Welcome once again, Dear Reader. It is I, your Interlocutor, The Happy Pessimist, bringing you news of a recent advance in telecommunications.(Full disclosure: I took the title of this post from a song with the non-PC title “Indian Love Call,” from a 1924 Broadway musical and the soundtrack of a 1936 movie, both entitled “Rose Marie.”)

A week or so ago, I noticed that a religious establishment in my neck of the woods had erected a Telephone Booth on its property. If you are under the age of fifty, you probably have no clue what a telephone booth is. It is a small structure about the size of a coffin standing on one end, equipped with a door, windows and a telephone instrument. This telephone instrument performs the same basic function as a cell phone, except that it will not fit in your pocket. In olden times (i.e., before the iPhone invasion), if you were out and about and wanted to call someone, you would enter the booth, close the door, insert some change into the phone, dial the phone number, and proceed. The booth was connected to the telephone network, a maze of wires, switches, and nubile young ladies who would get you connected to your intended victim.However, the new telephone booth was connected to NOTHING.This strange contraption is called a windphone. It was invented by Itaru Sasaki in Ōtsuchi, Japan in 2010, to cope with the loss of his cousin. Sasakisan believed that, when he spoke into the windphone, his words would be carried by the wind (hence the name) to his cousin’s residence on the astral plane.

In 2011, when the Fukushima earthquake, tidal wave and nuclear reactor meltdown occurred (good things come in threes, right?), thousands of people with departed relatives flocked to his garden to have a whack at contacting their dead family members.The idea caught on and has metastasized, and there are now about 1500 windphones scattered about the globe, including some 500 right here in the good old US of A. Thus, windphones were added to the contributions to civilization from The Land of the Rising Sun such as hara-kiri, the Kamikaze, and fugu fish.

Now Sasakisan is not the first person to come up with the idea of a telephone that talks to the dead. In 1964, Richard Matheson wrote a short story addressing the concept. (If you are familiar with Mr. Matheson’s work, you can guess what is coming.) A decrepit old woman starts receiving eerie, static-filled midnight phone calls. She complains to the telephone company which, surprise, surprise, is of no use. She goes out and traces the source line, and discovers that the line has fallen across the grave of her long-deceased fiancé.

Returning to the title of this post, I can give you the answer the question raised there:

“When I’m calling you, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh

Will you answer too, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh?”

With regard to the windphone, probably not.