1996feb03. Kinko’s Trash-Fishing And/Or WheeCut!
The holiday season, for me, is just another excuse to watch TV, with all the pageantry and goodness that is the Christmas Special. However, I find that with each passing year, I am able to spark the otherwise dormant Spirit O’ Christmas by creating my own Christmas cards at Kinko’s. Last year, I brought in some clip art, did some intentionally-crude cut-n-pasting with a friend of mine, and had a good old time. This year, I resolved to enter the portals of Kinko’s sans art, and see what fun I could have there with whatever was left in the garbage. “It’s closing in on Christmas, surely there will be ample holiday detritus,” I thought to myself while eating Goldfish Tiny Crackers®. After spending a half-hour there, it was proving to be a heartless endeavor (a GM paint manual, pastoral spring scenes, some kind of flyer about a contest to appear on “Home Improvement”), until I found two pages from the Wall Street Journal (dec 21) at the bottom of the trashbin. Paydirt – an amazing article on “dragees,” those kooky little cake-decoration silver balls with the “non-edible” warning right on the package! And the shape of the column was the same approximate dimensions (once reduced) as a postcard! A Martha Stewart quote baked right in! A Christmas miracle! But you probably aren’t surprised that the topic of this paragraph is the paper cutter I used at Kinko’s. This paper cutter features a blade shielded by a grip-friendly block, running back and forth the length of two metal bars. You couldn’t cut your thumb and two of your fingers off (like, say, my elementary school principal) without really wanting to. This paper cutter is the closest you can get to having sex as far as paper cutters are involved, and isn’t that a lovely image. This paper cutter is wonderful. So perfect. So nice. Delicious. This is God’s paper cutter (oh, sure, there are those of you who would insist that God would use X-ray vision, or merely think the two pieces of paper apart with His Mind or whatever He’s got Up There, but I’m of the opinion that the big G is a hands-on kind of Guy, maybe with a nook-like woodworking corner in His Basement Of Infinite Size [sure, if it’s a basement of infinite size, how can it have corners, you say, but these are the types of problems you run into when dealing with the omnipotent]). It, however, lacks a proper name. “Safety Super Roller Cutter” is what the nuts at South Coast Designs (714 997 7582) deigned this paper cutter, and I say the name sucks. I have rechristened this device “The WheeCut” (I pause here to note that it was during the fermentation period of this special name that I realized why people sometimes spell “Wee” with an “h,” to wit: “Whee” – it’s actually to differentiate it from the classical definition of “wee,” i.e. “small”; this little bit of grammatical trickiness isn’t needed if “whee” turns into an exclamation, e.g. “Wee!” Unless for some reason the speaker may actually be excited about something tiny, and in this case, just throw the “h” out the window, because no one will care but your chronicler. Oh, sure, you can’t find a exultation spelled “wee” in the dictionary, but we all know and use “Wee!” with careless abandon, myself included; as I’ve posited before and will posit again, English is my second language, and once I’ve determined what the first one is, I believe my life will be a lot smoother). If you need an office supply fix and end up calling these people, offer the new name to them. Don’t forget to charge them – people are loathe to accept free advice, but they love to pay for it.