I just got my new IKEA catalogue! The one I didn't want or request, the one that was removed from the front porch and directly dumped into the bottom of my recycle bin. It's annual arrival got me thinking about all the junk mail I receive in a year and I contemplated saving it all in a big pile and weighing it and... oh! Hey! Seattleite Alan Durning over a Sightline just did that!

His write-up of a year's worth of junk mail is pretty funny—15 pounds of phone books? 17 credit card offers from United Airlines? Seven pounds of annoying sales pitches from Qwest, Verizon and Comcast? This shit is ridiculous, but Durning includes action ideas after each item to help channel that frustration into activism.

It would be cool to chronicle Portland's biggest junk mail offenders. I think it must be phone books by far but I can also commiserate with the Comcast deluge.