Be alarmed #2

As the youngest child of many in a house where everyone accumulated, but no-one ever threw out books, I had access, while trying to make sense of the world, to a Victorian childrens' story book full of weird little fables and fine line drawings. One of its more memorable cautionary tales concerned a very poor couple who lived in a tiny house in the country. The man, who cultivated frugal habits, began to tie his string collection together. Whenever he came across a new bit of binder twine, pudding string or parcel hemp, he would add it to his rapidly growing tangle of string.

The perils of this strategy were familiar, because in his widowed retirement, my railway grandfather took to splicing every bit of super 8 film he ever shot onto one huge reel. I liked seeing his fillums - the repetition of the familiar, the long, long shaky pans, the random jumpcuts, the climactic arrival of the promised 'new pictures of xxxxx'. Grownups hated them.

As anticipated, the frugal man in the story's obsession with string ruined his life. He grew overprotective, as the enormous ball attracted first great kudos and honour, and then string thieves. His wife left him, taking the family cow, when, even though she had grown gaunt and thin from the loss of the man's formerly productive farm effort, she could no longer squeeze past the string ball and through the front (and only) door of their tiny cottage. String man died a lonely and allegedly deserved death, crushed, body and spirit, by his runaway obsession.

This man, John Bain, made the world's biggest rubber band ball. It's now 5 foot high, took him and some helpers 5 years to assemble, and apparently cost $25,000 for the materials. Me, I can think of better things to do with that money.

This link takes you to tonight's reason to be alarmed: a Kafkaesque true story of air travel in the days of terror-phobia, wherein a small rubber band ball thrown casually into the hand luggage as an afterthought leads to detention, drug-testing, and a night in the clink for our hero.
[Flyer Talk link from Boing Boing].