September 22, 2009

5 Creative Uses for: Coffee Filters

Image courtesy AltUse.com

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A few weeks back, I posted about alternative uses for coffee. If you have extra coffee, chances are you also occasionally have extra filters. The reuse gurus over at AltUse.com have done it again with these brilliant ideas. Use filters to:

1. Filter cork out of wine. Place an unbleached filter over your glass and before you pour the wine. Minimal impact to taste.

2. Stop a razor nick from bleeding. Tear off a small piece of filter and cover the nick. Stems bleeding fast.

3. Clean windows. Use filters instead of paper towels. Picks up dirt and dust without leaving lint behind.

4. Absorb food grease. Durable filters soak up excess oil without disintegrating. Works for bacon, pizza, french fries, or any of your other favorite greasy foods. Bonus: After frying, pour leftover oil through a coffee filter, then use it again.

5. Line house plants: Prevent soil seepage by placing a coffee filter in the bottom of a plant pot.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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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