A good rag is hard to find!

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I love magazines. It’s light reading especially good between books. They have good information and a giggle or two but they aren’t like they used to be.

When I received a magazine, I was assured of several hours of reading. Sometimes a shopping trip was required. Not anymore.

They are so much smaller. That’s both in overall size and in thickness. There is not as much stuff between the covers and many of the articles are short. You can go to their website if you want more information or to know how to do it or to where to buy it.

I must be a dinosaur. Yes, I have a Kindle and use it but when it comes to magazines, I like the paper. I like the smell and the pretty glossy pictures. You can’t get that effect from a Kindle.

Back in those old days (that really weren’t all THAT long ago), I used to rip pages out. My old magazines were always in shreds when they went into the recycling bin. Not so today. I rarely rip anything out.

I would tear out health tips which of course I never followed and fashion advice for my body shape and age which I never used. The important thing was that I had it in case I would need it which I never did.

There would be a box of articles and stories cut out just waiting for me. Usually I moved before I was ready. When you move you throw those things out. It’s written in the ‘moving bible’ or you will need a super gigantic truck.

I miss the old-fashioned recipes. I had boxes full of recipes I wanted to try (but of course never did). Today’s recipes are from faraway places with ingredients I can’t pronounce. If quinoa was so damn good for you, why didn’t anyone eat it before now?

What happened to those easy peasy casserole thingies that you toss together and into the oven (without the can of condensed soup please)? Or those yummy salads with chopped vegetables that you could both pronounce and find at your normal grocery store?

Even the desserts aren’t as enticing. Should we really put bacon in our chocolate cupcakes with caramel and sprinkles on top?

Remember the Glamour and Seventeen fat summer issues with the new fall fashions? Today the fashions are so retro. I wore all that stuff decades ago and it didn’t look good then especially those geometric prints. I like the shoes but I wore those styles before too. The best part of today’s fashion is the inclusion of stretch in everything but there’s a reason for that.

The designers are structuring swimsuits better but the food industry is structuring our bodies differently too. I can’t remember my mother eating processed food. Ok, once in a while she bought Velveeta cheese but that was all. That quick and easy processed food does things to your body that render it…larger.

It’s hard to look good in a swimsuit unless you are 14 years old. There are only so many pleated areas you can have on a tiny square of fabric.

Of course, today’s magazines carry more articles on serious facial treatments, like lasers and scalpels. They also review cosmetics that will help erase or hide wrinkles and sun damage. I don’t remember those in the old ones. Then it was all about eye shadow colors and lipstick and hairdo’s — oh yes, lots of hairdo’s.

Maybe I have outlived the fashion cycle! My mother said it would happen and the magic of shopping would go away. What she didn’t tell was that the magic of magazines would go with it.

 

38 thoughts on “A good rag is hard to find!”

  1. I once loved magazines and ripped mine to shreds, too. I still find remnants of them in boxes or tucked into books. I no longer bother with them for the same reasons you mention. I don’t want to go to a website for “further information”. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have a magazine in hand, would I, now? I’m waiting for the day that I read a book and come to the middle chapter only to be given instructions to follow a link for further text. They’ll cal them “teaser books” but still charge the full price.

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  2. I certainly agree! I have piles of magazines and can’t seem to let them go, but at the same time, there’s not much meat between the pages! Of course I have less time to read, too, so maybe it is better balanced than we think. 🙂

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    • Oh yes, I bought Chinese 5 spice at least 5 years ago to make something fantastic. I never did and don’t remember what it was for. Time to clean it out. BTW I love yearstricken!

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  5. Kate … Have you tried bacon in chocolate chip cookies? I swear you’d convert if you did. I’m glad I’m not the only one who cuts or tears out endless articles on exercise and dieting that I never look at again. I do purge them periodically – once every 5 or 10 years or so. 😉

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  6. So true. Magazine used to be everything each fall and spring – we’d wait for that big issue. Now? What’s is between the glossy covers is tons of ads and a few old recycled articles. Done in 30 seconds. Why bother?
    (How can people live without can soup based casseroles?)

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  7. I agree with all that’s been said here, of course. But I can’t help but wonder if at some point in the next 10 years magazines will become retro-cool & suddenly they’ll be back in all their glory… if only for a few years. You know how fickle the American public is. If Birks can make a comeback, so can mags.

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  8. I agree, Kate and I do remember those fat summer issues. And Good Housekeeping, it would have a ton of interesting articles. The only magazine I ever rip anything out of is Writer’s Digest, the rest of the magazines are full of advertisements. I guess their focus these days is on their online version.

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  9. This is a great piece. Love the quinoa line…I too loved buying a magazine or two, curling up on the sofa. I remember when Vogue was the size of your coffee table…now it’s all ads and crap no one really wears.

    Loved this 🙂

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  10. Yes! I cruised through a stack of 6 magazines yesterday afternoon in the time it used to take to peruse one. And I didn’t see any articles worth ripping out or recipes worth saving.

    Most magazines are nothing more than ADS. For stuff I don’t want.

    I did rip out 30 funny ads to make an Anniversary Card/Booklet for BFF which he loved, especially the ad featuring a Zebra chasing a Lion (which I captioned, “I K-e-e-e-l-l you!” ~ after Jeff Dunham’s Achmed the dead terrorist).

    And I definitely remember the THICK fall issues of Glamour and Cosmo with “sophisticated style and class” for class.

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  11. There’s one magazine I really enjoy each month…Real Simple. It’s full of good stuff. Like newspapers are shrinking, so go the magazines. Thinner, overboard with ads…seems like that’s what they are about…ads! Yikes! As for health foods? I cannot force myself to like tofu…our Chinese friends loved to kid me about that when we lived there. Didn’t like it then, don’t like it now and I’m not gonna’ eat it. Even drowned in bacon…I like bacon for breakfast or in a BLT. That’s it. To each her own, right? Yeah, right.

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    • I do like tofu (it doesn’t taste like anything) but we never eat it because my husband hates the texture. It’s just too hard to cook two separate meals. I have gotten Real Simple and liked it. Good Housekeeping sparked this rant. I used to have that magazine. It was chucked full of good stuff. The last issue was so thin I read it in an hour.

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  12. I used to love Seventeen magazine, right up until I was actually 17 years old. And of course my favorite pre-teen mag, Tiger Beat. Ahh, David Cassidy, my true love. I did subscribe to Cosmopolitan way way back when but ditched my subscription in a Feminist Fit, when it seemed like every issue was devoted to how we could please our men. Harumph. The only magazine I subscribe to now is Washingtonian, which still has great content. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

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    • Oh yes, how we can please, get or keep our man by totally changing yourself and disregarding who you are. Phooey! I never saw those articles about keeping women in men’s mags.

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  13. Ah yes! So well described. I’d have added Cosmopolitan and Vogue. And I didn’t manage to throw clippings out when moving, so now I’m stuck with having to deal with my “Fifty Years of Paper”. That collecting of so-called ‘information’ seemed part of being a woman. Now I get everything online – have been gradually discarding recipe books to the few who will accept them 🙂 Folks won’t even buy them at yard sales!

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    • Yes, there are a lot of diet articles. I don’t notice them because I don’t read them. There is usually a sad medical article with some very unusual ailment, a relationship article, a couple of weird recipes I’d never made and a collection of new cosmetics to buy. OMG! We could so write a magazine!

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