Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Binder Clip Fan Club

Something happened in the blogosphere yesterday. Maybe a belated April Fool's Day Joke, or maybe a conspiracy that I'm not in on (yet).

Whatever it was, the changes were, shall we say, binding.

I know a trend coming along when I see one, and I knew I'd have to run at a pretty fast clip to catch up with it. So hastily, I registered www.BinderClips.ca and created a Blogger blog to act as a landing site for now. This evening I created some basic content:

For me, the first sign of the apocaclips was a link on the blog of binder clip fan (and self-declared Binder Clip King) David Scrimshaw, David Scrimshaw's blog, repeating a post by binder clip enthusiast Megan Butcher on her eponymous blog.

Megan had discovered a user for binder clips: a ceiling cleaning mop mod.

Megan's post linked to a post on Mae Callen's blog, Driving fast on loose gravel, wherein she had devised a mounting system for silk scarves.

This led Woodsy to post on her blog her own binder clip story (which she knows by their French nickname, "des clips," not to be confused with the nickname for Desmond Clipson, the infamously hard-to-Google actor*). In that post, she summarised the previous three links as Ottawa bloggers who enjoy the creative use of bull binder clips.

*You may not remember him. He plays a conveniently-named bit character on blog posts.

I was disappointed not to see any links to my blog on her list. Then I realized that my binder clip affection is still a secret on this blog! The closest I've come is the recent post on creating a handlebar-mounted clipboard.

Meanwhile, others are way ahead of me: both David Scrimshaw and Megan Butcher have made enough relevant posts to have a "binder clips" tag on their blogs.

But you are not alone! I have a longstanding addiction to binder clips!

Here is a photo of a box of binder clips shortly after I picked it up from my supplier last August. The blue thing is a letter size file folder for comparison.

When people visit, I always offer them a handful of clips for the road.

And this was the third such box that I got from my supplier, having already exhausted two. You find a lot of uses for binder clips with that many around.

As for www.BinderClips.ca, I'm hoping it will be a resource for all the many uses people find for binder clips.

To be honest, I kinda just registered the domain and hoped the rest would come together. As far as I could see, there weren't any Binder Clip fansites out there, so this is new territory. I guess I'm vaguely thinking of a cross between theme blogs like el Maks' Swapbox blog, I Can Has Cheezburger and Always Use Zipcode, and collaborative blogs like Apartment 613 and the ELgiN StreEt iRReguLars.

Damned if I know how it's going to work, but if it does, I want to make a similar site for local fans of used inner tubes.

I guess the question is, who's in? Clip fans--speak up!

- RG>

3 comments:

Lynn said...

Will I get kicked out of the club if I admit that binder clips kind of annoy me? I'm not sure if it's a hand strength thing or what, but I find them so hard to use.

I'm a giant paper clip girl at heart, I guess. Is paperclips.ca gone?

XUP said...

You should know that at the very first meeting of the Ottawa Bloggers, binder clips were distributed as membership tokens. Many of the Ottawa Bloggers use binder clips for their hipster PDAs-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA

RealGrouchy said...

Lynn - most definitely!

XUP - Maybe if I had been invited! But now that you mention it, I use a binder clip for my business cards that I keep in my pocket. Didn't even think of that until you mentioned hipster PDAs!

- RG>