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We love love love reader mail. While your regularly scheduled writer is presumably laying on some tropical island, dodging monkeys, we are not traveling, not in a tropical area, and working under hideous lighting for far too many hours a day. We are like our own version of high/low, but something we agree on is our love for reader mail. Please! Send us anything! We’ll do our best to answer it.

Anyway! Today’s question:

Hi Lil Bunny,

I have a question for you. I’ve been invited to a really good friend’s fiancee’s bridal shower. I’m not going to know a single soul there – I’ve only met her twice, it’s really far from where I live (but not far enough where distance would be my only excuse), and I really dislike parties. I don’t know this girl at all, so can you help me pick out a completely excellent gift, under $50, that will make up for my absence?

Thanks!

C.

Ah, C. We, too, have been known to bail on bridal and baby showers, and we generally believe that sending the nicest gift humanly possible is the best way out. That, and a heartfelt – but not overly sentimental – card.

For bridal showers, we have a default gift. We’ve sent it to our best friend (yes, we skipped her shower), we’ve sent it to fiancees of friends, we’ve sent it to our Loved One’s relatives we couldn’t pick out of a crowd. We’ve always gotten really great feedback, so we’ll keep giving it until someone tells us to stop. Or, all of our friends are married. Either way.

Personally, we don’t love Philosophy products – we find them drying. But we think they smell great, have excellent packaging, are vague enough to be appropriate for everyone without being impersonal and they always present well.

Anyone else have other ideas?

-LB

10.07.2008

We recently got ripped off on Etsy to the tune of $50. Not catastrophic, but definitely enough to be incredibly annoying. We’d like to publicly thank Etsy for trying to make it right, following up with all the robbed customers and just generally being awesome.

Thanks, Etsy. You’ve restored our faith in faceless internet craft shopping.

XO,

LB

200810071448.jpg

We are pretty sure we are not the only Americans whose primary cultural comparison for the—we believe the word is "unrelenting"—bad news from economic circles is It’s a Wonderful Life. In fact, we were recently asked if we felt like we understood the financial crisis, and we responded by quoting, as near as possible, this scene from the movie:

George: No, but you . . . you . . . you’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?

Tom: I got two hundred and forty-two dollars in here, and two hundred and forty-two dollars isn’t going to break anybody.
 

For a slightly less … 1946 take on events, we share this NPR story, forwarded to us from a friend, via an interested party. The former promises it is "by far the best, most comprehensive and interesting explanation." Our reading has been less comprehensive, focusing, as it does, on ads for waitressing jobs, but we did remove our headphones feeling significantly more in-the-know than just an hour earlier. It’s like the reverse of watching The Hills.

Anyhoo: This American Life on the credit crunch

So. We have moved, however temporarily, to a village outside a monkey forest in southeast Asia. Really! There are monkeys everywhere. We heard that before we got here—that the monkeys would be everywhere—and were all, eh. Sure they are. But: Monkeys. Are fucking everywhere! They appear to enjoy bananas. The other day we saw this kid with a banana in a plastic bag, and this monkey went—our first and probably most apt word is apeshit—and tried to get the banana from the kid. (The kid, mind you, is about 20X bigger than the monkey.) The kid runs away from the monkey—not out of fear but spite. Then his adult minder starts swinging her bicycle helmet at the monkey. She is about 30X bigger than the monkey. The monkey is freaking out. We want to find some sort of sea creature 30X bigger than this woman and have him swing a giant pod of kelp at her.

Bunnyshop is a fashion and shopping blog, apparently, and we must say, in our opinion, the fashion and shopping here leave something to be desired, unless you really like (a) wicker baskets, (b) Bintang beer paraphernalia, or (c) yoga clothes with pictures of monkeys on them. Thus, our radio silence, as the site has been left in the highly capable hands of our co-editor. We’ve decided, though, that for the time being, BS will be a fashion, shopping and travel site, lest we exclude ourselves from contributing to our own blog. We hope this doesn’t bore the shit out of anyone.

We welcome, more than perhaps ever before, nominations for BS Hearts things—anything you’ve bought lately that you like—or Reader Mail questions, which we or LB will be so excited to address. Also, in our ongoing redesign: We’re looking for a web designer, particularly one who might be willing to trade some consulting fees for some A-list copy writing or similar. For all of the above, please email us here.

We will, of course, be here, with a potentially endless number of monkey stories. It’s nice to be back.