Blog your bin for Sherlock Holmes!
Jan. 13th, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWhat would Sherlock Holmes make of you, based upon a cursory examination of the rubbish presently lying haphazardly in your rubbish bin? The wastepaper strewn in your wastepaper basket? The trash lying in your trash? (Even the way you describe it would tell the intrepid detective volumes.) This evening I snapped the top layer of my plastic Ikea waste bin. Here's what I found:
An opened contact lens container (I just use one at a time, obviously -- the prescription is - 2.25), a British tupenny piece (I think it may be a crime to throw away coins, especially those bearing your sovereign's head), a hanger that came with a new pair of socks I bought (does anybody actually hang their socks on a sock line?), a Berlin U-bahn ticket stamped at Weinmeisterstrasse, some cooking foil originally used to store fish fingers and baked potatoes, a carrier bag from Taj Stores on London's Brick Lane, still fragrant with the three packets of Twining's Chai it once contained, a Pokka cold green tea bottle, a rabbit dropping, and a DHL Pluspäckchen wrapper.
Now, no doubt Sherlock Holmes would have been able to induce without much difficulty (he induces, doesn't he, rather than deducing?) that this bin belongs to a short-sighted, one-eyed, lagomorph-owning nippophile, recently returned from his once-native Britain, a land towards which he now harbours some dismissive impulses, despite his love for its post-imperial immigrant communities.
Furthermore, Holmes, had he known Berlin, would have been able to declare that the bin's owner has tastes beyond his means -- for he has taken the U8 line from Weinmeisterstrasse, the most fashionable part of Mitte, south to the poor immigrant quarters of the city, where he no doubt lives in insalubrious lodgings, dreaming of better things.
But would the great detective have any way to account for the astounding fact that, as our suspect prepared to blog his own bin, and without telling his girlfriend -- the Japanese girl as absorbed, behind the top of her iBook, as he is behind his -- anything of his interests or intentions, he discovered that they were both, at exactly the same moment, viewing the same image on the world wide web?
For, extraordinary though it may seem, both of them, for entirely different reasons, were looking at this picture at exactly the same moment. They only discovered the fact when the one-eyed self-scavenger pulled the torn wrapper of an image in the same series out of his bin and took it over to his partner's new Philips Energylight to smooth it out and photograph it.
"Oh, I was just looking at Metroblogging Berlin," she explained, "and there was a comment about how DHL were using hard gay images on their Pluspäckchen prepaid postal packages".
In the face of this remarkable co-incidence even the world's greatest detective would, I believe, profess himself stumped. Buggered. And rubbish.
An opened contact lens container (I just use one at a time, obviously -- the prescription is - 2.25), a British tupenny piece (I think it may be a crime to throw away coins, especially those bearing your sovereign's head), a hanger that came with a new pair of socks I bought (does anybody actually hang their socks on a sock line?), a Berlin U-bahn ticket stamped at Weinmeisterstrasse, some cooking foil originally used to store fish fingers and baked potatoes, a carrier bag from Taj Stores on London's Brick Lane, still fragrant with the three packets of Twining's Chai it once contained, a Pokka cold green tea bottle, a rabbit dropping, and a DHL Pluspäckchen wrapper.
Now, no doubt Sherlock Holmes would have been able to induce without much difficulty (he induces, doesn't he, rather than deducing?) that this bin belongs to a short-sighted, one-eyed, lagomorph-owning nippophile, recently returned from his once-native Britain, a land towards which he now harbours some dismissive impulses, despite his love for its post-imperial immigrant communities.
Furthermore, Holmes, had he known Berlin, would have been able to declare that the bin's owner has tastes beyond his means -- for he has taken the U8 line from Weinmeisterstrasse, the most fashionable part of Mitte, south to the poor immigrant quarters of the city, where he no doubt lives in insalubrious lodgings, dreaming of better things.
But would the great detective have any way to account for the astounding fact that, as our suspect prepared to blog his own bin, and without telling his girlfriend -- the Japanese girl as absorbed, behind the top of her iBook, as he is behind his -- anything of his interests or intentions, he discovered that they were both, at exactly the same moment, viewing the same image on the world wide web?
For, extraordinary though it may seem, both of them, for entirely different reasons, were looking at this picture at exactly the same moment. They only discovered the fact when the one-eyed self-scavenger pulled the torn wrapper of an image in the same series out of his bin and took it over to his partner's new Philips Energylight to smooth it out and photograph it."Oh, I was just looking at Metroblogging Berlin," she explained, "and there was a comment about how DHL were using hard gay images on their Pluspäckchen prepaid postal packages".
In the face of this remarkable co-incidence even the world's greatest detective would, I believe, profess himself stumped. Buggered. And rubbish.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
fog matters to you and me, but it can't touch Sherlock Holmes..
Date: 2007-01-12 11:12 pm (UTC)For what it's worth, if Sherlock Holmes was coming to look at my bin, I'd print out some Holmes/Watson and leave it there, crumpled up, and hope that it would scare/intrigue him so much he would stop going through it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-12 11:32 pm (UTC)Mm, chocolate.
NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-12 11:47 pm (UTC)IN TORONTO HOLMES WOULD HAVE TO RECONCILE
a)GREY BIN (paper)
b) BLUE BIN (bottles and cans)
c) GREEN BIN (compost)
d) BLACK BIN OF LAST RESORT (other)
ON PICKUP DAY THERE ARE THUS PICTURESQUE CUBES AND TUBES OF COLOUR SCATTERED ALONG OUR STREETS
Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 12:22 am (UTC)Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 12:56 am (UTC)i agree. i'm from seattle and was equal parts surprised and shocked to see all that stuff in the trash. esp. considering all the comments he's made about being environmentally friendly by using public transit vs. driving, carbon emissions etc.
it's not even legal to throw that stuff in the garbage here. apartment buildings get fined if you throw away paper, recyclable plastic etc.
our airport has recycling bins, the trash cans downtown have a bin on top for recycling bottles, cans, etc.
as far as the sociology of trash goes, a portland newspaper did an interesting experiment where they went through the trash of city officials (http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=3485).
Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 12:56 am (UTC)Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 01:08 am (UTC)GLAD TO HEAR YOUR APARTMENT BUILDINGS ARE ON BOARD--WE STILL DONT HAVE HIGHRISE RECYCLING AND THE SUBURBS DONT HAVE COMPOST BINS YET
THE COLLECTORS LEAVE YOUR TRASH BAGS ON THE CURB IF THEY SPOT ANY RECYCLABLES--MY AMERICAN NEIGHBOUR STUDYING IN CANADA GOT BURNED ON THIS RECENTLY AND IS SIMPLY HIDING THEM BETTER I THINK--THE CITY WAS EVEN PROPOSING A MOVE TO MANDATORY CLEAR GARBAGE BAGS! NO MORE SECRETS!!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 01:34 am (UTC)http://www.minipara.com/movies2000-3rd/tokyogomi/
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 01:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 01:56 am (UTC)I wonder what a demented Sherlock Holmes would read from your bin. A Sherlock Holmes, heavily aged and always expecting a murder in every corner, with a charming idiocity. Probably that you're a calm, half-blind villain coming home from murdering a cook by suffocating him with a sock in London.
Nice entry.
Robert
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 04:30 am (UTC)mixu62
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 04:46 am (UTC)Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 05:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 06:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 06:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 06:42 am (UTC)sherlock suspects you have been murdering trees ?
a slapping for the lack of recycle-age!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 07:24 am (UTC)Perhaps you sort after you purge and no one has given you the benefit of the doubt? It is after all a small bin.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 08:12 am (UTC)Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 09:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 10:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 11:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 11:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 11:45 am (UTC)But aren't they just two masculine men together? Sometimes all this policing straight-eye-for-queer-guy is annoying. Women are so ubiquitous in advertising, that as soon as we have two men in an image it is construed as gay.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 12:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 12:49 pm (UTC)he would never solve anything for real.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 02:48 pm (UTC)Am I just cynical or are you going to come clean about your dirt?
mixu62
yeah but,
Date: 2007-01-13 02:53 pm (UTC)Alexandre P.
Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 02:54 pm (UTC)mixu62
Re: yeah but,
Date: 2007-01-13 02:56 pm (UTC)Re: NO HAS BINS
Date: 2007-01-13 02:57 pm (UTC)mixu62
Re: yeah but,
Date: 2007-01-13 03:13 pm (UTC)I read that in a customer review of the novel Fantomas on Amazon.com, so this comment itself is a piece of electronic rubbish.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 05:21 pm (UTC)mixu62
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 07:35 pm (UTC)You are all envirangelists, repent your hypocrisies, let him that is without sin cast out the first polystyrene wrapper.
Thomas Scott.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 09:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 02:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 02:26 am (UTC)Now if there was a biro tube as well....
I might suspect it had gone all john and yoko 1968
Dylan used to suffer from garbage interpreters.
Bucket rakers of the world, unite and take over!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 06:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 10:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 07:47 pm (UTC)access to the rear is limited
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-20 12:20 pm (UTC)