Canadian Gift Guide

The title of this post is from a brilliant song called ‘Mix Tape’ by a brilliant band called Brand New, who produced one of my top three albums of all time, ‘Deja Entendu’. Go on, take a break from reading, and have a listen.

Okay, good to go? Now see, if we knew one another a little better, perhaps I would throw ‘Mix Tape’ or ‘Jude Law & A Semester Abroad’ or ‘The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot’ onto a mix tape for you. Then again, cassette tapes are woefully obsolete, so maybe you’d throw said tape at my head if I attempted to gift you with it. I look back fondly on my mix tape days however, sitting by the radio and waiting for a tune I requested to come on just so I could hit ‘record’ and cut off the first few seconds, or craft compilations from my expanding collection of CDs at the time, back when record companies didn’t threaten to lay you with some sort of smackdown for doing so.

In today’s digital era, it’s hard to imagine replicating the sentiment and effort that went into crafting a special mix tape for that special guy or gal in your life. The closest we have is recommending a song or two, or creating a public iTunes playlist. That is, until now. I mentioned the other day that I dig this UK company called Suck UK. Their full website is amazing, filled with practical, clever, and sleek gift ideas. In Canada, you can get a decent chunk of their product line from one of two New York-based etailers, FunHousewares.com or NerdSeven.

Now, back to the mix tape. The geniuses at Suck have reinvented that hunk of plastic into something decidedly 21st century – the mix tape USB. With 64 mb (room for about 18-22 standard-length songs), this everyday gadget gets a new life when tucked into a cardboard cassette-shaped box, complete with a fold out menu for you to handwrite (!) the playlist for your amour. I’m not discounting the hard work and sentiment that went into old school mix tapes, but the idea of whipping together a nice little playlist and dropping it onto a USB for your honey to hum along to beats hours of hitting the rewind, pause, and record buttons on a tape deck.

Even better, this little gizmo is priced just right – comparable to CDs – at $16.95 USD (plus about $10 for shipping), perfect whether you’re coming up to your one-month or your ten-year anniversary. The mixture of ultra cool and unexpected is hard to beat I must say, and paired with a set of concert tickets or heck, even a proposal, this is a sweet memento that’s sure to have a lasting impact…at least until MP3’s become obsolete and we have to dream up ways to relive the glory days of playlists.