christmas

What to do if you can’t find a Lionel Polar Express set

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , ,

The Polar Express is turning out (so far) to be a bigger hit for Lionel than it is for Tom Hanks. Dealers are sold out and the sets are turning up on Ebay, usually with asking prices $100-$200 higher than the suggested retail price. It’s not as hot as Tickle Me Elmo, but since the words "hot selling" and "train set" haven’t appeared together since the late 1950s, well…

So what should you do if you (or someone in your household) wants The Polar Express and can’t get one? Hint: Ebay shouldn’t be your first resort.First and foremost, Lionel did little other than apply new lettering to existing product to make this set. So if you can live without the posable figures that were included in the set, any 2-8-4 Berkshire steam engine pulling a string of heavyweight passenger cars is going to look like the Polar Express. That’s Greek to you? Don’t worry. If you call up a hobby shop that sells trains and ask for that, someone there will know what that means.

But, from a playing with trains standpoint, passenger cars aren’t nearly as interesting as freights. Once you get tired of watching the Polar Express run around in circles, the set’s going to do time in the basement or the attic and maybe come back out around the holidays to grace Mom’s porcelain village with its presence. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless the train was intended to be played with.

If the Polar Express has kindled an interest in trains, Junior is going to have more fun with a freight set, because freight trains haul stuff. Gondolas and hoppers can haul loads of marbles, flat cars can haul automobiles and construction equipment, and so on. New cars can be added to make it more interesting, usually at fairly low cost. Besides, a freight train isn’t going to scream "Christmas," which the Polar Express certainly does.

I recommend O27 type trains for kids for two reasons. First, I recommend it because it’s what I grew up with and it’s what my dad grew up with, so it must be the best, right? More seriously, O27 trains are big and heavy enough that they can be handled without breaking. The track can be permanently attached to a table, but that isn’t necessary. It works just fine set up on the floor. HO and N scale track don’t work as well if they aren’t bolted down, and an O27 set has much more tolerance for kinks in the track. Also, because of O27’s sharp curves, you can actually squeeze a better O27 layout into a 4’x5′ space than you could an HO set. It isn’t as realistic, but kids aren’t as worried about perfect realism as adults. Another advantage of O27 is that it’s scaled at 1:64, which is about the same scale as the Matchbox-type cars that every kid already has. Kids would probably play with the trains and cars together anyway even if they weren’t the same scale, but since they’re sized to go together, they give more play options together.

What brand? Lionel is the venerable brand, but there are others. If you go to a store like Hobby Lobby, you’ll see sets from a company called K-Line, if you’re lucky, maybe one or two Lionel accessories. Many of the so-called anchor department stores carry a set from either Lionel or a company called MTH in their catalogs, if not in the stores themselves. While the brand loyalty to Lionel and MTH is even more ridiculous than Ford and Chevy pickup truck loyalty, there isn’t a lot of difference these days. The nice thing is that even if you buy a set from one company, the other companies’ cars will work with them. Most of the hobby shops here in St. Louis carry a large selection of inexpensive cars from a company called Industrial Rail. Unfortunately, no matter which brand you get, it’s very difficult to find an O27 gauge set for less than $200.

Used, er, vintage trains can be a lot less expensive than buying new, but I don’t recommend it for a first-time buyer looking for a train set for a child. I’ve bought a lot of used vintage trains, and about half of them run. It’s usually impossible to tell from looking at the outside or from its age if it’s going to run. An 85-year-old train I bought ran–poorly, but it ran–while a 30-year old train I bought didn’t run at all. If you’re going to buy used, buy from a hobbyist who has been using it and can demonstrate that it still works, or buy from a dealer who will stand behind it.

But if you must have the Polar Express, what to do? Ebay may be your only option. Lionel fanatics have known this set was coming for about a year, and they bought up a good percentage of the sets. Most of the remaining sets are spoken for. A phone call to your local Lionel dealers (look in the phone book under "hobbies") might turn up a set. If someone actually advertises a set in the ads on the left-hand side of this page, they’re worth checking out too, on the logic that they wouldn’t pay to advertise something they don’t have in stock.

If you must turn to Ebay, e-mail the seller before you bid to make sure the seller actually has the set. A lot of people are listing sets on Ebay with the intent of ordering a set if someone buys it. This practice is illegal, but these buyers either don’t know or care. But why should you pay someone $350 to order a set and wait until March to get it when you can pay $250 for the set yourself and wait until March to get it?

The other option is to wait until March. Lionel will make more sets. Trust me on that. They need the money.

Lionel bankruptcy

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Lionel bankruptcy

It was all over the news when it happened. Lionel, the train maker, filed Chapter 11 on Nov 16, 2004. But a lot of the news stories got some critical details wrong. It’s not the first time a Lionel bankruptcy confused people.

Lionel has been bankrupt before, but the company has changed ownership numerous times so it’s not the same legal entity that went bankrupt in the 1930s and 1960s. There have also been numerous rumors about bankruptcy after 2004. These are usually dealers trying to create artificial demand to clear inventory.

Read more

What day is it again?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , ,

Passing a few minutes before a movie started tonight, my girlfriend and I went into a nearby store to look around. And what did we find?

Christmas stuff.

Am I smoking crack, or is it still August?I probably shouldn’t encourage them, but I bought some stuff. Many of those collectible holiday village sets happen to be sized about right for O scale Lionel trains. Those that aren’t are usually sized about right for HO scale. I doubt it’s an accident. Around 100 years ago, J. Lionel Cowen convinced everyone that a train belonged around the Christmas tree. These days, ceramic villages and figures are more popular than the trains, and the big brands are every bit as overpriced as anything Lionel or MTH have made in the past decade, but they’re still sized so they’ll look right if a Lionel train escapes from the attic and ventures into the neighborhood. New traditions have a better chance of usurping older traditions if they fit in with them first.

These weren’t Lemax or Department 56. They were cheap knockoffs. This particular series of knockoffs pairs up O scale-sized figures with HO scale-sized buildings. Not my thang. I’m anything but a scale bigot but half-sized buildings get on my nerves.

But I bought a few figures. They came four to a package for a dollar. You’re lucky to pay less than $4 per figure at a hobby shop. For my four bucks, I got 16 figures.

Yes, the figures are dressed in heavy coats and there’s snow on the bases they stand on. So I won’t have them on the train layout at the same time as my open-top convertible 1:43-scale cars. But the availability of the figures makes it just as cheap and easy to make winter scenes, just like the 50-cent Homies figures make it cheap and easy to make summertime scenes.

Useless trivia answer: If you’ve ever wondered where 1:43 scale toy cars come from, they come from trains as well. The British decided that O scale should be 1:43, and Hornby decided it would be nice to be able to sell cars with which boys could populate their cities. The cars became popular toys in their own right, and the 1:43 scale was copied by other companies, so 1:43 scale cars lived on long after Hornby stopped selling O scale trains.

End useless trivia.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Useless Christmas merchandising in August. I decided I wanted 16 vaguely O scale figures in winter dress more than I wanted $4.24.

But I passed on the wreaths and the holly. I can’t think of any good use for those in my basement.

Pretentious Pontifications: R. Collins for President

Dave Farquhar General , ,

R. Collins Farquhar IV, Aristocrat and Scientist.

To the directionless American people.

Greeting:

As my most recent endeavor received little appreciation, it is my great delectation to announce my decision to devote my considerable talents to solving the world’s problems.George W. Bush is in the back pocket of large corporations in a time when there are only two corporations, Intel and Microsoft, who are worthy of any trust. John Kerry is in the back pocket of labor unions and other leftist organizations.

Matters such as war and the economy are best left to the aristocracy, and not to amateurs such as these men. And, being an aristocrat, I have adequate means to support myself for eight years, so I can work without the distraction of trying to tread water above the poverty level on a meager $200,000 salary.

Therefore I am running for president.

John Kerry says he will reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil but he does not say how. This is because this is a popular idea to which he has given no thought. Some political consultant told him this is what the rabble wants to hear. As even a simpleton like my brother David knows, the way one reduces dependency on oil flowing in from countries that hate you is by increasing your dependency on oil flowing in from countries that do not. Alaska has oil. Alaska is not even a foreign country. Venezuela has oil. We already buy oil from Venezuela. We should keep doing that. Russia has oil. We have money. We need oil. Russia needs money.

I will not state the rest of the obvious.

Now let us tackle the difficult matter of war. Being of rich Scottish heritage, and being descended from warriors who nearly succeeded in overthrowing the King of England except for a minor technicality of being betrayed by the French, I know a few things about war. I know more than a few things about winning a war.

I suppose only an aristocrat would notice such things, but it is very appropriate that our troops wear green camouflage, for many of them are not battle-tested. This is part of the reason why we are not winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is painfully obvious to my aristocratic eyes that our troops need more seasoning before we send them off to fight in either of those two countries. Therefore, I propose we declare war on France in order to give our troops an opportunity to learn how to fight a war and gain confidence by absolutely trouncing an enemy. This trenchant and sonorous victory would give our troops confidence and rid us of a distraction. While routing the French army would not provide total preparation for facing the much better-trained guerrilla troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would certainly give them confidence, and confidence is 90% of everything.

The economy is easy to turn around. The aristocracy needs to spend more of its pin money. And when unemployment increases, the aristocracy needs to take on more manservants.

There remains but one problem, but hear me out, for I am going to turn that problem into a tremendous advantage: My age. The reports are true that I am but 29 years of age, which is well short of the 45-year requirement. However, I am in possession of an evil twin brother, who, incredibly, is also 29 years of age. Our combined age of 58 is well over the legal requirement. The advantage is that my brother, whom some consider more personable than myself, can take to matters that make presidents popular with the populace, such as jogging, drinking coffee at McDonald’s, looking at trains going around Christmas trees, signing books, making appearances at sporting events, dedicating libraries, granting interviews, and other such examples of woolgathering. He obviously will not know what is going on, but that is okay, because it will make this presidency appear peccant and naive, but such are the hallmarks of recent U.S. presidencies. Meanwhile, I can be tending to vade me*censored*presidential affairs, such as having my manservants bathe me, and then I can tend to a grueling 4-hour workday, whose tasks will include turning around the economy, bringing jobs back to the United States, and winning wars.

With an identical twin frolicking about the country acting as an aegis, it will be impossible at all times to know my whereabouts. So my misguided fans who like to give me fan letters soaked in alcohol and set on fire, or give me a 21-gun salute all by themselves, will not only have to get past the Secret Service, they first will have to figure out where I am. The additional Secret Service agents needed to protect two co-presidents will help the economy, offsetting some of the abstruce disadvantages of having such an ignoramus in such a prominent and redoubtable position.

My vice president, of course, will be none other than Jacques Pierre Cousteau Bouilliabaise le Raunche de la Stenche. He will, of course, be my main deipnosophist, and act as a fountain of yeasty jeremiads.

My time has come. My country needs me.

Not only do I appreciate your vote, I deserve it.

Vintage signs and lighting for your toy train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , ,

I couldn’t have possibly found this site too soon: http://www.gatewaynmra.org/download.htm.
Besides photographs of six vintage building signs, there are also numerous other photographs for download that might be useful, and also some articles with really good tips.

Emphasis is more on serious modeling in HO or N scale than in toy-train O or S gauge, but in the case of the photographs, all that means is you have to print them bigger in order to use them. And the tips for assembling and improving models from kits hold regardless of type.

I also found this tutorial on lighting your railroad buildings with Christmas lights. Seeing as most places have them on sale for 50, 60, or 75 percent off while they last this time of year, the timing’s pretty good.

One guy in rec.models.railroad suggested using yellow LEDs to light your buildings, but seeing as a strand of Christmas lights is dirt cheap and I don’t have anything to cannibalize yellow LEDs from, I may go the Christmas light route first.

Thinking on Compaq Presario upgrades

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I’m going to be upgrading a Compaq Presario 7360 here pretty soon. It should be fun to shatter some of the myths surrounding recent Compaqs. It’s a standard microATX PC, nothing more, nothing less. With a $20 replacement power supply (Newegg.com calls the form factor used by low-end eMachines, Compaq, HP, and Gateway PCs “mini ATX”), it’ll handle any modern microATX motherboard.
Buying a new PC is easier, and if this PC were going to anyone else, I’d probably just tell the person to buy whatever the local consumer electronics store is hawking in its post-Christmas sales, or whatever Dell has for $349-$399. But for the technically savvy (or those who have a local computer store that’s honest and savvy and don’t mind paying for the use of that privelige), upgrading in pieces still makes sense. A motherboard based on an Nvidia Nforce2 (I’m sick of goofy capitalization) costs $65. Add a $36 1.6 GHz Duron CPU, a $10 fan, and a $35 256MB stick of DDR memory to go with the $20 power supply, and that Presario becomes a formidible computer for not a lot of money.

Recapturing the charm of Dad’s Lionel train

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , ,

I unboxed Dad’s old Lionel train Monday night. They don’t make them like that anymore.

Dad’s train led a rough life. My investigative reporting skills tell me he got the train sometime between 1949 and 1952, and then sometime after 1953 he got a new locomotive and cars. And then sometime in the 1960s, the trains ended up in a box. I remember him telling me it came out a few times in the 1970s for Christmas, but most of my memories of Dad’s train are four big pieces of plywood with rusty track mounted on it, sitting in the garage next to a stack of repurposed liquor boxes containing train parts.

Read more

This is still a blog

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

A year, or maybe two years ago, I wrote a piece called “This is a blog” in response to an overly full-of-himself author who said that serious professionals don’t blog. It infuriated some people and got me kicked off the daynotes.com web page. I don’t have anything like that to lose this time around, so I don’t approach the topic with the same kind of eagerness–you’re always more eager when you know someone’s going to be offended and throw a temper tantrum–but since everyone and his uncle seems to be writing about John C. Dvorak’s current PC magazine column, Co-opting the future, I might as well weigh in, since it’s the in thing to do, and disagree with the majority knee-jerk reaction, since that isn’t the in thing to do. But I won’t do it to be counterculture. No, I’ll disagree with the majority reaction because the majority reaction is wrong.

Yes, I find it funny that the guy who was recommending novelty domain names as Christmas presents back when a domain name still cost $99 a year is today opposed to blogs. What else is someone going to do with a personalized domain name? I’ll tell you what I’d do if someone gave me the davefarquhar.com domain–I’d run a mail server on it and I’d hang my blog off it. Dvorak would run a mail server off it and post some recipes on it and some pictures of his pets. But my site would be more useful–at least blogging software provides a search engine so you can find the stuff. Isn’t it tacky to tell people to go to Google and type what they’re looking for, followed by site:yourdomainnamehere.com?

But unlike the vigilante masses, I don’t take issue with the majority of what Dvorak says. So he cites a paper that says the majority of blogs get abandoned. The blogosphere goes nuts. Well, I’m sorry, folks, but Dvorak’s right. Go to any public blogging community and start navigating random sites, and you’re going to find a lot of abandonware. It’s like any other hobby. It’s great when the novelty is new. But eventually the newness fades away. Some people abandon their blogs for a while, for various reasons, then come back. Hey, I posted as much in the months of September and October as I used to post in a week. It happens. I came back because I love writing. Some people find they don’t love writing. Some people find they love writing but they run out of things to say. It happens. Large numbers of people trying it and deciding they don’t like it doesn’t invalidate it. How many millions of cameras sit in closets, only to be taken out during birthdays and holidays, if then? Does that somehow invalidate photography?

Then Dvorak says the people who stick with blogging are professional writers. Interestingly, the people rebutting Dvorak bring up the blogs written by–guess who?–professional writers. Now I don’t see how that invalidates Dvorak’s point that the longest lasting, most popular blogs tend to be written by people who do it professionally. I think it’s obvious. If you’re going to write professionally, you have to love it. And if you love writing, you’re more likely to blog.

In other news, computer professionals are more likely than others to build their own computers, dogs are more likely to bark than cats, the sky is blue, and if there’s snow on the ground it’s probably cold outside.

The really incendiary statement Dvorak quotes is that the majority of blogs have an audience of about 12 people. Sometimes reality hurts. I remember checking my logs in my early days and being shocked when I had 40 visitors. Then I was shocked when I found out some people looked up to me because I had 40 visitors. I thought I was the only small-market guy.

Eventually, one of three things happens to every small-audience blogger. Some get frustrated and quit. Others toil on in obscurity. Still others one way or another stumble onto something that people like and they grow their audience.

Today, my audience is closer to 12 hundred people. That doesn’t make me a superstar, but it’s not bad. Some people I remember celebrating breaking 20 readers a day five years ago aren’t doing it anymore. Others are, and they probably get 1200 people a day too. Or more.

I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone, but Dvorak will be Dvorak. I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone when he wrote about OS/2 either, and I think Dvorak’s personal crusade against the caps lock key is idiotic and annoying. He needs to just download a utility that remaps it to a control key and shut up. Those of us who really know how to type will continue to use it when we need it. So Dvorak doesn’t like blogs either. If I only ever read people who agree with me, I wouldn’t ever read.

The only thing I really disagreed with was Dvorak’s assertion that big media is taking over the blogs. Yes, big media is blogging. But the little guys will always outnumber big media. There’ll always be professional writers who blog on their own time to keep sharp or to experiment. There’ll be part-time pros like me who don’t like big media and don’t like most editors–well, I can name four editors I worked with who I liked–who blog because it’s a way to write and stay in touch with the craft and be true to one’s self. There’ll be up-and-comers who are in high school or college and decide to start blogging as part of the process of finding one’s self. There’ll be people who do it just as a hobby.

And guess what? Google starts out with no assumptions. It treats all links the same. That’s why little guys like me can get 1,200 hits a day.

And next week Dvorak will be off on another crusade. There’s about a 50% chance of him being right. I’ve known that since I started reading the guy a decade ago.

Getting started in Genealogy

Dave Farquhar Genealogy , ,

I’ll admit it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m a johnny-come-lately to the genealogy game. My computer can tell you how I’m related to more than 1,200 different people. And I just started last week.
I’ve accumulated more names than my mom did in years of research, working the old-fashioned way in the 1970s, searching libraries, museums, LDS records, and graveyards.

So how’d I do it?

Talking about Mom’s side of the family is cheating, because she can easily trace her ancestry to pre-Civil War days. Dad’s side of the family was the challenge, because his parents never talked about their roots (my grandmother actually told my mom to quit nosing around in the past and spend time with her two young kids instead–advice that I, as one of those two kids, disagree with, but it’s too late now).

Here’s what I did. I knew that my great great grandfather was named Isaac Proctor Farquhar (I didn’t know if the middle name was spelled “Proctor” or “Procter”), that he was a doctor, and that he lived in Ohio. I literally punched “Dr. Isaac Proctor Farquhar Ohio” into Google to see what came up. What came up was a family tree tracing my ancestry back to 1729. I verified it because I knew the names of my great grandfather and grandfather.

A better approach is to visit a pure genealogy search site, such as ancestry.com or the Mormons’ familysearch.org and punch in the names of any deceased relatives you can think of. The further back they are in the past, the better. The names of living relatives aren’t very useful, since people almost always strip out the names of any living people from their online records due to privacy concerns.

Once you’re reasonably certain you’ve found a relative, enter whatever you can find into your computer. Family Tree Maker is a good piece of software for tracking your roots, and it’s not terribly expensive. Several sites offer free genealogy software. I haven’t looked at any of it. There’s little risk in trying it though–virtually every genealogy program can import and export data in GEDCOM file format. A number of free Linux genealogy programs are available too–just search Freshmeat.

I need to stress entering anything you can find. Often I find incomplete genealogies online. I’ll find a record for a great great great grandfather that lists two children and a birthplace. If I’ve previously entered all available data and I know my great great great grandfather had 10 kids, including the two on that genealogy I just found, and the birthdates and birthplaces and spouses’ names all match, then I can be reasonably certain that I’ve got the right ancestor and I can see where that trail leads me. It’s more fun to track direct ancestors and see how far back into the past you can go, but you need aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’ names to prove relations sometimes. Besides, sometimes you find a distant cousin who married someone interesting.

If you don’t find anything, talk to your living family members. Ask if they can remember any relatives’ names, birthplaces, and anything else about them. I only know about Isaac Proctor Farquhar because of some conversations I had with my dad. My sister may or may not have known about him. But I know there are relatives she knows about that I don’t. Old family photo albums and Christmas card lists are other sources of clues.

Here’s how I cracked a tough problem. My great grandfather, Ralph Collins Farquhar, married a woman named Nellie McAdow. Nellie McAdow was a dead end. Her mother’s name was Mary Lillian Miller. I didn’t even have her father’s first name. All I found was a guy named McAdow, born in Ohio. A subsequent search revealed her father’s initials were A.G. and he was born in Pharisburg. So then I had A. G. McAdow, Pharisburg, May 25, 1859-January 15, 1904. I did a Google search and found the text of an old book that casually mentioned A. G. McAdow owned a store in Pharisburg in 1883. Great, so the guy’s in the history books, and I still can’t find his first name. Somehow, somehow, Mom knew his first name was Adalaska. Adalaska!? No wonder he went by “A. G.” I searched for Adalaska McAdow. Nothing at ancestry.com. But at Familysearch.com, I found 1880 census data. I found Adalaska living with someone he listed as his stepfather, Smith May, occupation farmer. His mother’s name was Virginia, and she was born in 1838 in Ohio, and they had a daughter, Lena, who was born in 1871. That was enough information to feed a couple more searches, which gave me Virginia’s maiden name, Evans, and the name of her first husband, James W. McAdow.

He was tougher than most, and I still don’t know nearly as much about this line as some others–including Nellie’s mother, Mary Lillian Miller’s line–but I broke the dead end.

I still have no clue why two people with normal names like James and Virginia would name their son Adalaska.

The grandmother who told my mom not to pry into the past remains a tough one. Social security records confirmed her dates of birth and death, and place of death, because my memory was hazy. Mom knows her parents were German immigrant Rudolph Keitsch and Irish immigrant Bessie Bonner. A Google search revealed Elizabeth Keitsch graduated from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1932. So far I’ve found absolutely no trace of her parents. I’m hoping that census records may help–a Google search for “ancestry records search” turns up several sites that will let you search various U.S. censuses for free, but they all use ancestry.com for something or another, which is down for maintenance as I write.

But I’m reasonably confident that once I can search census records, even my stubborn half-German grandmother will finally yield some information after all these years.

You can subscribe to ancestry.com to get to information that you can’t find online for free, and I’m sure that at some point I’ll end up doing that. For now I don’t have much reason to. You might as well see what you can find out for free as well. And I honestly hope you don’t have four grandparents like Elizabeth Keitsch. I hope yours are more like Ralph Collins Farquhar Jr., who took about 30 seconds to trace back to 1729, and whose grandmother, Elizabeth Stratton, led me back to the sixth century and gave me a splitting headache that forced me to temporarily abandon the search to return to this continent and four-digit years.

May all your lines do the same.

Eldred loses, and so do the rest of us

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , ,

It’s obvious from today’s ruling in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case that copyright law will never revert back to what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Corporate interests will be able to continue to buy extensions to copyright law to prevent the overwhelming majority of works made after 1924 from falling into the public domain unless for some odd reason it gets abandoned.
The problem is that when you and I want something, all we have to offer to our congressmen is our vote every two or six years, and maybe a campaign contribution. Disney doesn’t vote, although its employees do, but Disney can give a congressman or a political party more money in a year than I’ll earn in the next decade.

The result is that companies like Disney can profit off the public domain (that’s where they got The Jungle Book–author Rudyard Kipling didn’t make a dime off the Disney movie) without ever putting anything into the pot. Movies like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, which would be public domain by now if the Sonny Bono Copyright Act hadn’t passed in 1998, remain locked up.

I doubt the public domain issue is something that’s going to energize the masses enough to force the issue into Congress. At least not in the short term. Most people have no clue what “public domain” means. They just know that around Christmas, suddenly 50 of their cable channels start playing It’s a Wonderful Life 24 hours a day. If any of them ever bother to ask, they find out it’s because the movie is in the public domain and anyone can broadcast it without paying for it. Then they shrug their shoulders and reach for the remote and look for tanks or bulldozers or football.

But this is a battle we have to fight.

Since writing to our Congressmen is futile–I may do it anyway, hoping that maybe my word carries a couple of grams’ worth more weight since I have produced a number of copyrighted works–we’re going to need to resort to something else: Civil disobedience. If a law can’t be counted on to be kept by 70 percent of the populace, it’s not enforcable and the law will chance. The most recent example of this is speed limits.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to run out to Gnutella and Kazaa and download everything in sight. As much as I may disagree with Aimee Mann’s political views, she has more than the right to be paid–she has the need to be paid. She’s not working a steady 40-hour-a-week job so she needs those record royalties to pay her bills. Taking her music without paying for it is no different from withholding my 40-hour-a-week paycheck.

But when the copyright would have rightfully expired by now anyway, I see no moral or ethical problem in taking it.

For example, there’s the Non-US Online Books Page that lists old books that are out of international copyright but not U.S. copyright. Books make you look smart, right? Download them, unwrap them with a text editor like Metapad, and then you can load them into Word and set the font and size to whatever you want. Duplex-print them (or print the odd pages, let the pages cool, then put the pages back in and print the even pages) and comb bind them or put them into cheap $1 3-ring binders, or take up bookbinding as a hobby. Fill up your bookshelves with free books you may not necessarily ever read. Be sure to include legitimate public domain books in your collection as well.

Or, since I know the majority of you won’t do that, amass a huge collection of early ’50s rock’n’roll tunes. The copyrights have expired in Europe. Import cheap European bootlegs, or get them through Gnutella. Share them with friends. Record a shelf full of CDs. If your hobby is music, sample and re-use the living daylights out of them. If you’re a European musician, do us States-siders a favor and use a 1950s-era sample in every song you record so that your colleagues over here start wondering why they can’t do that.

Sometimes civil disobedience is the only way to overthrow oppressive laws.