"WHO KNOWS what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Lamont Cranston, alias "The Shadow," was wont to ask at the start of each episode of the old radio show of the same name. Well, I know precisely what was bugging Lamont-baby - he had just received another mail order catalog.

In its capacity for inflicting misery, the human mind has come up with some gems. The concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD) to explain why we aim nuclear bombs at each other springs to mind, as does the cell phone, IRS Form 1040 and ping pong balls that cats manage to find at 2:48 in the morning.

In the realms of insidious mischievousness, the mail order catalog is the equal of any of these, preying as it does on the very vulnerable members of our society, those hapless critters with spines like jellyfish on Ex-Lax who really are convinced that their living room wall needs a plastic wall plaque of Grecian women with no heads but lots of naughty bits.

Which perhaps explains why closets at my home are stuffed with the remnants of a flashing light box with red, green, blue and yellow bulbs that blinked in tune with whatever music was playing, an artificial wave-making machine, an ex-clock dedicated to the principle of making something very complicated out of something very simple, and an egg-timer that looks like a particularly gaudy chicken sitting atop an oversized egg.

And, of course, a lava lamp. A dead lava lamp. If you can imagine anything on the planet more useless than a dead lava lamp, my befuddled mind missed it when it zipped by.

There's not much else I missed, certainly not in the mail order catalogs that pour through the front-door mail slot like a Niagara Falls of graffiti on steroids. All of the above joined what my beleaguered wife chooses to call Al's Hovel - things that really looked good on slick paper, not so good when the mail order wrapping came off, and wound up stacked in the closets when the newness wore off, which took about 12 minutes 43 seconds on average.

These catalogs, I seem to have read somewhere, once served a useful purpose, when Mr. Sears or Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Montgomery Ward sent them to sourdoughs, gunslingers, cattle rustlers and other citizenry of the Wild West with pictures of mail order brides they could send for, C.O.D and postage prepaid.

(It boggles the brain to imagine what these examples of feminine pulchritude must have looked like in the flesh versus any pictures in the catalogs, particularly after four weeks on the Old Chisholm Trail or whatever without a decent facial and nail files yet to be invented. And forget Doris Day - the real Calamity Jane looked like the Bride of Frankenstein without the beauty bolts.)

But I digress. The problem is, I hate mail order catalogs because I love the bloody things, with those wondrous photos of gimmicks, gimcracks and other thingies that one cannot possibly face life's next minute without, such as the Telescopic Bathroom Cleaner and the No-Sew Button Fixer and the genuine imitation Ostrich Feather Duster.

As you have probably twigged by now, the latest 10-volume set of mail order catalogs has just thudded an inviting thud on the hall carpet. Just a quick glance brings us to page 2, and the Exclusive Specs Stand - a sculpted brass nose you can park your glasses on, and you'll always know exactly where to find them. Eleven bucks for that little doozie.

On page 14, there is the Tortoise Lamp, with his beautifully detailed, antiqued brass body peeking out from under a glass tortoise shell that shows up magical, mottled markings as the light shines through... Oh fabulous joy and a couple of hot damns! And only 35 smackeroonies for this little beauty.

But - and much to my wife's amazement - I have turned my back on old tortoise. Even I suspect that paying real cash for such items can be an open invitation for the men in white with their butterfly nets to drop around and haul you off to the local Home for the Terminally Bewildered.

I am learning my lesson, across how many decades remains unclear. The ex-clock was my first hint that something might be somewhat amiss in mail order catalogland. In the book, it looked intriguing - a sort of mechanical clock that operated through a series of moving slides carrying a number of metal balls that ticked - or more sort of pinged - off the seconds and minutes and hours.

The trouble is, it was self-assembly - the sort of thing you have to put together yourself with the assistance of a book of instructions written by a dyslexic Japanese to whom English was his 14th language, some distance behind Urdu, Sanskrit and medieval Anglo-Saxon.

Without going into the grisly details, the result was a sort of black rectangular Leaning Tower of Pisa that clack-clack-clacked something awful. Still, things might have been salvageable had not one of the balls gone missing, which had a definite effect on the time-keeping aspect of things, which in turn rather depended on a specific number of balls.

In fact, if I recall, 60 balls were provided, and for the sake of accuracy, 60 had to be used. And since 59 balls resulted in hours that were 59 minutes long, this shambles has been relegated to pride of place in one of Al's Hovels. Other items will join it, as surely as God made little mail order catalogs.

Oh, the missing clock ball. One of the cats found it. At 2:48 one morning. Even The Shadow couldn't comprehend my evil thoughts as that ball rattled down the hallway...

Thought for the Day: The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

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