|
101 Things You Can Do With A "101 Things to Do With 101-Things-To-Do-With" Lists
1: Read it. 2: Choose not to read it; studiously ignore it. 3: Toilet paper. 4: Tear out the pages and roll joints with them. 5: Lick the ink off the paper and use the book for a message pad. 6: If you're male, drill a hole through it and have sex with it. 7: Shred it, boil it and eat it. 8: Cut all of the words out and rearrange them to say something interesting, like William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin would have done. 9: Hang around on street corners reading from it in a loud voice, with a wild look in your eyes. 10: Do a "Washington Irving" on it; black out every word except "the", "and", "it", "a" and "of". 11: Fold the outer corners of each page in towards the spine of the book. This will turn it into something resembling a sea urchin, and you can then spray-paint it blue-green and hang it on your wall as a decoration. 12: Drill a hole in the exact centre of the cover, put the book on your record player turntable and then play it backwards, listening for Satanic messages. 13: Pull out the last page and then give it to a friend, who will be horribly frustrated by not knowing who the murderer was. 14: Trim it until it'll fit into the CD slot of your computer, then try and install from it. You never know. 15: Gather thousands of copies of the book, wear a white sheet over your head and then burn the books in the city square, denouncing "This kind of filth which is bringing our once-great country to its knees". 16: Review the book from a postmodernist perspective, enthusing about the "purity of the apparently sterile numeric framework". 17: Pull down some jpegs from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.fetish.latex, print them out and insert them into the book. Tell everyone it's the latest volume of coffee-table erotica from Andre Pigeur of Berlin. 18: Try to find the hidden messages in the book by various cryptographic means; for example, take the first letter of every word and see what that spells out. 19: Check the book for grammatical errors, then highlight them and send it back to the publisher with a note saying "Fire the proofreader". 20. If you can't find any grammatical errors or typos, then highlight words at random and do the same. 21: Examine all of the full stops under a microscope to see if they're actually CIA Microdots. 22: Failing that, cut all of the full stops out and sell them at a nightclub. Tell people they're mescaline. 23: Type out numbers 5, 17, 23, and 93. EMail them to Matt Curtis (matt@flat-earth.org) and within weeks, they will appear as a song by Frantic Dogpaddle ( http://www.very.net/frantic/ ). 24: Paste a sheet of blank paper over the front of the book and scrawl on it with crayon "Idiot's Guide to the Web". You will then be able to sell it for quite a lot of money. 25: Pull an "Iain M Banks": Cut all the letters out, sort them alphabetically and glue them back in. 26: Plant it in the garden and see if it grows. 27: Find the word "iron" in the text (it's bound to be there somewhere). Stare at it for ages until you realise what a weird word "iron" is. Go on, say it... iron.. i-ron.. eye-yon.. 28: Get a pad and pencil, work out the ASCII value of each letter, then calculate the book's checksum. 29: Stand in a pentagram and read the text backwards. Chat with the demon that this will summon. Ask it for 101 things to do with the book. Don't be surprised when it rips your liver out and makes you chew on it. 30: Try to read the whole thing out loud with one breath. Don't give up if you can only get to number 51 before collapsing. 31: Put it in the microwave oven and set it to run on high for three minutes. Go on. You know you've always wanted to do that. 32: Nominate the book as "Cool Site of the Day". 33: Translate it into Klingon. Here's a start: wa'vatlh wa' Qu' = One hundred and One Tasks. 34: Actually do the things in the book. Film yourself doing them, then send the result to Cannes for the film festival. It can't hurt. 35: Get George Plympton to animate #34. 36: Quote from it next time the Mormons visit. Put on a very serious expression and get angry when they question the book's wisdom. 37: Run it through a C++ compiler. Pipe the error messages out into a file and print this out as a new book: "101 error messages from 101 Things to do with 101 Things-to-Do-books". Run this book through the compiler as well. Keep going until you run out of hard drive space. 38: Locate every lower-case "m" on each page and draw a black dot over it. Connect the dots. 39: Tell everyone that David Eddings wrote it, "but it's not as good as the Belgariad." 40: Pull the covers off, then roll the rest of the book up and insert it into a convenient body cavity. Try to smuggle it into Turkey. Think of a witty come-back when they find it and get around to asking you "Why?" 41: Write on the second page: "The Indonesian Government leaves something to be desired in the area of human rights." Then send it to Indonesia, and they'll ban it. 42: Slice the pages out with a razor blade (be careful!), then fold each one into a paper plane and fly them off the roof of the tallest building in your area. Find the plane that travels the greatest distance and enshrine it on your mantelpiece. Explain in great detail why it's there whenever people ask. 43: Send a copy to the Woodside Literary Agency and ask them to read it. When they ask for their reader's fee, tell them you didn't write it. 44: Take it along to a poetry slam and read it out with Shatneresque pauses and odd inflections, as if it actually means more than it does. Use your eyebrows a lot. 45: Strap it to your body over your heart in the hope that it will deflect that assassin's bullet. 46: Pretend it's a gun. Hold up a 7-11 with it. If people think you're crazy enough to hold up a convenience store with a book, they'll probably give you whatever you want, just to make you go away. 47: Get some friends together, take all your clothes off, smear your bodies with acrylic paints in primary colours, then act the book out on a city corner. Don't forget to put down a hat for donations. 48: Travel to China with it; pull the pages out and glue them up on that wall that has all the Chinese newspapers on it. 49: Chew the pages into a soft pulp, then make a nest for your offspring out of it. Guard this nest jealously. 50: Ignoring any letters above "G", treat the book as a series of guitar chords. With enough fuzz on the guitar, the result should make a good grunge song. 51: Make a dust-cover for the book out of old leather. Tell everyone it's Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon, and that no-one is allowed to open it for fear of summoning... something. 52: Use standard numerological techniques to combine all of the page numbers into a telephone number. Ring this number and ask the person who answers, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" Hang up. 53: Track down the author of the book. Crouch on their doorstep with a well-thumbed copy until they come out, then ask them to sign it. Moan orgasmically when they hand it back to you, then gnaw on a corner of the book and lope off like an orang-utan. 54: Pizza topping. 55: Rip pages out and wad them into the exhaust pipes of cars belonging to people you don't like. 56: Soak the book in water for a few days, then mash the pages up and mix them with some wallpaper paste. You can then form the mush into handy household items like dinner plates, shoes, lightbulbs, IDE hard drives, edged weapons, etc. 57: Buy a second copy of the book; glue them to the soles of your shoes to save wear and tear. 58: Slice the pages out as in #42 (still, be careful!) and very carefully glue the edges together to form a large sheet. Lie down on it and have a friend trace an outline of your body from the neck down, allowing about six inches of leeway all the way around. Do this twice, then cut the shapes out and glue them together to make an inexpensive suit. 59: Shred the pages and then send them to a young hacker group, saying "I fished this out of the bin at NASA. It's really sliced up, so it must be important." Imagine the fun as they try to re-assemble it. 60: Prop it up against a fence-post and then shoot holes in it. Send it back to the author with a note saying "and your LITTLE DOG, TOO". 61: Underline individual letters in sequence so that they spell out some horrible message like "LUST FOR SATAN'S CODLINGS E'EN NOW RISETH WITHIN ME", then leave the book face-down on that page in a photocopier. 62: Frisbee. 63: Shuriken. 64: Whatever the hell it is, that circular edged thingy that Xena flings around. Chakram. Yeah, that's it. 65: Soak the book in black ink until it's completely black, wait for it to dry and then sell it to a Goth. 66: Attach it to an IDE interface and then ring up Microsoft, demanding a driver for it. 67: Dip one end in petrol and take it to an Amnesty International rally. Light the petrol-soaked end, hold the book up and stand there with a solemn look on your face. 68: Do #67 at a heavy metal concert, except without the solemn look. 69: Dress up in sackcloth and ashes. Walk around town slowly bashing the book against your forehead while intoning: "Pie Iesu Domine / Dona Eis Requiem" over and over. 70: Paint it black, lacquer it and stand it up outside the primate enclosure at the zoo. Tell them it's a monolith and they should be worshipping it or something. Stand back, in case they start throwing bones. 71: Sit it on your lap while on public transport and type on the back cover. Tell people it's the latest in laptop computers. Make beeping noises to lend credence to the illusion. 72: Force it into the tape slot of your VCR and then blame it on the nearest small child. 73: Take several dozen copies and glue them to a burlap sack. Cut holes in the end of the sack and wear it to an SCA gathering, telling them it's a primitive form of plate mail. 74: Start building a full-scale Ark in your back yard out of them. When the neighbours question your sanity, point to a copy of the book and say "It's all in there, you know." 75: Kindling. 76: Contraceptives. Anyone who sees you reading it won't sleep with you. 77: Drinking game: two people start stacking copies of the book until one pile falls over. The person whose pile doesn't fall over has to drink. 78: Go to that tallest building in town again. Take the elevator to the top floor, and leave a copy of the book wedged in the doors, so that the elevator is stuck there. Take the stairs down. 79: Attach a collar and chain to it. Take it for a walk. Ignore the curious stares; it's all healthy exercise. 80: Scan each page; save them as jpegs and give them filenames like "hotbabe06.jpg". Fiddle with them in Photoshop until you can't recognise any of the text (copyright, you know) and then put them up on a pay-for-access web site, with banners saying things like "You won't believe your eyes!" 81: See how many copies of the book you can fit in your mouth at the same time. 82: Paste false spines onto several copies, with titles like "Hobbes' LEVIATHAN", "Rimbaud, Collected Poems", "Umberto Eco, Misreadings". Put them on your bookshelf amongst the other trash to give people the impression that you're far more literate than you really are. 83: Give copies to libraries. Keep giving them until the librarians learn to recognise you and start shooting at you when they see you coming. 84: Nail several of them to a piece of chipboard. Splash some yellow paint over them and give the whole thing a pretentious title, like "I must admit I prefer Casablanca". Sneak it into a gallery and hang it up with the rest of the junk when the guards aren't looking. 85: Sell them in Muslim countries as English translations of the Koran. They won't know the difference. 86: Sell them in China as English translations of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. They won't know the difference. 87: Dip it into liquid nitrogen. Wait until it has frozen all the way through, then take it out and bash it against a table. When the chunks have thawed out, you can market it as a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. 88: Sell them to the US military as "Decoy Land-mines". 89: Bury it in a time capsule and think about the low opinion our ancestors will form of us when they dig it up. 90: Arrange with a local model rocketry club to put one into low Earth orbit, just so you can say you did it. 91: Pull the cover off, show it to people and tell them it is the rarest Magic: The Gathering card there is. 92: Sell them to tupperware salespeople, who can then demonstrate the utility of tupperware by putting a book in it. 93: Bury them in your back yard and wait for them to turn into fossil fuel. 94: Arrange several hundred of them in a row and challenge a stunt-man to ride a motorcycle up a ramp and over them. 95: Marsh reclamation. 96: Sell them to Seagate, who can then put them in boxes and tell people that they're hard drives. 97: Stack thousands of them on their ends, just far enough apart so that if you knocked over the first one it would then hit the second, which would fall and hit the third, and so on in the manner of those nut-cases who stack dominoes. Then *don't* knock them over; just leave them like that. 98: Glue two of them together and sell it as an omnibus edition. By the time people get to the end of the first half, they will have forgotten what the start was like. 99: Rub two of them together and start a fire. Beat the fire out with a third copy. 100: Nominate it for the Pulitzer prize. When it doesn't win, get angry and take hostages. You might even like to use a copy of the book as a threatening weapon, as in #46. 101: Paint it grey and use it as a tombstone for a dead pet. |
|
|
( top )
All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated. |