February 9th, 2009, 18 Comments »
Is that odd? It’s a totally unobtrusive Pulsar that Julie gave me years ago. I’ve probably changed the black leather strap on it at least five times, and the battery at least twice. The face is a bit dinged up, I guess, but it works perfectly.
All it does is tell time. It has no fancy digital functions (which have, not surprisingly, fallen out of fashion), nor is it good to 200 feet underwater. It has none of the silver and gold bulkiness that I frequently see in men’s magazines on the wrists of brooding male models and an even broodier Clive Owen. I cannot wind it by shaking my wrist.
I have friends who have lots of watches. Travis has, as last count, well, I’m not really sure, but I think it was north of 40. He’s a collector, though, so that seems like a different league altogether.
I have no urge to buy another watch until this one breaks. Is that a common or unusual perspective? How often do you buy watches? How do you decide that it’s time for a new one?
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November 26th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Last year I complained about a periodical incursion–how magazines for men were increasingly being annexed by magazines targeted at a female audience. I was down at Pharmasave today, and snapped this photo of this ongoing trend (click for a bigger version):
I couldn’t get the whole newsstand in, but this is certainly representative. You can find a smattering of men’s interest magazines on the top shelf, but that’s really it. And most are buried in the third or fourth row, the way girlie magazines used to be.
I’m not actually lobbying that men deserve more shelf space. It’s pure economics. Consider this table from the Magazine Publishers of America. Of the top 50 magazines sold in 2007, only three could be considered primarily of interest to men (by my count, two others might qualify as appealing equally to both genders). The top male interest magazine, Men’s Health, is in the 17th spot, with a single copy circulation of 544,054. Cosompolitan, the top magazine, has a circulation of 1,882,061.
Men just aren’t buying magazines. Or, more accurately, women are buying a lot more magazines than men.
9 Comments »
April 11th, 2007, 2 Comments »
I’ve always been fairly Green with a capital G. You can’t grow up middle-class on the west coast of Canada in the eighties without having environmental values pounded into you. Then I went to UVic, the heartland of environmentalism.
As such, it’s been interesting to watch environmental values creep, ever onwards, into the mainstream. Climate change seems to have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, no doubt helped along by some recent radical weather patterns (which may or may not be attributable to global warming).
I was looking at the magazine rack in the grocery store today, and was struck by the prominence of this ethos in a wide variety of publications. I snapped some photos with my dodgy camera phone:
Whenever I see that Lou Lou magazine (yowza, that site), I always laugh. It’s a “shopping magazine”, which just means they’re lying less than all of the other advertising and advertorial-packed womens’ magazines.
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