Weekly Geeks #10 - Magazines!

This week's theme in Geekdom is magazines. The proposition of this topic made me giggle a little bit considering the quandary I've gotten myself into with magazines. It even has an accompanying "interesting only to me" story which I am, nonetheless, going to share with you perhaps for the second time because I'm sure there are still people out there who haven't been afflicted by my free magazines story yet.

Okay, so, my dad has these frequent flyer miles leftover from the days of yore when he used to travel for work. Not nearly enough to send any of us on a nice vacation, most unfortunately, but as it happens, plenty to squander on mountains and piles of magazines nobody needs or wants. So, when it turns out that your trivial amount of frequent flyer miles are about to expire, in your mailbox arrives a piece of paper that says, basically, "Hey, you could just let these miles expire or you could subscribe to a randomly chosen pool of magazines" complete with checklist and business reply envelope. So, with glee borne of receiving free stuff, we diligently check off each magazine that we have even the most passing interest in because "hey, we can't just let these miles go to waste and it's free." You may think that is the end - we just subscribed to fifteen magazines we have no particular need of or desire to read - but no, this is not the end.

Through some flaw of paperwork, we then receive these notices repeatedly despite the fact that we already used up those 7,000 or so miles/points. Except, each one has a slightly different selection of magazines. The last one had Time, well this one has Newsweek (and the like)! So with glee borne of simultaneously getting free stuff and sticking it to "the man" we fill it out and return it again - signing up for yet 15 more magazines we neither particularly need nor have any desire to receive figuring, "hey, what the heck? Worst case scenario we don't get any additional free stuff and don't get to stick it to the man." Much to our delight (or do I mean consternation?) it does work. At least until the third or fourth time you try it.

So, I, in all my wondrous idiocy decide to indulge my ridiculous love for news magazines and other stuff that comes out not merely once a month but every week. So, now, instead of merely reading magazines, I can swim in a large vat of them something akin to those cartoon scenes of ridiculously greedy folks swan diving into mountains and piles of money. For every magazine I read/throw away, five more spring up in its place. Yes, that's me and my magazines. If they burned a little slower, I'm quite certain we could forgo heating oil and keep our house warm through the winter on the magazines alone. Proving that, yes, there is, in fact, too much of a good thing.

So here's what I get...

The Economist - I had a political science professor in my first year who had a profound love of this magazine, so when I saw it on the checklist, I just had to give it a shot (I'm way too poor to get it when it's not free - so what better opportunity?). I love it, but I read far too slowly to get through even a small portion of it every week. It's good real world news that doesn't assume that I'm too much of an idiot (or too much of an American) to know/care about/think critically about what's happening around the world. I rave about it frequently despite the fact that I rarely actually read beyond 40 pages of its densely packed weekly volumes.

Newsweek - Yeah, more news! Except more idiot friendly! My favorite part is probably their one page "My Turn" articles where some average joe or jill gives a snapshot of something important in their life - learning to teach biology for non majors, how their siblings shaped who they are, how setting up an e-mail card shower helped his wife fight cancer - stuff like that. I like it.

Time - Heh - uh...more news. Funny thing about news magazines, it turns out that if you read one news magazine from one week you can pretty much disregard the other five news magazines from that week. The same stuff is happening in every one. I know! Imagine that! You would think they could come up with more original news...

New York - Yeah, this comes weekly, too. Interesting articles, but my favorite has to be that big crossword in the back. I've never finished it, because I'm terrible at crossword puzzles and these are huge and difficult. I'm happy to report that I've significantly improved my crossword clue completion rate with the help of these weekly crossword puzzles, but still fall well short of finishing the whole puzzle. If I ever manage to completely finish one, I think I'll have no other choice but to simply die. Happy.

The New Yorker - This one has short stories written by well-known authors. Who couldn't love that?





Elle - There's not all that much in this magazine that interests me, but they've got a surprisingly good book section complete with Reader's Jury program that I've gotten to participate in repeatedly. I've actually had my little reviews "published" in Elle magazine. As a matter of fact, I think the one pictured here has one of my little reviews in it...but it's possible I'm mistaken, if not this one, then any of several others.

Atlantic Monthly - Yup, I subscribe to this one, too. Funny story about it, though. It looks like a great magazine, great looking articles, all kinds of book reviews and even some lit crit. Guess how many pages I've read out of all the issues I've received since last September? Did you guess zero? If you did, you're uh...very nearly right. I'm saving them...for a rainy day...in the year 2010...at the earliest.

I think I need to crawl under my desk and cower in shame for a while now. But I promise I'll take something with me to read. ;-)

The Meandering Reading Update

The good news about this week is that my absence from blogging has been indicative of my preference for reading over the internet. Since that's been a little rare lately, I decided to run with it. I'm still plodding through Schindler's List at a somewhat steadier pace than I have been, but it's still slow going. I have, however, reached the final eighth of it, so that's a good sign that the end is near.

I've been alternating it with a few rather engrossing magazine articles including one from New York magazine about Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee and steroids as well as a nice breakdown of Super Tuesday and what the future looks like for the American presidential race at this point from The Economist. If I haven't mentioned my love for The Economist lately, I must say that I appreciate that it can be counted on to provide some fairly trustworthy news and smart analysis, the kind of which doesn't seem to emerge so often from the wildly scaled down reporting in what we (or I) suppose to be "news" magazines in America. I like to believe that I'm a thinking American who wants to know more about what's going on in the world and it feels as if The Economist treats me as such while magazines like Time seem to get fluffier and fluffier. Or maybe reading The Economist just makes them *seem* fluffier. Sure, I could get quality news from the internet, but I prefer the feel of the magazine in my hands and the fact that I can carry it around whereever I may go. Okay, that's the end of magazine snobbery. For now.

I sit here now wondering if snobbery is indeed a word. In a last ditch effort to find out definitively without trying too hard, I've clicked the spell check button on Blogger only to be reminded that it's not working. Which leads me to a question. Do a lot of you actually use the spellchecker in your blog? This is assuming you use Blogger, otherwise I don't even know if your blog edit page *has* a spellchecker. I've seen the non-working of the Blogger spellchecker has been troubling a few bloggers, which made me notice something about myself. I don't use it. Unless, of course, I'm worried that I'm using a non-word. I re-read my entries and edit them the hard way. Is that unusual? I usually don't find too many screw-ups (that aren't intentional) anway, but it just struck me as funny that it doesn't even occur to me to use the spellchecker. I am my own spellchecker! Oddly enough, spelling something wrong would really bother me (despite my disuse of the spellchecker), but I don't seem to have any problem with over-abundant and awkwardly constructed parenthetical phrases nor does it bother me that I have a tendency to use lots of sentence fragments (for example, the above "Unless I'm worried that I'm using a non-word."). Sure, I could write it correctly, but I like how it sounds. It sounds like it's coming right out of my head. Which it is. Maybe my blog is meant to be read aloud? Okay, that's the end of spellchecker and standard grammar pondering. Aren't you wildly tempted to fill me in on all the terrible errors I've made in this post now? =P

Last but not least, and possible the most coherent of everything in this post, a meme! Susan tagged me for this one, and it seemed fun and easy, so here it goes!

The Rules:

1) Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2) Open the book to page 123
3) Find the fifth sentence
4) Post the next three sentences
5) Tag five people

Well, there are a couple of books sitting near me. I hesisitate to spring some painful image from Schindler's List on people without due warning, so I'm going to use my mom's current read: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.

She was twelve years old, lying still like this, waiting, shivering in the narrow bunk with polished mahogany sides. Her mind was a blank, she felt she was in disgrace. After a two-day crossing, they were once more in the calm of Carteret harbor, south of Cherbourg.

I'm going to break the fifth rule and not tag any specific people, but it's a fun and easy little meme, so if you haven't done it yet, I invite you to do so!