Believer Mag Bags

A recent Spring-cleaning adventure resulted in yours truly unearthing a stack of 19 (how many? 19!) unread issues of The Believer. I'm never going to read them. I can't throw them out. The paper is too nice, each page too beautifully typeset, to end up in the blue box. So, I made gift bags out of them. They're even gusseted. (You heard me, eat your heart out, Martha). Relax, I clipped all the Nick Hornby and Javier Marias columns first (and dated them, and stored them in protective plastic sleeves, because I'll get to them someday, because I'm such a freaking nerd). The bags are small (about 4.5 inches tall, 2.5 inches wide) but surprisingly strong, and the handles are made out of some nice, rough twine. These will come in handy during craft show season, making me feel less bad about my sometimes wasteful and often frivolous jewellery-making/packaging endeavours. But now what's a Knittah gonna do with four years of Scientific American?
(Project Soundtrack: Barrington Levy's Too Experienced)

On another note, can I get a "hell yeah" for my man Junot Diaz for straight jackin' some mad Pulitzer gwop? Who said book prizes don't mean anything? Well, okay, I did, but whatever. From The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened - and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? - Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he knew exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.