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Staying with my mother has reintroduced me to the delights of telephone salesmen. During the week, somebody calls the house trying to sell us stuff perhaps once an hour. A few of them are spectacularly obnoxious – the one that put me in a hold queue as soon as I picked up the phone was particularly impressive.

My question to you is: what can I do to them? Either to have some fun, or to make their lives unpleasant. Mostly I’m currently telling them that I’m really interested in $useless_product, asking them to wait while I turn down the cooking/call the homeowner/move to a different room, leaving the phone off the hook, and seeing how long they’ll wait. But I’m in desperate need of some better ideas.

Edit

: OK, OK. I’m impressed how reasonable and sensible you all are, and wondering how I managed to not run into the Telephone Preference Service. I give in: I’ll be nice to them, and do the things that are supposed to make them go away. But grr…I’d love it if once things didn’t all come down to politics and economics.

…or you’ll miss the text message offering you a free Glastonbury ticket.

Damn.

---

There probably won’t be a big Cambridge update – it’d be either dull or tasteless to write about most of it, and I can’t face working through all those lj-names. It was great, although I feel somewhat maudlin at the inevitable drifting-apart from friends who I now only see a few times a year. Obviously I need to be more extraverted in Berlin, and stop expecting Cambridge to be the same whenever I visit.

Still not sure exactly when I’m heading back to Berlin (a pox on logistics, laziness, disorganization and big business). I’m in Oakham for now, and probably too poor to go back to Cambridge or London. Should anybody feel a burning need to visit Oakham, there is a spare bed here – but the place is hardly bustling

Sorry to all the people I didn’t get to talk to much in Cambridge.

“I was down in my garage when it happened,” David Eddings told

reporters outside the smouldering remains of his office in Carson City,

Nevada, “making reparis to my broken-down Excalibur sports car. I was

using water to flush out the gas tank when some fluid started leaking

out, and I began wondering what the hell it was. I didn’t want to leave

a tankful of gasoline slowly leaking onto the garage floor, so

I lit a

piece of paper and threw it into the puddle of liquid, to test if it was

flammable. In retrospect, I can see that this was a lapse of judgement

on my part

.” [

Private Eye

]

Also: in Cambridge for the weekend!

I was just emailed the following invitation:

An Evening with Gilly Mundy

Come and celebrate the life of campaigner and activist Gilly Mundy,

who died on 17 March 2007 aged only 36.

I wonder if they’re planning to summon him from beyond the grave…

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Mainly for rachelfmb: Crooked Timber have far too much fun with a planned film biography of Marx:

OPENING CREDITS

SOUNDTRACK: Jim Morrison sings “The Internationale”. Fade into overhead shot of Karl lying flat on his back on his desk.

MARX: (V/O) Bloomsbury. Shit. Two weeks and I was still in the British Museum Reading Room. Every time I looked around, the political philosophy shelves moved in a little closer. Everyone gets what he wants. I wanted an overarching critique of the modern politico-economic system. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

…

ENGELS: (puts down dog-eared copy of “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”) It is clear to me that Herr Hegel has gone insane.

MARX: Yes, sir. Obviously insane.

ENGELS: And he is still out there, still discussing the nature of existence. We want you to go to Germany, and terminate his tenure.

PROUDHON: Terminate with extreme prejudice.

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Here is a nicely tongue-in-cheek economics paper, claiming that people drive better bargains listening to Brian Johnson than to Bon Scott. What’s impressive is that they manage to keep up their oh-so-serious tone all the way through…

Our results suggest that having participants listen to songs by AC/DC in which Brian Johnson served as vocalist results in participants realizing more efficient (*) outcomes.

…

Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: when policymakers or employers are engaging in negotiations (or setting up environments in which other parties will negotiate) and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band’s Brian Johnson era discography.

(*) Efficient=mean and self-interested, it seems

In Sharm el-Sheikh, Ban Ki-moon and a gaggle of presidents finally [launched](http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/EGUA-72URTH?OpenDocument) the International Compact for Iraq today, supposedy gathering billions of dollars in aid for Iraq. [1]

They’re probably eviscerating their webmaster right about…..now.

[1] They claim $30bn, but most of that is debt relief (i.e. it is only worth a fraction of the face value)