stray shopping carts...

[iris lilies]

Last year at this time we were debating issues about shopping carts from grocery stores.

Here's something funny: today I found these books about shopping carts.



the review describes The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: Despite the ubiquity of stray shopping carts, little effort has been made to comprehend the complex relationship between cart and landscape. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that we have until now lacked a formalised [sic] language to describe these wayward carts in systematic detail. That is, until now. In The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, a layperson is able to identify and classify their own cart spottings based on the situation in which they were found. In five handy chapters, Montague leads the reader through his identification system, covering such bucolically littered locations as the Niagara River Gorge (where many a cart has been pushed to its untimely death) and mundane sites that look suspiciously like a suburb near you.


and this one, Abandoned SHopping Carts



SynopsisThis book is an appeal to think clearly for yourself in order to regain a sense of responsibility for taking care of humanity and the world; and it offers a set of suggestions for doing so. The book uses the theme of abandoned shopping carts as a graphic symbol of uncaring relinquishment of responsibility in many areas of life, such as littering, driving rudely, and not voting in elections.The world and humanity are falling apart. This book offers a vivid call to action to save them, using a simple model from everyday experience: not abandoning your shopping carts.The solution offered here is that people must regain a sense of spiritual responsibility (not religious, but spiritual) as the most important aspect of living, and that all other forms of responsibility will follow.Abandoned Shopping Carts will appeal to people who are disenchanted by society's wastefulness and neglect, and who want an inspiration for changing their lives for the better.People are ready for a book that cuts straight to the truth that we all know inwardly: we are spiritual beings temporarily living in a physical body, and our prime personal responsibility to ourselves and the world is a spiritual one.

[Tiam]

I live in a blighted area of town. One plucky woman created a "beautification" page on Facebook and invited people to come to different trashy areas and come together as a community and clean up. One thing they do is look for and return carts.

[Alan]

I remember our thread on the subject well. So well that I've had recurring thoughts on writing my own book, tentatively titled "The Parable of the Shopping Cart", wherein those liberated carts are a symbol of a society in decline. I thought it was an original premise, but perhaps not.