|
Mike's Pith & Wind - OMG
I’ve had my new Yellow Pages sitting
on my porch for three weeks now. It’s by way of registering
a protest against the wanton waste of providing every subscriber
with these yellow (and white) elephants that I’m sure 70%
of us will never use in anger, let alone the spirit of inquiry.
I noticed yesterday that the original package had given birth to
a baby (local) Yellow Pages, (pic) which, if anything,
is even more useless than its parents.
If it helps, we’re not alone - American left-of-centre comedian
and social commentator, Bill Maher, alerted me to the fact that
the US has precisely the same problem as, I’m pretty sure,
do most countries round the world. It’s unbelievable to me
that this manifest wastage issue hasn’t been addressed before
now, if only in the interests of cost-cutting, let alone preserving
the environment.
In some countries the equivalent directory is called ‘Golden
Pages’, but calling yellow gold smacks of the same kind of
snobbery that has some people (seriously) calling Target ‘Tahjay’.
Despite my couple of years as an Art student, I cannot name all
the colours in a water colour palette, but I can tell you
that the Wallabies’ jerseys are yellow, not gold, just as
the Golden Wattle’s flower is dead-set yellow. I think people
are afraid of calling yellow a spade because of the associations
with cowardice (as pointed out by New Zealand’s PM, Robert
Muldoon, after the 1981 under-arm bowling incident*), and it’s
true that yellow, which I always thought of as a cheerful, sunlit
colour, (remembering my.. read
more |
