black friday reading material
I'm sure you'll all be safely ensconsed at home this Friday, protesting the materialist, commercialized nature of the holidays, self-righteously snickering at all the fools who woke up at the crack of dawn to drive their gas-guzzling SUVs to the local big box retailer to take advantage of a measly 10% discount on the brightly colored made-with-petroleum painted-with-lead crap made by slave labor in China.
But if around noontime you get tired of re-reading your well-thumbed copies of Tom Frank or Lizabeth Cohen or Kalle Lasn, you may want to pick up the copy of the Restoration Hardware gift catalog that most likely landed in your mailbox this week. It's the best catalog of the year (it's obviously less expensive than what Neiman's pitching, and it's less pretentious then the one from Design Within Reach), and it's chock full of great toys, games and stocking stuffers like a wooden box Clue, or a Jokes on You Prank Kit or a pair of Marshmallow Roasters. (And even though this is all online, the paper catalog (relax, you can recycle it!) is worth getting your hands on. It's really a thing of beauty.)
Don't worry -- after you drool over the nice Scrabble set and possibly order a few prank kits for your nieces or nephews, you can pick up your Frank or Cohen or Lasn again and step back into your usual Black Friday spirit before your friends come over for a few games of Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis. No one will have to know.
