Warren's Five (plus two) Most Fun Past Journal Entries

Thirty Eight
Warren's wedding
Warren does an Ultimate Survey
Hume Improvement
A Small Tail Tale
Peaceful Postal Protest
An Amusing Top Five List


My Amazon Wish List
Buy me stuff!


Virii Watch

Pete's Ancient and rarely updated
D-land Journal


Peaceful Postal Protest

Journal Entry entered: 2002-03-12 - 9:26 a.m.

Not exactly an entry, just rambling about a little idea of mine that all of us (monkeys and non-monkeys) ought to indulge in! Actually, it seems to me I may have mentioned this once before, but it can't hurt to mention it again.

So, do you get as lot of junk mail at home? The snail mail garbage getting you down? Here's something that might give you a small amount of satisfaction. Let's see... they are spending money to send you unwanted junk mail... wouldn't it be nice to return the favour, but let them pay for that, too?

One of the very kind things many of these folks do is that they send you a "business reply envelope". These are postage paid, so you don't even have to pay 37 cents to get ripped off by these folks! Aren't they sweet?

You can mail them back their postage paid envelope without including the order form/sign up form/screw-me-please form. Until it is opened at the destination, they won't know that it's junk. But they've had to pay to send it to you, pay to get it back, and pay to have it opened. looked at and thrown away!

Sure, it probably doesn't have much impact if just one person does it. But think on this: there are 300 million people in this country... discount kids and other folks for various reasons and we can still bet on there being 100 million people getting junk mail come-ons from credit card issuers and music clubs at the very least. Each of these people probably gets at least a couple of these offers per week! That's like 200 million business reply envelopes per week, nearly a billion a month, and around 10 billion over a year. Reread this: A minimum of ten billion business reply envelopes that should be returned to the senders! That's likely to cost a bit of cash! enough people start oing this and they will probably take note!

Oh, and don't just send back the empty envelope, most machines used to process the mail at the destination (and perhaps at the USPS) will detect empty envelopes and pass them to the trash without delay. Put in the comics section from the newspaper, cuttings from an old playboy, Biblical verses, or xeroxed notes protesting the volume of junk mail.

ADDITIONAL NOTE (added 1/12/03): I just found something that helps add weight to this protest! According to the rules of the USPS, quoted from the USPS website: 1.2Payment Guarantee: The permit holder guarantees payment of the applicable First-Class Mail or Priority Mail postage, plus a per piece charge, on all returned BRM. This includes any incomplete, blank, or empty BRM cards and envelopes and any mailable matter with a BRM label affixed." (Underlining added for emphasis.) That's right kids and vindictive adults, these companies absolutely get charged, even if the envelope is empty! Of course, if the envelope has a couple pieces of paper (like pages from a Hustler) it will get delivered and will have to be opened, costing the company a bit more in processing fees.

And don't attach it to a brick, it is obvious to the recipient as well as the post office that an envelope with a brick is a crank-type thing and it's likely to be discarded out of hand. Plus, the brick might damage legitimate mail in the box you deposit it into, and we don't want to damage other peoples' mail, just vex the big businesses that are so busily creating landfill and filling our mailboxes with junk.

Now I've heard people say that this is illegal. It's not, though. The envelope is "only to be used for purposes relating to the business who sent it" and protesting their issuance of obscene amounts of junk mail with a simple, peaceful display like this is acceptable through the idea of freedom of expression: they send us junk mail, we return the favour. We're not using the envelopes for personal reasons, I'm not rerouting it to someone else, and not including damaging or threatening material. We're simply sending them what they send us... mail that they won't want. The only difference is, they get to pay to get it.

Poor babies!

Well, I'm done. I may have to re-sort my journal entries and add a section devoted towards rants and the like.

A final thought regarding this protest. The US Postal Service complains that mail volume has slumped due to the internet and electronic money exchange and so on. This is one of the reasons they cite for wanting to raise prices. Well, if their revenue stream goes up because of our protest we help support our postal service AND keep prices down! It makes us good citizens! One might even make the claim that it is a civic duty we have! Hee hee!


Previous journal entry | Next journal entry

Three years! - 2010-04-27

School choices... - 2007-10-03

Virginia Johnson - 2007-09-05

Tau Trivia update! - 2006-12-15

Been a while, now vote! - 2006-10-03



Aww, isn't he cute? Move the mouse around him and he just might play with it!
adopt your own virtual pet!

Take my Readings Survey


Download AIMAIM RemoteSend me an Instant MessageSend me an EmailAdd Remote to Your Page
Download AOL Instant Messenger

about me - read my profile! read other DiaryLand diaries! recommend my diary to a friend! Get your own fun + free diary at DiaryLand.com!



Warren's list of words that monkeys use to annoy him by misspelling, misusing, or mispronouncing them (the list will most assuredly grow)

Misspellings
  • COMING (typically mispelled "comming")
  • TONGUE (typically mispelled "tounge")
Confused spellings
  • HERE vs. HEAR (the former is a place word; the latter is what you do when a sound hits your ear)
  • IT'S vs. ITS (the former is a contracted form of IT IS; the latter is a possessive form of the impersonal pronoun IT)
  • LOSING vs. LOOSING (the former is what you are doing if you are not winning; the latter is what you are doing when you let the lions out of the lion pen at the zoo, you are "loosing them" or "setting them loose").
  • POUR vs. PORE vs. POOR (the first is what you do to get milk from the carton into the glass; the second is a small opening in a surface, such as those in your skin that sweat comes out of (... don't write poetry if you don't know your English, you just look sad). The third, a state of having little or no money, is rarely confused with the other two).
  • ROGUE vs. ROUGE (The former is a person who might also be described as a rascal, scoundrel or cad; the latter is make-up that one uses to add a bit of a blush to one's cheeks.)
  • THEY'RE vs. THEIR vs. THERE (the first is a contraction of THEY ARE; the next is a possessive form of THEY; the last denotes place or location)
  • TO vs. TOO vs. TWO (the first is a function word indicating movement, direction, proximity, intention, addition: "I'm going to the store" or "Add this to the pile" or "How close is the house to the road"; the second one sort of adds quantity, often of the excessive sort, to a concept: "Too many reptiles" or "I'm coming, too"; the last represents the number 2.)
  • WHERE vs. WEAR vs. -WARE vs. WERE- (the first references place or location; the second is either a verb, noun, or suffix relating to clothing or other adornments [example: wearing footwear] OR a noun or verb relating to the effect of exposure or useage or corrosion [wear and tear]; the third is a suffix that indicates that something is a class of some sort [hardware, software, flatware, wetware]; the fourth is a prefix used to attach the disease of Lycanthropy to a person or animal, i.e: werewolf, wererat, weretiger. Finally, although pronounced differently, "WERE" is also a past tense of are or to be.)
  • YOU'RE vs. YOUR vs. YORE (the former is a contraction of YOU ARE, the middle is a possessive form of YOU, and the latter is a reference to another, undefined era in the past: "Days of yore.)
Mispronunciations
  • ASK [ask'] ("axe" is something used for chopping wood or the action of chopping something with an axe).
  • CAN [kahn] (it should not be pronounced as [kehn]). Thanks, Ken.
  • CAVALRY [kah'-val-ree] ("Calvary" is a mountain that is prominant {pun intended} in the Bible, not a military unit that rides on horses... or these days on tanks and Hum-Vees).
  • DONDER [don'-der] ("Donner" was the name of a party of travellers that got stuck in the mountains and ate each other, not the name of one of Santa's eight little reindeer).
  • ESCAPE [es-kayp'] ("excape" simply sounds dumb).
  • ESPRESSO [es-pres'-oh] (it is NOT "eXpresso," pinheads. Thanks, Mischief.
  • HUNDRED [hun'-dred] (it's not "hun'-erd" nor "hun'-red"). Thanks, Rachel.
  • INSURANCE [in-sure'-ense] (it is NOT "in'-sure-ense"! In English, the second to last syllable is the one that gets the emphasis except when asking a question, when the LAST syllable is accented... never the third to last!!!)
  • JEWELRY [jew'-el-ree] (it's not "joo-lah-ree" or "joo-luh-ree", stoner!) Thanks, again Rachel.
  • LIBRARY [lie-brayr'-ee] (there's no such thing as a "lie-berry", people!)
  • NUCLEAR [new-klee'-er] ("nuke-yuh-ler" is incorrect, Homer! Same goes for you, Dubya!!!)
  • OFTEN [aw'-fen] (the pretentious will insist on saying "awf'-Ten" but that is an archaic form and no more appropriate than saying "thee" and "thou" in colloquial English)
  • RIPON [rih'-pin] (so very many people pronounce this "rih-pon' " or "ripe'-on" that it gets on the nerves of anyone who has ever lived or gone to school there! Thanks Rachel K.
  • VIOLA [vi-o'-la] (the musical instrument is pronounced "vee-ola" but the flower and the woman's name is pronounced with an "eye", not an "ee")Thanks, Viola.