Retro Yakking

We’ve all had them: those shiny disks of doom that drop out of your magazine or through your letterbox with startling regularity. There is no special ‘AOL CD’ recycling bin at the local supermarket, so the question is, what on earth are you supposed to do with the darn things?

It seems people have been offering alternative uses for this nuisance since the Dark Ages: Henry VIII would have his servants flush them down the toilet in front of his very eyes, whilst Alexander Graham Bell would use them to kill ants on the pavement by reflecting the sun’s deadly heat rays.

For a more up-to-date perspective, though, I would recommend moJoe’s 61 things to do with and AOL CD. I couldn’t possibly compete with that magnificent effort, but in homage, here are a bunch more uses for those annoying spam CDs as suggested by Harry Yack.

1. Sell them to ninjas as cheap replacements for ninjastars, or to James Bond as a handy head-severing device. In these times of financial hardship, I’d imagine there’s quite a market for these.
2. Alternatively, save money on lawnmowers: set up a line of sling shots approx. 2cm high down the side of your lawn. Line up a bunch of pillows, couch cushions or a hated family relative down the other side. Then, fire the CD from them one at a time to slice that grass down to size in no time at all.
3. Melt them down, mould them into vaguely oblong shapes and sell them as top of the range dog food, fish fingers (with added Omega 3) or home made sausages.
4. Collect hundreds and sell them to NASA for use in their space program, specifically telescopes and vanity mirrors for astronauts.
5. Practice your martial arts skills: prop them up on two piles of bricks and perform repeated karate chops on them. For an added challenge, increase the number of layers or try with two hands at a time.
6. On sunny days, blind the pilots of low-flying aircraft using the shiny side of the disk. Just be careful to do this while a safe distance from a police station.
7. Resell them on the high street as “the answer to your credit crunch problems”. Those gullible fools will readily believe anything you tell them, and probably be resigned to a life of corporate AOL spam. Mwahahah.
8. Collect as many as possible and create a perfect scale model of the Eiffel Tower in your back garden, climb to the top and shoot pigeons or passing microlights.
9. Using a marker pen, amend the “AOL” label to read “The latest XBOX Game” and sell it to Microsoft for megabucks. Well, they commissioned Bomberman: Act Zero and Sonic The Hedgehog 360 so they’re certain to give this their approval.
10. Stick a few together with glucose solution and throw in a pan with 500g of mint. Boil for twenty minutes and you have an oversized polo mint. Useful to bribe giants.

Note: before attempting these at home, please make sure it’s an AOL CD and not your favourite Sega Saturn game or something.

For more things to do with AOL CDs, see:

• 12 Creative things to do with AOL CDs
• Things to do with AOL CDs
• Serious stuff you can do with AOL CDs

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