman wandering back down the path in his Royal Mail high-visibility jacket.  “Great, more bills,” I thought, and went to check for bad news.  Two items of post, I mean “post” said with fingers sarcastically indicating inverted commas, a Dominos menu and an advert for npower boiler insurance.  These weren’t even addressed to anyone, just pure unashamed junk.  I felt like storming out into the street, accosting the postman and saying “excuse me, Mr. Post Man, but I think you delivered these by mistake,” or some other blistering incitement.

What are Royal Mail doing acting as real-life walking spam bots, sucking the scaly pecker of Satan, as Bill Hicks might have put it; drink that black worm jism.  If Royal Mail concentrated more on delivering letters and parcels to normal customers instead of pushing shit through our letterboxes, we might not have late-afternoon post and parcel deliveries where they don’t bring the fucking parcel.  I’m sure everyone has experienced this; you’re sat at home waiting for a parcel, nobody knocks but you hear the letterbox flap.  You run over only to find a card saying “we tried to deliver your parcel but you were out, please leave 2 hours (or 24 hours, whim dependant) before collecting from your local depot”.  Sometimes you might run out to meet the postman saying “I’m in, why didn’t you knock,” to which you might be told “I haven’t got the parcel with me”.

Turns out the reason for Royal Mail’s increasingly poor service is they are now primarily dedicated to acting as a medium for corporate marketing, indiscriminately shovelling great swathes of glossy paper pap into your house.  I suggest that all the shit they put in through the door needs to go back into post box around the corner.  Join me in a mass protest; together we can get the message out, and claw back the efficient and early-morning service we can barely remember.

On a much less vitriolic note, let’s hear it for the increasingly brilliant Wikipedia.  It’s often criticised for its inaccuracies, but usually by lazy journalist scum peeved at having copied and pasted said inaccuracies into their own stream of shit.  However it is also the perfect place for eccentrics, with special subjects on ludicrously specific plant-pots of knowledge, to write and publish excellent articles.  Case in point is the Wikipedia article entitled Toilet Paper Orientation.  No joke, your life will be improved by reading this.  Just knowing that someone out there has taken the care, time and effort to put this together is a strangely comforting feeling.

The article features quotations from books, papers and articles by sociology professors and more, discussions of gender role and social class, masses of survey results, photos of toilet paper (including one of two cats tearing a roll to shreds), a discussion of the binary problem (over or under), solutions, and even celebrity preferences.  It is either a serious article about a silly subject, or a silly article about a serious subject.  Whichever it is, it is brilliant.  There has obviously been a huge amount of research collected, and the article ends with loads of notes, further reading suggestions, and more references than I thought possible.  A fine example of the craft of communal encyclopaedia composition, to be envied and adored the world over.

End of blog.  And all without any reference to 187 or 187um Killa (almost).

No comments: