Love Your Snuggie? Consider the Scrunchie.

Image courtesy of Saturn V Club Clothing www.saturnv.co.uk/clothing.shtml

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In a world where post-grunge bands sell Snuggies, people prance around the beach in Wearable Towels, and mop up battered faces with ShamWows, we have to ask: Where will all these products be when our fickle-consumer preferences take a turn? You don’t have to be a Freegan to come up with the answer.

3.5 Floppy Disc

Then: 1998 was the heyday of the cheerfully colored floppy disk. More than 2 billion were sold worldwide.

Now: External drives and CDs have usurped the 3.5. In 2007, PC World stopped selling the disks, and now the only place you can find a 3.5 drive is on Mother Jones intern computers.

Neither Gone Nor Forgotten: Turn boxes of old disks into handbags, pen holders, coasters, or spacey, Cubist artwork.

Pagers

Then: Invented in 1949 for the New York City Jewish Hospital, beepers didn’t achieve popularity until 1974 with the release of Motorola’s Pageboy. Popularized by doctors, drug dealers, and pimps, 61 million pagers were beeping in the U.S. in 1994.

Now: The cellular telephone killed the pager. In 2008, four billion cell phones were in use worldwide, connecting more than 60% of the world population to American Idol ringtones and creating fodder for the Texts From Last Night.

Neither Gone Nor Forgotten: Beepers still buzz for emergency personnel and doctors . In Britian, pages are popular with “twitchers,” who pay for up-to-the-minute tips on where to spot rare birds.

 

 

 

 

Scrunchies (also scrunchy or scrunci)

Then: Rommy Revson patented the fluffy, fabric-wrapped hair ties in 1993. With styles that range from polka dots, to tie dye, to silk, suede, and faux fur, the scrunchie swept across the malls of this great country and into our hearts.

Now: In 1999 Revson sued her lawyer for fraudulent billing after he spent five years defending her patent. She lost the case and $670,000. In 2003, adding insult to injury, Carrie Bradshaw mocked the scrunchie in an episode of Sex and the City for being terribly out of fashion.

Neither Gone Nor Forgotten: The popularity of the scrunchie dwindled but never really left the big hair of the Bible-belt or the world of Olympic gymnastics. And, thanks to the purveyor of all things hip and ironic, American Apparel, the scrunchie is avaliable for purchase once again.

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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