congratulations on your hobby, or should I say your meta-hobby - the hobby about your hobby.

I have been toying with the idea about an opera concerning textiles for quite a few years and have not yet found the 'handle'. I might not find the ensi but the idea is still there stitching away as I compose other operas. But now to your questions

1) What other types of ruggies deserve a horrible death?

flea market dealers who with blow torches 'age' rugs and sell them for antiques .. . just imagine the instrument of death.

dealers who cut up textiles and sell the pieces hoping to earn more money.

critics (or is this just a prejudice of my profession?). Imagine a business man who sets up a carpet manufacture and produces wonderful rugs but is ridiculed by a critic who only values antiques

2) What sort of deaths can be tied-in with ruggish pursuits?

west Nile fever . . associated with a tick which could be transported on a carpet .. .

suffocation under piles of carpets stacked to collapse on the victim.

3) What kind of ruggish behavior could be inflicted on someone that would lead to his madness?

being cheated, or being led to believe that you have been cheated. (Othello)

4) What kind of response do you imagine from the rest of the rug world as they discerned a serial killer moving around them?

Sorry don't know the rug world . . .us textile folks are a more refined and nonviolent????

5) Should the killer be caught?

John Cage would have suggested you flip a coin.

This note is before coffee . .

Richard Farber

How perceptive of you! Addressing this topic BEFORE having your coffee is exactly the way to do it. That pre-coffee edginess is what I'm looking for.

(Let that be a lesson to all the rest of you.)

West Nile Fever has a nice Middle-eastern sensibility to it, too. I'm not sure it will kill very quickly though. And just making the baddies really, really sick isn't where we want to go with this, now, is it? We're looking for grisly deaths. Being crushed under a stack of rugs is much more on point. Especially if they're musty, mildewy, dry rotted crap in the back of an unscrupulous rug dealer's shop - that he's trying to sell as "precious oriental handwoven art."

Just being cheated isn't likely to drive one to madness. If that were so, most rug collectors would be several sandwiches short of a picnic. Uh-oh. Maybe you've got something there.

-Jerry-

May I suggest that your opera include a death scene in which the hero (if it is a tragedy) or the villain (if it is a comedy) dies as a result of being shot by a rug. It would be a flying Afghan war rug, of course, and the weapon would be a German Mauser cleverly incorporated into the design as a motif in the lower third of the rug (the trigger being the demarcation point of the Internal Elem which the victim cannot resist touching - it has magical powers, you know).

The flying rug element is very oriental and exotic, and the opera could be titled, "Die Fledermauser".

Steve Price

Further carpet creep codas . . .how about the bath of chemicals used to try to bleach brown suzani karbos to white .. .I've seen them try to do that in the flea market. . .

or the chemical bath used to kill the color of a 1950s monstrosity and then the carpet is touted as being made at the end of the 19th century for the 'American market'

or the spotches added with markers on bald spots being a rare desease that affects the creeps

Some carpet gremlin has been adding smile-icons to the messages . . .

no comment on critics maybe they don't exist in the ruggie world

I still like the blow torch.

But seriously there have been a number of publised thefts of textiles [I can imagine that carpets have also been stolen] I could well imagine developing a plot around the theft of an imortant collect . . .after some years the pieces appear in Chicago . . .trips to Israel and to Central Asia . . .

good hunting

Richard

Now yer' talkin', Marvin.

Let's say a baddy gets an anthrax-laden rug. He breathes in the stuff. Dies an ugly death. How long does it take him to die? What are the symptoms? How long is the anthrax contagious? If the baddy dies alone, how long does it take for his corpse to be non-contagious?

Use of this bio-toxin would open the issue of bioterrorism and direct attention away from the serial killer. I like this potential for misdirection.

-Jerry-

Filiberto Boncompagni

I'm a little worried, though, about how the curare-coated staples that Hogshead pricks his finger on will be disposed of. Or will they just be ignored?

-Jerry-