oobi is love

[devi]

It's like my experiment, but in the 60s and with cute googly eyes...

muffledsqueak pointed me at the Oobi site. Oobi was a little plastic egg-shape with cartoon eyes. You put a message inside it, addressed it and left it somewhere, and the idea was that it would get carried a little way by one passer-by, then another and another, till it arrived at its destination. That was the idea. In practice, people hated it. That's actually the word they use, hated. The few that were sent vanished without trace.

I'm annoyed with the site for being so cynical and snide about the whole thing. I think it's a beautiful idea. I'd go well out of my way to transport an Oobi if I found one.

Thinking about how things like bookcrossing have caught on, and how many people have signed up for my letter stunt, it almost seems people are more open to an idea like this than they were in the 60s. Is it the Internet? Would people be more willing to release Oobis or carry them some of the way if they could come online and track them, or report having found one?

Maybe the little critter's time has come.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

On Saturday, at a folk festival, someone I didn't know gave me a packet of photos to give to someone else I don't know.

The photographer approached my mum (on the festival's organising committee) to ask how he should get the photos to a team who attended last year's festival. The team is from Ducklington, Oxon, so mum figured giving them to me would at least get them to the right end of the country.

I'll probably hand them on to someone who lives locally and is involved in Cotswold morris dancing - and the photos will each their destination eventually.

As long as I can remember things have made their way up and down the country (and, in the case of my absent-minded uncle, back from continental Europe when he left them there) in this way. It delights me that the network works.

[pionie.livejournal.com]

This says as much about what nice people you and your mum must be as anything else :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously, we're lovely :)

But there are enough nice people hanging about on the UK folk music/dance scene to make it viable to hand over messages/lost property/etc to complete strangers. Which is great.