Posted 5:44 PM by Gene

Today AdAge, which put me on its subscription rolls without my consent, mailed me a nice little gift: a Hallmark card that plays a tune. This must be the worst thing to happen to greeting cards since the emoticon. First off, the cards play only excerpts of tunes, so they're cheats that way; for what Hallmark charges for one card you could buy five complete iTunes and send homemade greetings with each of them -- Word documents perhaps -- or better yet you could e-mail your favorite songs for free. Plus they're hi-fi the way Alexander Graham Bell's prototype phone was. And we can guess what happens to them; they get played five or six times and put away in a cabinet or hatbox to collect mold, or some four-year old pulls an Edison on them and voila! No greeting card. Worse, they probably defy recycling; you have to rip the electronic innards out, and those surely can't or won't be recycled, plus the battery (about three-quarter-inches in diameter) has some toxic substance that by the millions would form a low-level Superfund site, although most likely it would merely leach out onto other greeting cards after years of storage, leaving a small but ugly mess. Hallmark, go back to no-tech treacle.

Just one question: can some Slashdotting geek with too much time on his hands do to these cards what other GET-A-LIFES! have done to Singing Santas?