One More Treat?

THANKS, TOSCANINI'S, FOR SHOWING ME HOW I CAN PAY MY DEBTS.

Dear Gus and Mimi Rancatore:

Congratulations on getting other people to pay your bills! You guys at Toscanini's ice cream shop run up a $167,000 tab with the state rev'nooers, and you then manage to get people to give money to help pay off your delinquency. What a concept. Of course, I'm hardly surprised. If you guys could find people willing to buy "Earl Grey" ice cream, you obviously have a ready-made network of suckers larger than the Romney fund-raising list. Some grumpy old folks say that the Internet was designed primarily to allow people to create fantasy football leagues and to watch porn without the additional expense of buying a raincoat. Not me, by cracky. I now feel fully safe walking along the Information Superhighway, because I know that there's a sidewalk there and that you're sitting on it, a battered coffee cup on the ground in front of you. Of course, your success prompts the same question in me that anyone else's success always does. Namely, "Where's mine, dammit?" I believe I will attempt to build on the foundation of cyber-panhandling you have so nobly laid. Of course, I'm not going to jump in with both feet and ask folks to pay my taxes for me. I'll start small. Maybe my friends on the Web would like to pay half of this month's phone bill or three-quarters of the cable bill. After all, I know that several people read this column and consider it a cute little enterprise here in the magazine. There has to be a way to coin all that good will into a way not to pay bills that I find inconveniently large. Like you, though, I just have to pick my spots carefully. Beggars, apparently, can be choosers.

E-mail cpierce@globe.com.