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KAREN LOUISE BOOTHE: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, this is Karen Louise Boothe. Good morning. A traffic accident in Beltrami County has claimed the lives of two people, bringing the holiday weekend traffic death toll to 15. Minnesota's waterways also had a share of accidents and deaths. Rescuers recovered the body of a man who drowned in Powderhorn Lake in South Minneapolis and continue to search two other lakes for two men presumed drowned as well.

A group of sports enthusiasts in the Twin Cities is hoping to create a new type of water park on the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. The organization has selected Saint Anthony Falls as the future site of an Olympic-class whitewater kayaking and canoeing course. The group's chairman, Bill Tilton, says whitewater sports could benefit the area's tourism industry.

BILL TILTON: If there were an opportunity in the heart of the Twin Cities for this thing, there would be hundreds of people out here every weekend. I guarantee you, whitewater kayaking and whitewater rafting in the heart of the Mississippi River.

KAREN LOUISE BOOTHE: Tilton says reaction to the plan has been favorable from other users of the river, like NSP and the U of M. The community and technical colleges in Minneapolis, White Bear Lake, will begin offering classes by interactive television this fall. And when they do, it means the entire system in the state will be online. And in the age of email, rural free delivery is a term that might not mean much to you, but RFD service has meant regular home delivery for farmers across the country.

It was first operated by the post office in the Southern Minnesota town of Farmington back in 1897, and this year begins to mark its Centennial anniversary. Taking a look at whether it's going to be mostly sunny through the midmorning, becoming blustery with occasional cloudiness later on, but will reach an afternoon high in the mid 70s. Right now, it's partly sunny and 66 in the Twin Cities. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Louise Boothe.

CHRIS ROBERTS: You're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Chris Roberts, sitting in for Paula Schroeder.

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The good news is some of the Earth's rainforests are being saved. The bad news is a relentless slash and burn mentality still threatens the biosystems. Today in our Voices of Minnesota interview, we hear from biologist Dan Janzen, one of the people working to save rainforests. His formula is to convince pharmaceutical companies. Rainforests are vast warehouses of commercially valuable chemicals and the company should pay to harvest those chemicals.

The 57-year-old Janzen spends most of his time in Costa Rica. He raised $2 million to buy and create a national park there. Then he convinced volunteers to collect and catalog species. Janzen is a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Minnesota, attending school in Minneapolis. Janzen talked recently with Dan Olson about preserving rainforests.

DANIEL JANZEN: We, in fact, are much more optimistic than we were five to 10 years ago. And that sounds a little crazy. But that's because people have focused on a new way of, if you like, saving that rainforest. And the new way is to use it. Now, that sounds a little insane, but think about a library. The more you use a library, the more likely the library is to survive. Now, what do we mean by using a library?

It means you go to it, you get from it, but you don't trash it. You don't burn up the books when you get cold. You don't turn the books into paper newsprint. You devise ways to use it without trashing it. And that's where the real optimism is in the rainforest today. It's figuring out ways to use it that do not trash it, but do produce a high economic yield.

DAN OLSON: Commercial appeal instead of clear cutting for timbering, selective logging.

DANIEL JANZEN: Well, selective logging is one of many. It's a way to put it. I think perhaps a more general way to say it is this. Think of the rainforest as a crop, but it's a multicrop. So now we ask, what are all the different sorts of yield you can get out of it? The easy soft string starts with things like very careful selective logging, although that requires extreme control.

Another one which is, I think, very familiar to Minnesotans, at least of course, is ecotourism. The way we put it is the ecotourism is a better kind of cow. And another major use of rainforest in today's world now is realizing that these are mostly water generators. In other words, most of the surviving rainforests are on slopes very commonly above major cities or urban areas. And they're really water factories. They're the things that allow the urban and the irrigation ditches below to have quality water.

DAN OLSON: So has the loss of rainforests slowed or even stopped?

DANIEL JANZEN: The loss is certainly slowed. Stopped, no, but certainly has slowed. And what you have to do now is not think in terms of across the tropics. You have to go country by country. It's a fair statement that the losses of rainforest in many of the bigger, more spectacular countries like Brazil and Mexico and Indonesia-- there, the loss of rainforest has slowed very substantially. In Costa Rica, it's almost zero.

There are other countries that are still operating like it was 1950 and 1960 and thinking of the rainforest as only something to harvest, to clear, to move out of the way, to get out of the way.

DAN OLSON: Do we know why it has slowed, or in some cases stopped? Is it because of pressure from the outside agencies, whether it be the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund or biologists coming down? Or is it because governments are getting smart?

DANIEL JANZEN: I'm afraid to say the answer is complicated. And it's all of those. It's all of the above, with a fourth one added in. And that is that as it gets scarce in any given country, that country begins to value it like we do. Remember, we cleared almost all of the Eastern United States before we started worrying about-- my god, where has the last bit of forest gone? There's only about one square mile of forest left in the lower Michigan. All of West Virginia was cleared. So that same process occurred here.

And now, it's to the point where a country like Mexico, for example, or Brazil or Indonesia-- as major areas of the country begin to lose almost all their forest, the populace itself suddenly sees in one form or another, as I said before, as if for ecotourism or for water generation or sometimes for prospecting for interesting chemicals or for straight local recreation. There's a whole series of these things. That smaller area begins to have a sort of what we call a scarcity value.

DAN OLSON: But I guess I have the impression that rainforests once cut, maybe even burned, don't regenerate in the same way. And something has been lost forever of the original ecology.

DANIEL JANZEN: If you clear a large area of rainforest and there isn't any other rainforest in the area, you basically do lose everything that was there. However, if it's cleared in a mosaic or a patchwork form, and then for whatever reason, you take those cleared areas or some of those cleared areas and allow them to regenerate, the biological processes are there, the species re-invade, and you do get the forest back.

This process, of course, is ages old with what you and I were grown up to believe what we call slash and burn agriculture or shifting agriculture, which was, of course, based on the concept that you cut a piece of forest, you farm it for a couple of years, and you don't come back to it for 50 or 100 years. Now what happened, of course, as European agriculture moved in is you cut the forest down and then you throw livestock on it or you put other kinds of crops on it. So it never allowed to come back again.

But if you take those various kinds of assaults, crops or cattle or whatever it happens to be, some kind of crop off of it, and let the adjacent forest re-invade, rainforest is regenerable. We're doing that. It's happening now all over the tropics. And in fact, in some places happening for economic reasons, Costa Rica being the classic case. The cattle industry is dead in Costa Rica. It's not a viable crop.

If you're a landowner, you wouldn't think of investing your money in cattle, except under very peculiar circumstances. The outcome is that huge areas that were pasture, what you and I would call marginal pasture, are now being allowed to regenerate the forest with the concept that these forests then will yield forest products at later times.

DAN OLSON: This is where you're based, Costa Rica, a country I've never visited. I'm told it's almost incomparably beautiful. What do they call themselves? I guess the Garden of the Americas is what you see on the license plate. Anyway, it's a very pretty land, I'm told. What have you done? You better clarify. Have you gone ahead and bought your own rainforest as a means of protection and preservation, or have you worked with others to purchase and protect?

DANIEL JANZEN: No. I would say I'm 180 degrees different from your opening guess. I grew up in a family of the regional director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. My father was the regional director here in Minneapolis. And I grew up believing in government set aside lands for various kinds of purposes like wildlife refuges and national parks. And my activities in Costa Rica have always been very strongly with what you would think of as the National Park Service.

Today, it's now in fact called the National System of Conservation Areas. And my efforts and my wife's efforts, Wini Hallwachs, in doing things since 1986, which is what? 10 years? --has been focused on raising funds, which then were used to purchase land to enlarge and improve what you and I would start out thinking of as a small national park. So you take a small national park, you expand it onto a trashed pasture land and old fields in the vicinity, and then you let that area regenerate.

It's grown from 10,000 hectares to 120,000 hectares, but that's all state-owned land. And the administration established on that land, about a hundred employees from the director on downwards, are all effectively-- think of them as government employees, even though they operate under what might be called private sector salaries and incentives and professionalism.

DAN OLSON: And you've come by the money to do this. How? Do I have it right that you've struck a deal with pharmaceutical companies to get royalties from some of the natural products?

DANIEL JANZEN: Well, in the beginning, from 1986 onwards, it was a very straightforward, traditional kind of conservation funding where you go out and you explain to agencies, to foundations, and to individuals the need for funds. And these monies come in and you use them to build an endowment. You use them to buy land. You build them for salaries and buildings and so on.

As this process has become more complicated, think of it like a giant university biological research station which promotes all kinds of activities. One of those activities initially in 1989 was deciding that we needed to inventory everything that was in the place. It's like taking a big warehouse and figuring out what's where. That produced what's called the National Biodiversity Institute, or INBio, in Costa Rica.

And again, now this is a private institution for the public good non-profit. So think like the Smithsonian Institution. That's the way. It's a miniature Smithsonian. Now, INBio then begins to look at how can we strike deals with the commercial world, which will result in funds flowing back into the management process and the land acquisition process of the wild land area. And specifically, the first very visible example of that was the Merck contract.

And that was a contract very explicitly designed to say to a large pharmaceutical company, look, think of Costa Rica as a warehouse, like a Sears and Roebuck. Here's the catalog and here's the contract. And if you want to study these different chemicals made by these plants and insects from the rainforest, then you sign on the dotted line. Not only do you pay a really serious fee for the sample to study, but also then there's a royalty fee associated with any real true commercialization. And that royalty fee then flows back.

So in effect, INBio and Costa Rica and the wild conservation areas acted like, say, a chemistry department in a university who says to a pharmaceutical company, we're doing research, we'll produce things which you pharmaceutical company want to use. So we'll strike a deal between the University of Minnesota and Merck. That's what the contract really looks like.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Rainforest preservationist Dan Janzen talking with Dan Olson. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview on Midmorning. I'm Chris Roberts. Remember the movie Medicine Man? Actor Sean Connery portrays the irascible scientist who finds a cancer cure in a rainforest plant. Biologist Dan Janzen says if you discount the romanticized view of science, the story is basically true.

DANIEL JANZEN: The general theme and thrust of that movie has a huge amount of truth in it of what's going on today, not some dream for 20 years down the road.

DAN OLSON: Including the interaction with the Indigenous people. I mean, the fact that these were people who apparently have a storehouse of knowledge, as you would expect. They've lived there all their lives-- that you can tap. Have you been able to tap the storehouse of knowledge that Indigenous people have about the substances around them?

DANIEL JANZEN: The problem with an awful lot of the extraction of information from Indigenous peoples, whether they're in the tropics or elsewhere, is that we tend to apply what you and I would call Western European market methods at extracting them. It tends to be, hey, I get what I can get and to hell with you, OK? That hasn't worked very well and will continue to work even worse.

In Costa Rica, the specific case is twofold. One is that unfortunately, the Spaniards eliminated most of the Indigenous people many centuries ago. So the knowledge base of the wildland areas there tends to be slight because this knowledge was lost, OK? Second, there is the unfortunate thing that the Costa Rican government itself is still in its own conflicts with the few remaining Indigenous people.

So as a way of not stirring that pot and not becoming involved, INBio and the efforts in the conservation area has been focused on dealing with wildland areas themselves, where there aren't any Indigenous people. So we tend to try to read nature rather than read an Indigenous person's book, to put it bluntly, feeling that there's an enormous amount of knowledge in the interactions of the organisms themselves. So instead of going to an Indigenous person-- and we don't have anywhere we are.

But instead of going to an Indigenous person and saying, have you seen any plants that no insects eat? Which would be a cue, of course, to having pesticides in them, right? You as a biologist wander around in the forest doing what are thought of as esoteric ecological studies, and you make the same observation the Indigenous person would have made. My goodness, these seeds lie here on the forest floor for days or weeks or months and no animal comes along and eats them.

DAN OLSON: What's an illustration?

DANIEL JANZEN: Well, there was a concrete case. Well, now it's 15 years ago where the first glimpse occurred of exactly that, seeing the seeds of a tree called lonchocarpus lying all over the forest floor, big enough for a mouse or an insect to certainly find and encounter, and never being eaten by anything. So I, in my esoteric ecologist days, took those seeds, offered them to mice, wild mice, and found that in fact, they were rejected.

I sent them off to a chemist in England and the Kew Botanical Gardens who looked at them and said, well, these are full of some very interesting, funny looking alkaloids. And so she extracted the pure chemicals, sent them back to me, and I smuggled them across the border like I was dealing with other kinds of prohibited drugs, and fed them to mice and wild mice in Costa Rica, who lo and behold, ate them in great quantity.

So my reaction was, oops, it's obviously not those interesting chemicals. So I went back to Linda and she said, well, I noticed some other things, but not chemicals I specialize on. So she said, why don't you send them to a guy named Peter Waterman in Scotland who works on this other set of chemicals? So this is a fairly complicated detective story. So I sent them to him. He extracted his chemicals from the seeds, sent me the pure chemicals, which I tried on the mice. No effect.

Well, in frustration, at the end of these trials, he sent me eight different chemicals all related to each other. All of them, the mice ate. At the end of the trial, I had little dregs left over in each of the eight bottles. And being one of these experimental types of people, I just dumped them all together and mixed it into the mouse chow and gave it to the mice, and the mice spit it out. It was the mixture, not any particular chemical.

So I got all interested in that. And I wrote a paper about it, as we all do in scientific journals and so on. And we also wrote another paper describing the chemicals that Linda found as an esoteric thing. Here are these chemicals. Well, it just so happened that somebody noticed in the literature that this same chemical had been tried as a synthetic chemical on nematodes and turned out to be moderately toxic.

Well, it just so happens that nematodes, small worms that live in the soil, are major pests of bananas. Bananas grow all over the tropics. Well, INBio in Costa Rica, looking at that, reacted, oh, well, why don't we think about testing this chemical in these wild plants to see if that could become an easily applied organic nematode pesticide in banana plantations?

Well, they went and did the trials. And lo and behold, it works like a charm. And at the present time now, that tree is being, if you like, domesticated and grown in large expanses to harvest its leaves-- to use as a soup, if you like, as a nematode pesticide in the banana plantations. And why would you use that as opposed to others? Because when it hits the soil, it works very well and decomposes beautifully. So you don't have any of this residue problem that you have with DDT and other kinds of inorganic pesticides made in a factory.

DAN OLSON: My mind keeps going back to something you said earlier about the fact that when rainforests, tropical forests, or dry forests do become scarce, but apparently, especially tropical forests, governments really do react.

DANIEL JANZEN: Governments can be made up of processes or individuals who can seem to be stupid and greedy. Simultaneously, they can also have large numbers of individuals who are what you and I would think of as very devoted civil servants, people who are really dedicated to what they're supposed to be doing in government, right? I'll give you a concrete example from Costa Rica.

The president of the central bank, which would be like the president of our Federal Reserve, sets monetary policy, said very publicly, and this person is not a biologist, I will do anything that will keep the tourist in Costa Rica half a day longer. Now, if you're the director of the park service, you hear that word, and you say, aha, my parks keep the tourists in the country a half a day longer, perhaps more than a half a day. That person is very alert to the yield potential of any kind of land use.

And what's happening in governments is that as rainforests become scarce, the people who are concerned with the economic health of the country see those pieces of land and say, aha, they are in fact a kind of land use, which has a place in our economic fabric.

DAN OLSON: When you are going around and trying to convince others how to set environmental policy and what that policy should be, I suppose you have to take off the backpack, put on the shirt and tie, and maybe even walk the halls of Congress. I don't know. I mean, I literally don't know if you're sometimes cast in the role as a lobbyist. But if you are, what kind of attitudes are you encountering among people who hear about your work? Do they see you as kind of the kindly, if slightly eccentric, academic out there in the field, or are they listening to you?

DANIEL JANZEN: I'm not viewed as a fuzzy, crazy academic so much as a person who comes from off shore. By virtue of working in another country mostly, and using that as the pilot project, I am viewed as slightly distant from the US tax base. And therefore, I have to be extra persuasive. I don't have the advantage of having a local constituency, so to speak. The consequence of that is, is that I don't elicit automatically. I'm not an insider. I can't walk into Congress and talk about what I do, as though I were from Minnesota or California.

On the other hand, I would say that there is, amongst the government policy arena, a very receptive voice to the kinds of arguments I've been making in this interview-- that biodiversity is something that should be part of the economic fabric of a country, rather than a set aside painting on the wall. And by that, I do not mean to denigrate the aesthetic values of it, but to say that we can have high quality paintings hanging in a museum and charge admission at the front door and use that museum in a wide variety of ways.

We don't have to isolate it in an ivory tower of circumstance, nor does the academic have to be isolated in academic ivory tower of circumstance. The academic can take part in this system. But it requires changes in the reward structures. It requires changes in how people negotiate, let's say, rather than the extremist position of, I am going to save every animal and plant in the world. And you are bad and you're trying to stop me from saving every animal and plant in the world.

And therefore, we are now going to go to nuclear Holocaust in order to see who wins. Always, I will lose. OK? So instead of that position, what you do is you take a negotiated position where it says, I'll pay 5% of the biodiversity to save 95%. Now, when you do that, then you have to be very careful about which 5% you're willing to lose. You have to have your opponent, if you like, the person you're negotiating with, recognize this as a negotiating table.

I give some, you give some. And we sign on a dotted line an agreement. And then we honor that agreement, which is a very-- if you like, commercial way, because that's the way the commercial world works in partnerships and so on, a way of going at things. But it requires that you lower the-- as they say in Spanish, your gut reaction to a bit and become more calculated about how you go about conservation.

DAN OLSON: Your reference to Mexico reminds me of the work of Norman Borlaug and his argument of the big threat to our planet. And I suppose then, the big threat to tropical forests is the unbridled population growth. And I wonder how you see that, if you feel that that is the threat that is beyond the kinds of other threats you have been seeing in terms of degradation of the rainforest. And it is the big threat to contend with.

DANIEL JANZEN: The families today who are having two or three, their parents had nine or 12. So you have this bulge which slides up. So the population of Costa Rica, as a concrete case, is going to slide up. It's 3.3 million right now. It'll hit probably 4 or 5 before it levels off. And then I think it'll probably drift on downwards again. And what I see the problem is, is that when each country goes through that up bulge and then drift downwards through its own social processes, of course, biodiversity is very severely threatened by that bulge top.

Some countries are already well into that bulge. Costa Rica hasn't even hit it yet. So what we have to do, I feel we have this 10/20-year window in which we've got to get the governments, the countries as a whole, to seeing that biodiversity is so valuable that it effectively gets protected from this bulge. Now, as long as they're on this detail, there is another detail, which will interest people, I think. And that is this.

As a country's education level rises and the kids move towards more and more urban environments, the populace as a whole becomes less competent at being frontier. Outcome is that as people become restive and worried and concerned, they're actually less inclined to turn back to the wild lands to try to survive. They fight it out in the urban circumstance. Because the irony is that in 1890, if you got in trouble, you saddled your horse, you picked up your machete, and you became a colonist.

In 1996, when you get in trouble, you no longer have a horse. You no longer know how to saddle one. You don't have a machete. And you'd starve to death in the first two days in the field. And your grandmother isn't there to teach you how to do it anymore. So the urban ghetto is your only hope. And you end up working in a sweatshop rather than fleeing.

And the outcome of this, ironically, is that in many countries, the pressure on wild land areas, even though the population is still rising, is actually going down because people themselves as individuals aren't as inclined to be the frontier colonist. These kinds of social interactions are frankly where we need to study things and need to apply our energies rather than screaming about the conservation per se.

And very frankly, if I'm talking to policy makers at a senior level, bank presidents, minister of planning, all those kinds of people, my focus is on those kinds of interactions, not so much on the biology of the wild land conservation area itself.

DAN OLSON: Daniel Janzen, a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

DANIEL JANZEN: You're very welcome. Thank you.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Biologist Dan Janzen talking with Dan Olson. Our Voices of Minnesota interview is heard nearly every Monday as part of Midmorning. The producer of the series is Dan Olson.

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28 minutes now before 11 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Chris Roberts. They have a knack for calling at the worst time, those telemarketers. When you're sitting down to eat dinner, when you're trying to read the newspaper, when you're in the bathroom, the phone always rings. And usually, almost always, in fact, they're peddling something you don't want.

Since we all probably agree that telemarketers are a national nemesis, what's the solution when you know who's on the other end of the line? Well, you could pretend you're an answering machine after you've said hello to the telemarketer. You could start rehearsing your Vegas act and serenade the telemarketer. You could engage in what's called veggie babble, arbitrarily inserting the names of vegetables as the telemarketer begins his or her pitch.

These aren't my ideas, folks. They're from a book that contains a whole host of tips, entitled appropriately, How to Get Rid of a Telemarketer. Its celebrated author. Mrs. Millard America, also known as Tim Nyberg, joins us in the studio. Good morning, Tim.

TIM NYBERG: Hi.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Or Mrs. America.

TIM NYBERG: That might take some explanation, huh?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Yeah, absolutely. How do you want me to refer to you?

TIM NYBERG: I'll be Tim.

CHRIS ROBERTS: OK.

TIM NYBERG: Yeah. Mrs. Millard America couldn't be with us today because the restraining order is still in place.

[LAUGHS]

CHRIS ROBERTS: Oh, my gosh. Well, that's another story.

TIM NYBERG: She's a character that I used to do on WLOL in the Twin Cities. And she did a helpful household hints for happy homemakers. And one of her most popular hints was how to get rid of a telemarketer. So the boys at Bad Dog Press coupled up with her and created book, How to Get Rid of a Telemarketer, which we feel is really the only self-help book that everybody really needs.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Now, who says you don't get useful information on Midmorning, folks? Why don't you call us and share your favorite telemarketer story? How you shut one down, perhaps, or just a horror story.

TIM NYBERG: Or if you're a telemarketer, call up and--

CHRIS ROBERTS: Precisely.

TIM NYBERG: Tell us about your exploits.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Right. What's it's like to be a telemarketer and how you're dissed in society in general and by this book, as a matter of fact. Call us at 227-6000 with telemarketer stories, 227-6000 in the Twin Cities. 1-800-242-2828 from anywhere else outside the Twin Cities, where you can hear us on Midmorning. My guest is Tim Nyberg. Tim, was it an accumulation of telemarketer calls that put you over the edge or one particular call that broke your camel's back?

TIM NYBERG: I think it's just the whole concept of telemarketing that irritates us. And we compare it with junk mail that you have no choice in either. Well, junk mail, you can look at it at your leisure if you want to. You can recycle it. You don't have to open it. Telemarketer calls come just at the worst times. In fact, that's the way that you can recognize if it's a telemarketer call, even before you pick up the telephone.

It kind of couple the phone ring with what you're doing at the time. For instance, if you're reading in the bathroom or something or in the middle of changing a messy diaper, chances are 87.5%. If the phone rings, there's a telemarketer on the other end of the line. Or if you're engaged in marital relations, it jumps to 97.5% that there's a telemarketer on the other end of the line. The other 2.5%, of course, would be the mother-in-law.

CHRIS ROBERTS: I would guess that you could probably almost tell by the sound of the ring that we have some innate ability to detect telemarketers. That's why they're so annoying.

TIM NYBERG: Well, actually, coupled with the caller ID device, which we have now, is great because you can actually look to see if it's a telemarketer calling. A lot of them use the block or anonymous things so that if it says caller blocked or anonymous, you can pretty much assume that might be a telemarketer. Or a lot of times, they're stupid enough to have actually their service listed. And then you can go right in with a pitch that's tailor-made to them like a furnace cleaning place.

You just pick it up and get your pitch ready and say, hey, it's really coincidence that you called because my wife and I just last night were discussing how it is that you actually clean the furnace ductwork. Now, do you go in there with little robots with mops soaked in Pine-Sol so the whole house gets that forest fresh scent? And at any point, do you have to turn off the furnace? Because my fruit fly collection has to stay just at 76 degrees or all heck breaks loose. And a couple of techniques employed there.

First, you keep pestering them with questions that they don't know the answers to because they're, of course, going by a script. Once you get them off their script, it kind of screws them up. And the other one is to not let them get a word in edgewise, much like what I'm doing with you right now.

CHRIS ROBERTS: I appreciate that. And it's good for the listener as well. So don't worry about it. Well, that reminds me of one of the tips in this book. You were talking about a furnace telemarketer calling. There's the all-famous house fire response.

TIM NYBERG: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can break into tears when they say it's a furnace cleaner or a chimney cleaner. This works for it, too. And I'll try to feign some tears here. Just very funny. You know darn well that my whole house burned down last night. And at that point, they'll-- oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know, at which point they'll hang up, leave you alone, and then spend the next 5/10 minutes wondering, gee, if their house burned down, how did I actually get through to them? And that saves the next person on their list because they'll be wondering.

Another good one is if you get this kind of in the same vein. You get people calling us all the time for long distance services. Say, this is so-and-so from MCI or whatever, and we'd like to change your long distance service for you, at which point you respond, I'm sorry, we don't have a telephone. Goodbye. And there again, keeps them wondering a little bit afterwards. That's one of the efficient shutdowns.

CHRIS ROBERTS: What are the top two or three for you?

TIM NYBERG: Shutdowns?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Shutdowns.

TIM NYBERG: Tips. I really like-- you mentioned veg babble. Would you want to go through a script?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Yeah.

TIM NYBERG: Do you think you could pretend you're a telemarketer here for a second?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Yeah, I could. I could try that.

TIM NYBERG: OK. OK. Go. Hello?

CHRIS ROBERTS: Hi, Tim. My name is Chris Roberts, and I'm selling lawn mowers. And I--

TIM NYBERG: Rutabaga.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Pardon?

TIM NYBERG: Kumquats.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Toro is a fine lawn mower.

TIM NYBERG: Cauliflower.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Stratton engine.

TIM NYBERG: See, I'm getting screwed up just looking at you getting screwed up here. The point is, you keep reciting vegetables. And eventually, they'll start stammering and a little snicker and say, I'm sorry, I have to go. And then you won. You see, it's a battle of wits that you're doing with the telemarketer here, if you want to give the telemarketer that much credit.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Now, are we dissing telemarketers too much? They're an important component of our economy. It has to happen, I guess. For some reason, companies have figured out that telemarketing works or else there wouldn't be so many out there.

TIM NYBERG: I think it works because people are easy sells. They can't hang up, especially up here in Minnesota. We got this Minnesota nice thing going. And we just can't bring ourselves to hang up the phone. It's because there's another person on the end of the line. But you have to realize-- actually, we have a four-step program. Here in the land of Hazelden, we've got these 12-step programs. We thought 12 steps is really a little bit too many. So we have a four-step program in actually learning how to hang up.

One of those steps is to pass off the caller to somebody else in the house. As soon as you find out it's a telemarketer, just say, excuse me a second, and set the phone down. Go get somebody who's visiting from, say, the East Coast. Happens to be in your house. Give the call to them, say, it's for you. Now, when they find out it's a telemarketer--

CHRIS ROBERTS: What do you mean East Coast?

TIM NYBERG: If they got it, the East Coast doesn't have that Minnesota nice thing going.

CHRIS ROBERTS: OK.

TIM NYBERG: It could be anywhere-- your roommate. As soon as they find out it's a telemarketer, they'll hang up for you. And then you've got plenty of time to repair your relationship with that person. But in the meantime, you got the telemarketer off the line.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Ah, I like it. I like it. Well, the number to call is 227-6000 in the Twin Cities. If you have a telemarketer horror story or a victorious shutdown that you employ that you'd like to share, 227-6000 in the Twin Cities area. 1-800-242-2828 from anywhere else outside the Twin Cities. It's toll-free. All the local lines are full of either telemarketers or people who have encountered telemarketers. We'll go first to John in Stillwater. Good morning, John.

JOHN: Good morning. I've got two shutdowns that have been very effective.

TIM NYBERG: Let's hear them.

JOHN: The first one is you pick up the phone and they start talking, or even before they start talking. You just pick up the phone at supper time and you say, I don't want any siding. And I tried that. I tried that once and there was a gaffe at the other end of the phone. And they said, how did you know?

TIM NYBERG: Playing the percentages there.

JOHN: And I said, how in the world wouldn't I know because you're the only people that call at 6:15 in the evening. The second shutdown, which is very effective, particularly with people trying to sell securities, is to say, I'm sorry, I'd really like to buy your product, but I have to talk to my guardian first.

TIM NYBERG: That's good.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wow. The implication there is powerful.

JOHN: And at that point, there's a click and that's the end of it.

TIM NYBERG: Either that or, I'm sorry, but since my early release from a check fraud scheme in which I was imprisoned, I can't do any business with telemarketers without prior consent of my parole officer.

CHRIS ROBERTS: That's a good one. With me, I guess I fall under the polite category. I always used to watch my mom long ago when she took on the early incarnation of the telemarketer. And she would not be rude. She would listen for a little while and she'd say, I'm sorry, I don't think we want any of those, but thank you for calling. And then there would be maybe one minor response from the telemarketer. And she said, no, thank you. I'm sorry. But thank you, though. And I do that, too. And so it's interesting.

You have something in this book that would help me. It's kind of a bonus benefit in the book called How to Get Rid of a Telemarketer. You have anti-telemarketer meditations. I'm going to read this for you, listeners. Learning to hang up is an ongoing process. To help you in your struggle, try using the meditations below, words to consider as you struggle with telemarketers.

The first meditation is, I didn't call, I didn't place this call. I don't have to speak to this person, no matter how misguided he or she may be. It's OK for me to hang up. It's OK. I think that's my favorite. The second meditation is, I don't want this. I don't want a product or service and I don't need it. There's no reason to continue speaking to this person, no matter how misguided he or she may be. It's OK for me to hang up. It's OK. I like that ending.

And the last one is, I won't enable. If I hang up, the telemarketer may become discouraged and seek other employment. This will help this person, no matter how misguided he or she may be. It's OK for me to hang up. It's OK.

TIM NYBERG: That's a really important one to remember. We realize that these are people just trying to earn a living. But for Pete's sake, there's a whole lot of other jobs that they can do, instead of bugging the heck out of everybody. And actually, in the back of the book, we've got a listing of other employment that they could do that utilize their skills. For instance, pushing buttons. They have to push the buttons to make a phone call.

And I've seen a lot of ads in the newspaper for 10-key operators. And while I have no idea what a 10-key operator is-- no, wait a minute. A telephone has 12 keys. So I guess they'd be overqualified for that one. But there's others like facing continual rejection. They could be a writer and send in manuscripts and get them rejected.

CHRIS ROBERTS: That's true. I hope you telemarketers are listening who are considering other employment.

TIM NYBERG: Actually, I want to stick in here. We've gotten actually calls from telemarketing firms who want to order our book in bulk and our t-shirt, Nuke the Telemarketers t-shirt. And I said, well, you ready to poke some fun at yourself? And they said, the only way that we can keep doing what we're doing is to have a little levity about it. So actually, they enjoy it. And I think they're secretly stocking up on the book to become familiar with more of the shutdowns so they're ready for anything.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Lots of people calling. Bill in Minneapolis is next. Good morning, Bill.

BILL: Good morning. What I had heard from a television show is that to stop a telemarketer, it's not enough to just say no or to hang up. What you have to do is you have to write down the date and time of the call, keep a log, get the name of the telemarketer, and then request that they never call again. And then if that company does, then you say, oh, well, I told so-and-so from your company at this date and time not to call me back. And here you are calling me back. And I guess somebody actually won a suit when they persisted in calling this person.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wow.

BILL: Do you know about that?

TIM NYBERG: Yeah. In the back of the book, we've got a section dealing with legitimate concerns. And part of that is the guidelines that telemarketers have to adhere to. And one of them is if you request them specifically to not call again, they can't legally call you again. And if they do, you can report them to the Federal Trade Commission and the addresses in the back of the book.

Also, if you're subject to telephone fraud, there's the National Fraud Information Center, and we have the toll-free number for that in the back of the book. And you can call them or your state attorney general's office.

CHRIS ROBERTS: So it's not just humor here?

TIM NYBERG: No.

CHRIS ROBERTS: We are trying to provide a service.

TIM NYBERG: Yeah, a little service. Yeah.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Well, the scourge of telemarketing is our focus on Midmorning in this half hour in this segment. And we'll go back to the phone. And Kate in St. Paul, who has been a telemarketer and has some tips for us as well. Good morning, Kate.

KATE: Good morning.

TIM NYBERG: Hi, Kate.

KATE: Hi. I'm a college student. And last summer, I worked at a telecommunications place. And I guess I just called to share a little story with you and to let you know that oftentimes, the workers that are doing telecommunication are young college kids. Out of nine people that started in the week I began, after four weeks, I was the only one left. So it's a high burnout rate anyways.

But one time, I called all over the country and got this guy on the phone. And he was really difficult to work with. And I thought I had muted the button and I said jerk out loud. I'm just like, oh, you jerk. And the guy heard me. I happened not to press the mute button. So he's like, jerk? What do you mean, jerk? And I said, oh, I'm sorry, sir. I just jerked the phone and I was just trying to explain why I couldn't hear you for a second. And he's like, oh. And then I ended up selling something so it worked out. But I don't know.

CHRIS ROBERTS: So are you ever going to be a telemarketer again?

KATE: No. No. I ended up. It was the most stressful job I've ever had in my life.

TIM NYBERG: Did you ever have anybody toy with you?

KATE: Oh, yeah.

TIM NYBERG: Did you appreciate the humorous little sidelines?

KATE: I really enjoyed people down South, Texans. And I was working for a political agency. So they were really involved. Yeah, some of it, I enjoyed. I liked it when callers would say, no, thank you, and hung up. That was the best.

TIM NYBERG: Because then that's not wasting your time.

KATE: Right. It's not wasting my time. And they just say, no, thank you. And it's hard. I don't like callers that used to say, well, hold on. And then they'd get their husband or they'd keep me on the phone and then--

TIM NYBERG: Or give you to their two-year-old daughter--

KATE: Yeah.

TIM NYBERG: Who has a--

KATE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And they'd be making up stories all the time.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Were they listening in on your conversations with people that you called? Tell them about your employer.

KATE: Yeah. Yeah. It was a stressful job because you had to ask the person you were calling three times for an amount of money. And you had to go through with it. If you didn't ask for it, then my employer would.

TIM NYBERG: So it was your rule. Also, if they said no to you three times, that was it. You're done.

KATE: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

TIM NYBERG: A lot of them have to go.

KATE: But you have to wait on the phone until they say no and you have to work on them. And if they change the subject, you have to bring them back.

TIM NYBERG: So to cut it short, we could just say, no, no, no.

KATE: You could. Yeah. If you want, just say, no, thank you, and hang up. Say, hey, I know--

TIM NYBERG: That's only one no, though.

KATE: Yes. Well, when people call me nowadays, I say, hey, I was a telemarketer. I say, I know you have to ask three times. Here you go. No, no, no. See you later.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wow. Thanks, Kate.

KATE: All right. Bye bye.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Back to the phones. And Chaunce in St. Paul has called.

CHAUNCE: Good morning.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Good morning.

CHAUNCE: I work in the statistical end of a market research company. So I get to watch the action on the phone banks. And I have three pointers. This is not necessarily in sales. But in the market research game, when they call and ask you if your favorite soda is Coke or Pepsi, if you lie and tell them that you are employed by a market research company, they will consider you tainted goods, and that your disqualified.

Secondly, keep in mind that telemarketers generally are too ugly to work in a retail store. But if you make them feel paranoid and if they call and say, good morning--

TIM NYBERG: Speak for yourself, Chaunce.

CHAUNCE: OK. Good morning. This is John. I'm calling from ABC market research. If you say, hi, John, I'm looking at you. And they'll be very paranoid like you're looking over a partition somewhere they don't know about. And the third point is that when you go to the state fair, for instance, and you're filling out the little slips to win the contest for the free cruise to the Bahamas, remember that a siting company probably won't be giving that cruise away. But they will be using your phone number to call you at a later date to sell the siting. So keep that in mind.

CHRIS ROBERTS: We will.

CHAUNCE: All right.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Whoops, sorry for the feedback there. Thanks a lot for calling. Any comments, Tim?

TIM NYBERG: The one about, yes, I work for another market research firm, also works well if you're in a mall and people approach you with a survey. Because if you work for an ad agency or a market research firm, they don't want you. So that's a good one.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Let's see if we have more callers. Ned in Minneapolis has a quick comment.

NED: Yes, I do. I have probably the best comment you're going to get. The best way to get rid of these calls is to call our wonderful friends at the phone company and ask not to have our phone numbers sold. They are the ones that sell them. You can ask that they not sell it or provide it to these marketers. And I have seen a drastic reduction in my phone solicitations.

TIM NYBERG: We've got an address for that in the book, too. It's the National Telephone Preference Service. It's in Farmingdale, New York.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Tim, have you actually used any tips in this book?

TIM NYBERG: Oh, yeah.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Do they work? I mean, are you still bothered by telemarketers?

TIM NYBERG: Yeah. Right now, I've got a caller ID box hooked up, which doesn't allow in blocked or anonymous calls. And since a lot of the telemarketer calls are blocked or anonymous, a lot of them don't get through. And if you've got a little extra time on your hands and you want some free entertainment at the expense of the telemarketer, you can utilize these tips and have a lot of fun.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Now, the publisher is Bad Dog Press, which you co-founded with--

TIM NYBERG: With Tony Derkins, who was the editor of the Duct Tape books. And I wrote the Duct Tape books also. Some of your listeners might be familiar with those.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Through wireless, right?

TIM NYBERG: They're available through wireless or at any bookstore. And they've been bestsellers.

CHRIS ROBERTS: What are some of the other titles that you've published?

TIM NYBERG: We've got Rubber Chickens for the Soul, which is our parody of Chicken Soup for the Soul. If you've had enough of those chicken soup books to make a gag, this will cleanse your palate. This is 33 and a third stories to rekindle your heartburn. We've got a really nice parody of What Color Is Your Parachute? that the author of that loves, by the way.

It's called Who Packed Your Parachute? It's practical advice from the chronically unemployed. Great gift for somebody, a victim of corporate downsizing. And The Habits of Seven Highly Annoying People. All from the Bad Dog Press.

CHRIS ROBERTS: That title has a ring to it. Thank you very much, Tim, for stopping by. Tim Nyberg, who is the author of How to Get Rid of a Telemarketer and co-founder of Bag Dog Press, a humor publishing house based in Minnesota.

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It's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. We'll wind things up with Garrison Keillor and the Writer's Almanac.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 8th of July, 1996. It's the Great Circus Parade Week starting today in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where the beautiful antique circus wagons make their annual journey down to Milwaukee for the big parade through the streets. The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival starts tonight in Santa Fe, New Mexico under the open sky.

It's the birthday in 1621 in France of Jean de La Fontaine, the poet who wrote The Fables of La Fontaine, taking the stories of Aesop and fables about animals and working them up into little comedies and dramas. It was on this day in 1822 that Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat sank in a storm as he was sailing home after visiting his friend, Byron. He was 29 years old.

The Wall Street Journal began publication on this day in 1889. 1892, the birthday in Hampshire, England, of writer Richard Aldington, author of Death of a Hero, 1929, and the sequel, All Men Are Enemies. Big band singer Billy Eckstine in Pittsburgh, 1914. He sang in the Earl Fatha Hines band and was instrumental in getting Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker into the music business.

It's the birthday in 1926 in Zurich of author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote her famous book On Death and Dying in 1970, which was largely responsible for starting the modern hospice movement in America. It's the birthday of newspaperwoman Sarah McClendon, Tyler, Texas, 1910. She's been covering the White House for four decades.

The children's singer, Raffi Cavoukian, born in Cairo, Egypt, 1948, on this day. And Anna Quindlen in Philadelphia, 1953, columnist for The New York Times for years. She left in 1994 to become a full-time novelist, author of Object Lessons and One True Thing and other books. Here's a poem for today by Robert Pinsky about finding the dried jawbones of a shark on the beach, bones that form an O in the sand. It's entitled The Want Bone.

The tongue of the waves tolled in the Earth's bell. Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue. The dried mouth bones of a shark in the hot swale gaped on nothing but sand on either side. The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing. A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung. The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving. And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.

Ossified chords held the corners together in groined spirals pleated like a summer dress. But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure? Infinitesimal mouths bore it away. The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean. But O I love you, it sings. My little, my country, my food, my parent, my child. I want you. My own, my flower, my fin, my life, my lightness, my O.

Poem by Robert Pinsky, The Want Bone, from his collection entitled The Want Bone. Published by the Ecco Press and used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac, Monday, July the 8th. Made possible by Cowles Enthusiast Media, publishers of World War II and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Today's programming is sponsored in part by members who have their contributions to Minnesota Public Radio matched by their employer. Thank you for your membership support of Minnesota Public Radio. A reminder. In the 11 o'clock hour of Midday today, which is coming up next, we'll find out about the increase in the number of minorities in the city of Rochester, Minnesota in recent years.

We'll also hear about an effort by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to look into toxic emissions from large hog farming operations affecting the air quality in Renville County. Those stories and much more coming up on Midday, which is next with Gary Eichten. Thanks for listening to Midmorning. And we'll see you again tomorrow.

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GARY EICHTEN: Listen on Monday's All Things Considered for Jazz singer Joe Williams.

JOE WILLIAMS: Lord, what a dream I had on my mind.

GARY EICHTEN: All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio.

CHRIS ROBERTS: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. Fair skies. 82 degrees at KNOW-FM 91.1, Minneapolis, St. Paul. Twin Cities weather for today becoming blustery. Weather fell on the floor. Becoming blustery and some cloudiness later on this afternoon. Highs in the mid 70s. We've already surpassed that.

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock and this is Midday on Minnesota Public Radio, with Monitor Radio's David Brown in Boston. I'm Gary Eichten in St. Paul. In the news this morning, President Clinton today is announcing a new federal program to track down people who are illegally selling guns to juveniles. The ATF will collect data on guns confiscated in 17 cities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly decided to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and ease restrictions on access to the West Bank and Gaza. Netanyahu is making his first official visit to the US this week. AIDS researchers are reporting significant progress in developing drug therapies that could improve long-term AIDS survival rates.

And the INS is holding a Cuban who hijacked a Cuban commercial airliner and forced it to land at Guantanamo Bay. Those are some of the stories in the news today. Over the noon hour, we'll hear from the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, on the Clinton Administration's long-term foreign policy objectives.