Lots of creative, intelligent people, including some damn good SF writers, have forseen all sorts of uses for biotech. Well, a while ago I got a piece of biotech that I'd bet no one ever saw coming: Biotech junkmail. Think I'm kidding? Think again! A while back I got a piece of mail from (ugh) earthlink trying to sucker me into coming back because I'd dropped them like a load long ago for some damn good reasons. The mail contained a sheet of slightly thick card with little bumps in it, and instructions to tear it up and bury it a few inches in the ground if I wanted some flowers. Yep, apparently they'd shelled some flower seeds without rendering the seeds themselves inviable, then sealed them between a couple sheets of paper, possibly treated with some type of water activated plant food. (Or maybe not.) Well, I don't like earthlink, but it felt a little odd to have these potential living things handed to me, and what the hell? The flower seeds had never done me any wrong so despite not wanting to touch earthlink with someone else's hands I followed the instructions on the sheet and planted it. A few pinkish flowers with yellow cores eventually sprouted. OK, high tech, cutting edge genetic engineering? No. A crude, low tech form of biotech? I'd say so. Ergo, biotech junk mail. Who saw that one coming? The possibilities of biotech mail...let's think a minute. Maybe we get "garden in an envelope" that has a folded up sheet of various seeds, possibly engineered in some way. Unfold the sheet, tear put the pictures of the flowers you want, dig holes with a table spoon and pretty soon you've got flowers coming up. The flowers might be genetically engineered with a 'terminator gene" to limit their growth, so if you want a full bush and not just one single blooming stalk send 19.95 to... Then, of course, there are other uses. You get a letter from the UPOA, United potheads of Americe that goes like "Yo, dude! Check out this picture of a killer weed! Want to have a real one like it? Man, just take the picture, and like put it in a flower pot with some like dirt, and like water it like every couple days and keep it where it, like, gets some light every day and in like a couple months you'll have a real live plant just like this one. It grows killer buds, man! Ya gotta try it!" Of course there's a nasty side here, like some nefarious cretin engineering a plant that produces toxic pollen or something like that and disguising it as an innocent "Plant this lovely picture to beautify your neighborhood." mass mailing. A lot of plot nideas here, from a little piece of biotech junk mail.