5 Creative Uses for: Socks

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Since everyone’s always grousing about the washer/dryer sock mystery thing, I’m not going to belabor that point. What I will say is this: I am convinced that my feet are extra sharp, owing to the really remarkably short length of time a typical pair of socks lasts me before one gets a hole. For those afflicted with pointy heels like mine (or flimsy socks), a few ideas from AltUse.com and Yankee Magazine’s excellent book Don’t Throw It Out:

1. Protect your shoes: Slip socks over shoes to keep them from scuffing in your suitcase.

2. Make a chew toy: Knot a sock up, or tie a few together around a rubber ball. Hours of fun for Fido. Don’t you wish you were so easily entertained?

3. Warm up your arms: Like leg warmers: Cut the toe off an old pair of socks and bunch ’em up on your forearms. If you want to cover your hands, too, you can cut a thumb hole into the heel.

4. Store ornaments: Kids’ socks work well for covering delicate Christmas ornaments. This trick works well for packing up tchotchkes for a move, too.

5. Clean with precision: Dusty, hard-to-reach corners are no match for your sock-covered hand. Spritz the toe with cleaning solution and attack.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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