I have always loved things. I collect but only to amass. I have bits of stamps and coins and comics and baseball cards and letters and flags and soccer shirts and 45s and a bunch of other conglomerations of things in boxes around the house. Not to mention the things I buy off eBay. So this makes sense to me:

...matches appear to be struggling back from the brink to reassert their pre-eminence among the rabble of coasters, business cards, cocktail napkins and swizzle sticks charged with hawking a restaurant’s good name. In an era of instant information access and viral publicity, logo-bearing matches may have the edge as ambassadors that convey distinction in their very physicality. “When a state or municipality imposes a ban, we see a hesitation in reordering and a fall-off in new business,” said Mark Nackman, the owner and president of AdMatch, an importer based in New York City. “Then the volumes start to creep back up, so that within a year or so we see some resurgence in statewide sales. Matches have universal appeal, and that’s the mystery — that one little package could resonate with familiarity, maybe beauty, and a feeling of value.”

Last night in an evening remarkable only for the similarity to so many others of bouncing baby, watching TV and wondering where the time goes, I watched a chunk of this TVO panel discussion on the digital future and I was saddened that no place is left for stuff like matchbooks in the imagination of the geeks who think they are planning the future. Futurists are weird that way. Haughty, too. And seldom cross-checked after the fact. Only a flake would deny that incidental physical objects are remarkably important to humans and have always been so. Implanting them with diodes and doodads is key to controlling the future. Otherwise is the way of the robot overlords, the doodad-less. Messages of freedom will be passed one day on matches.