It used to be that when you saw someone walking down the street alone, ranting and raving about infra-violet radiation or the CIA's plot to taint our nation's Dorito supply, you were pretty safe in assuming they were a little unbalanced. Maybe even a lot unbalanced, or crazy, if you'd gotten up this morning in a politically incorrect mood.

But that's a thing of the past, thanks to the ubiquity of cellphones. People used to be more embarrassed about doing this kind of thing in public, but lately I've walked down aisles in the hardware store and in the grocery store where people have been standing around, having lengthy conversations with their loved ones and their not-so-loved ones. Sometimes these are conversations that you really wouldn't think most people would want to share with strangers.

In an age when people are so often making a big deal out of privacy issues (enough so you see those "privacy policy" notices posted on so many websites), it's odd that it's hard to escape overhearing someone's marital spat or romantic plans for the evening when all you'd bargained for was a head of lettuce and whatever kind of yogurt is on sale this week. (This, by the way, tends to happen a lot more in grocery stores, in my experience. In hardware stores, you're much more likely to overhear someone's marital spat or romantic plans for the evening while trying to buy sandpaper and drill bits. If you're in the hardware store trying to buy yogurt, you have your own problems.)

But at least you can tell the crazy people from the (theoretically) non-crazies by checking to see whether they have a miniature phone held against their heads. Considering how small cellphones have gotten and how many colors and styles they're available in, this is more challenging than it used to be, but even at worst, you're only going to get mixed up between the people with cellphones held to their ears and the relatively few people who are determined to enter a Matchbox miniature collectible car into an unauthorized NASCAR race being held inside their inner ear.

When you think about it, having a lot of visibly crazy people wandering the streets (as opposed to safely locked away in asylums or in the White House) can depress property values and reduce many people's comfort levels about being in that neighborhood. At the same time, cellphones are so common that they're not really "cool" or expensive any more, so sales of fake plastic cellphones have dropped through the same floor that absorbed those triple-bladed neon-colored windshield wipers some years back.

...As far as I could make out, it had something to do with cheese...

So the solution is obvious: take the surplus fake cellphones and hand them out to crazy people wandering the streets ranting incoherently. I'm sure there will be plenty to go around, and then the non-crazies will feel comfortable, because the crazies won't be behaving any differently than anyone else.

The one problem I see with this idea is one I encountered, appropriately, outside the Post Office. As I was walking into the Post Office, a woman was walking out, having a very emotional and apparently angry conversation involving lots of arm-waving. As far as I could make out, it had something to do with cheese, though I could have misheard that. No cellphone in sight, which was good, because if she'd been holding it, the way she was moving her arms, she could easily have propelled it thirty or forty feet, potentially injuring a perfectly innocent passerby who was not even affiliated with the dairy industry; perhaps even a vegan.

You're probably thinking, as I did at first, "she must be one of the crazy ones." But as she diappeared around the corner, it was possible to glimpse a remarkably compact hands-free earbud headset in her right ear. Either that, or her brain was being consumed by an Aurigelean Bloodworm. It's hard to tell a modern earbud headset from a bloodworm's posterior segment from half a block away.

In either case, it complicates my grand scheme, but allows for more options, too. If a crazy person doesn't want to walk around holding a plastic phone to his head, he can opt to have something that looks like a little black mushroom stuffed into his ear cap-first.

I'm sure most crazy people wouldn't object to that.

I'm still recovering from my schedule weirdness earlier in the week. At least I have the advantage that I've learned if I've gone without sleep for too long and people are absolutely determined to keep me from sleeping, I can go out bicycling for a while and feel more awake after that. Seems like a reasonable technique; if I do a whole lot of bicycling, I tend to sleep less anyway.

The trick is getting out of the house and to the bicycle. Since it's usually the phone that's standing in the way, I can sneak around it and get halfway out the door before it starts ringing two times out of three. Then it's up to me to maintain the determination to keep going.