I AM, AS MY wife Elizabeth will happily tell you at some length, a pack rat. I throw nothing away, at least until she catches me at it, and she can produce anything from a moth-gnawed University of Tennessee sweatshirt to a 1976 cat calendar to prove it.

It is my firm belief that just about anything and everything that we tend to throw away can have a second life, as it were, with a completely different use (although I'll concede I haven't yet found one for the UT shirt or the calendar, or even the ball-bearing clock with one ball missing, but it's early days yet).

Take, for example, those little compact discs with which ISP (that stands for "Internet service provider," for whatever it's worth) companies have flooded the world from Afghanistan to Zanzibar, to try to get every Tom, Dick and Harriet of us onto the information superhighway.

Never mind that whale blubber lamps provide your home lighting, or you're still using cat's whisker radios to catch Bruce Springsteen's latest ballads. The next llama bringing your mail over the mountain pass will surely deliver up yet another AOL CD.

AOL - that's America Online, for those of you who just fell off the back of the turnip truck - is the world's biggest ISP, and it spews out these things in their squillions, like so much silvery confetti, to stuff into our home computers so we can enjoy the wonders of the Internet and that favorite pastime called the "computer crash."

The CDs come free, and they are designed to help us get "online," thus making it as easy as pecan pie and possum pudding to get on the World Wide Web, check in at whitehouse.com and find that Dubyah seems to be running the grandpappy of all porno sites.

Anyway, to get installed and "up and running" on the net, as the vernacular would have it, takes only a one-time use of one AOL CD. "Software," it's called. Given this, it would seem that any number of these CDs above one would be about as useful as a yo-yo for a cat or a one-way boomerang.

The thing is, AOL - and other ISPs, with their own CDs - churns this "software" out by the megaton.

There's scarcely a day goes by that one of the damnable things doesn't pop through in the post, or is slipped into my newspaper box, or I find stuck to the pages of numberless computer magazines and even one on quilting and samplers, pastimes of glorious, computerless centuries of yore.

Even AOL, which has been sending them out for free for the past 11 years, doesn't know how many it has produced. "It's not something we would reveal," said one spokeswoman - then added: "But then, it's not something we've counted either."

Still, my pack rat instinct keeps telling me the wretched things must have some alternative use. I've taken to putting them on tables around the cottage as silvery, attractive - well, at least different - mats for coffee and tea cups, scotch and water glasses and the like.

But there are just so many silvery discs you can allow around the place before you find yourself having to wear sunglasses at night. Besides which, Elizabeth has gotten royally fed up and has taken to dumping them in the garbage (but she's losing the numbers battle - they arrive faster than she can get rid of them).

I had just about reached the conclusion that even I had no acceptable excuse for keeping them around. I was wrong.

It develops that Internet CDs are becoming collectors' items, sort of like space-age philatelists (stamp collectors, for the turnip truck set). One Sparky Haufle, identified as a 55-year-old credit union vice president from Washington, is a case in point.

Old Sparky has collected more than 500 CDs from 12 countries, all with gaudy designs (the CDs, not the countries, particularly if one of them is England in the wintertime). He's also got 130 pals and work mates saving CDs for him and putting them on his Website.

He insists that "I'm not alone in this strange hobby," indicating a potential growth in clientele for the local home for the terminally bewildered.

Haufle once spent 81 bucks on an AOL CD he bought at auction (on a Website, naturally). But his favorite, which he got for a fiver, "was given away at the 1998 Pro-Bowl football game in Hawaii." The recipient's response was not recorded.

Meanwhile, for Sparky Haufle and his fellow enthusiasts, Websites are springing up to cater to their needs, or fetishes, or whatever, including the AOL Virtual Museum and the AOL CD Preservation Guild. Well, there's a Website for building a gun that uses potatoes for ammunition, so why not one for preservation of CDs?

But every pro must have its anti, and CDs are no different. An organization on the net that calls itself Nomoreaolcds.com has launched an anti-CD campaign to expose "the needless pollution of the environment due to distribution of unwanted materials."

Nomoreaolcds.com has already collected more than 3,000 CDs from net users toward its goal of one million, which it says it intends to return to AOL: "996,778 more CDs and we go marching!" says the Website.

Meanwhile, 24-7 Freecall, an AOL ISP rival, is shooting for a spot in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest number of CDs collected - most of them, doubtless, from AOL.

AOL is not impressed. "There must be an easier way of getting into the Guinness Book of Records," a spokesman says. "Perhaps they could sit in a bath of baked beans for a year instead."

Quite.

Thought for the Week: If all else fails, lower your standards.

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