Crack.com Lives Here

I’m trying to get into the habit of taking photos, since it’s fun and easy and cheap as dirt, given that I have a finally bought a digital camera and rechargeable batteries. Eventually I’m going to move this blog to a proper web hosting situation, so that I can post photos and suchlike. In the meantime, I’m setting up a small gallery on biggeworld.com to allow me to illustrate certain entries and share with you the oddball things I find in Toronto and beyond.

The first entry in the wacko category is a computer mouse tossed over a residential electrical powerline.

I thought it would be an easy task to discover what sneakers hanging from the lines meant, and from that extrapolate what it means when a mouse dangles (dongles?) in a similar fashion. Nikes swinging in mid-air has been going on since forever, it seems, or at least since the mid-1990s. At Straight Dope, Cecil answered this question back in August of 1996.

Sorta.

Cecil threw out the question to his AOL chatroom plus alt.fan.cecil-adams and collated the responses, including:

* I heard tennis shoes hanging over a power line meant you could buy crack there.

* I agree with the drug theory. I saw a news brief on Amsterdam, and there was a pair of shoes hanging in the ghetto where everyone does drugs. So I assume it means "stop here."

* It's a time-honored tradition to throw your sneakers over the power lines on the last day of school.

* Used to be a gang sign -- sneakers hanging over telephone or electrical wires were to designate gang turf.

Concluded Cecil: "So there you have it. It's either a harmless prank, a rite of passage, or a sign of the end of civilization. You figure it out."

I wanted something definitive however, not something kinda helpful. There was nothing at Urbanlegends.com, unfortunately. (Or at least, I couldn’t find anything there). So, I guess you’ll have to figure it out or leave it be a mystery and simply enjoy the snaps.

And speaking of mice (and terrible segues) that song in the car commercial that’s causing all the indie kids to shout sellout for the 95th time is "Gravity Rides Everything" by Modest Mouse from The Moon & Antarctica.