How to Get Mail from Virtually Everywhere
For much of my life I've collected stamps. About twelve years ago when I was in Junior High, I received from my parents as a Christmas present an amazing book which listed the addresses of the philatelic (stamp stuff) bureaus of nearly every country in the world. With the addresses were suggestions for writing, including how to ask for ordering information, how to be put on mailing lists, and so forth. So I went to work. Every couple weeks I'd buy enough postage for half a dozen airmail postcards, and sent off my requests to the far points of the globe. The response was...um...overwhelming. I have an idea of how Craig Shergold's family felt about all the business cards they were deluged with. I got mail back from at least all the following countries:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China (PRC), Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Iceland, Ireland, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Oman, South Africa, Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Tanzania, Turks and Caicos Islands, Zambia
I have to wonder what our mailperson must have thought, day after day delivering pounds of mysterious tattered envelopes, some labelled mostly in Arabic or bearing impressive messages such as "ON MALAWI GOVERNMENT SERVICE". I also wonder what the State Department thought, as the U.S. government, at least during the cold war, often opened files on people for this sort of thing. What's most amazing is that, more than ten years later, the mail is *still coming*. Brazil is the most faithful by far. I know why they're felling the rain forests, it's for paper to send me mail. South Africa is a close second, they would thoughtfully inform me whenever any of their half-dozen homelands issued even a postage-due stamp. I still have boxes of all this stuff in my closet back home; maybe someday I can donate it to a stamp club that has access to a forklift.
Playing in Traffic
One summer night way back in high school, a thought occurred to me. How much do people trust symbols of authority? How often do we see symbols, objects, or uniforms, and simply assume that there is a legitimate force guiding their actions or use? I once read of one of the greatest pranks of all time, pulled in New York City in the sixties. A crew of guys with plausible looking uniforms blocked off a section of a city street, and proceded to jack-hammer it down to the dirt. No one stopped them since they were an organized group wearing uniforms, and the prank aspect wasn't detected until days later when it was clear that no one was returning to fill the street back in.
With this in mind, I tried a psychological experiment. In the nearby apartment complex I often cut trough on the way to school, there was a toolshed that was often left open, and inside were a stack of about a half dozen big orange traffic cones. So one evening, I, uh, borrowed these items, and went to a nearby T intersection of two streets. When there was no traffic visible, I blocked off one direction of the through street by spacing the cones at regular intervals across it. The experiment then was to see if people would obey the cones, even if no roadwork was apparent. I went over to a bench in the park nearby and watched the ensuing drama. A couple of cars turned and went back. But soon a lady came roaring up who had no intention of being delayed by just a few traffic cones, and she tried plowing right through them. This, however, caused several of them to lodge under the car and drag down the street. So for the next several minutes, while broadcasting into an otherwise quiet evening a spectacular stream of obscenity that would make George Carlin take notes, she backed up and pulled forward about twenty times trying to dislodge the cones without actually getting out and removing them manually. At long last she was free, and once she was gone I gathered up the cones and replaced them in the toolshed, having decided this was a big enough sample of data to collect.
Streetside Theater
Back in grade school, one of our favorite pranks to play while walking to school was feigning spectacular seizures. Several of us would be walking down the sidewalk and see a car approaching, and agree that this was our "mark". We would walk along normally until the car got close, and then fall into the grass and begin flopping around like trout dropped on a dry pier. This often produced some priceless expressions on the faces of the passing motorists, although perhaps the fact that several people seemed to be having these profound seizures all at once destroyed some of the credibility. We also enjoyed play-acting vicious looking fights, somewhat like an old Batman episode minus the big "BIFF" and "KERPOW" signs, sometimes with one person on top of another appearing to be punching the other's lights out. Ah, youth.
Special Ed
Also back in grade school, it was a favorite sport of the more obnoxious kids to torment substitutes in various ways. I recall one day in the fourth grade when we had a substitute, and my friend Mike decided he was going to be a Special Child for the day. We were going around the room, taking turns reading paragraphs from a story. When it was his turn, he feigned severe mental impairment and labored through his rather lengthy paragraph in an incredibly arduous and theatrical manner.
"Buh...buh...buh..BOB! Cuh...cuh...cuh...COOT..."
"No, Mike, the word is 'cut'."
"COOOOT...uh...CUOOT...CUT! Cut...cut...tuh...tuh...tuh-hee..."
"No, that word is 'the', Mike."
As this went on, the rest of us were losing the ability to suppress hysterical laughter, since Mike was quite bright and we all knew exactly what he was up to. Our poorly suppressed giggles and snorts made the sub furious.
"Class, I am *ashamed* of you! Mike is trying *very hard*, and he's doing *very well*. Go on now, Mike."
"Yeah!" he then exclaimed in mock sullenness, pausing to flash me a big surreptitious grin.
Not being allowed to laugh, of course, only makes it worse, and by the time he'd labored to the end of the paragraph, the whole class was struggling to keep from exploding and nearly crying from the effort. The sub, who paused to scold us repeatedly, was never the wiser.
The Pause that Refreshes
I was once visiting my Dad's lab at the medical center, and got us a can of Mountain Dew to split (a bright yellow soft drink, for foreign readers unfamiliar with the brand.) The only glasses he had in the lab were sterile specimen cups. So with childish delight we stood around with our specimen cups full of yellow liquid, waiting to see people's expressions as we took sips. I suppose close inspection would have revealed all the bubbles, though perhaps carbonated urine is a symptom of some dreadful malady.
Psychic Friends Network
One day during the Chemistry class I've previously described elsewhere, several of us had abandoned even feigning interest in the proceedings and somehow seized on the notion of testing whether we had psychic powers. We spent the class staring intently at one another, and announcing the number we thought the other person was thinking. We soon began telling one friend of mine, however, that his guesses, whatever they might be, were correct. "Uh....seven and a half!" "OMIGOSH! You got it AGAIN!" He soon became skeptical, of course, so I reinforced the notion by writing the numbers down and doing a little sleight of hand to reveal the "previously written" numbers he'd guess.
The game of convincing my friend he was psychic reached its grand finale one day at lunch in the cafeteria. I'd brought to school a very powerful magnet, which had previously been part of the pen movement mechanism of an eight-foot-tall chart recorder and could lift at least twenty pounds. We decided to "study" whether my friend's psychic powers included telekinesis. While his attention was diverted, I moved the big magnet from my lunch bag to my lap. We then put a paper clip on the table, and asked him to focus his mind and try to budge it. The table was nearly two inches thick, but not too thick for my behemoth magnet. He stared intently at the paper clip for a while, and, lo and behold, it suddenly began moving as I shifted the magnet beneath the table. His eyes got really big for a moment until I pulled the source of his powers out from under the table.
Laguna Sunrise
The friend in the previous anecdote also had driving habits that may only be described as psychotic. He once passed someone on an interstate on-ramp, and would keep himself alert on long trips by zapping himself in the leg with a stun gun. One such trip occurred when he and some friends, while running a few errands, were seized with the desire to see the St. Louis Arch. They spent the next several hours driving until they could finally see the Arch over the horizon, and, thus satisfied, turned around and went right back home. He drove a Laguna, whose doors had a disconcerting habit of not staying shut. The back seat, if there actually was one, was buried under about 3 cubic meters of junk, including trash, newspapers, clothes, and even a working flasher barricade. I'm not sure just why he acquired this last item, but it certainly gave the interior a touch of elegance. He finally sold the car when he discovered a note under the wiper after work one day from someone who loved the model, wanted one to fix up, and offered him twice the fair value in cash. I don't know if the flasher barricade was included in the deal, though.