Have you ever gone shopping and stuck all those nice, biodegradable plastic bags full of groceries into the back of your vehicle? Dave Locke, writing in the new issue of Catchpenny Gazette, has too:

"I had to reconstruct what must have happened. Each bag of groceries was like a fat man with baggy pants (or, if you prefer, a person of substance who was apparel challenged). There is always the danger that his pants could fall down. That must be what happened to the groceries. Their pants, the plastic bags, fell down. However, unlike the fat man, the groceries were now much freer to move, and had moved all over the trunk. When I opened it, the groceries were so evenly spread out that they concealed the bags. "Where the hell did the bags go?" was what I first wondered, and then I thought "Geez, they can’t be that biodegradable."

On the postive side, thanks to the handles, you can carry about ten plastic bags in each hand, so long as they aren't overly packed, in which case the bags are so flimsy you can't lift one without it breaking. When plastic bags first appeared they were strong. I kept the bags I got at the local drug store and used them to carry books and stuff around. They'd last for months. They were worth more to me than what I'd carted home in them. Today's bags barely make it to the car. The manufacturers have got them down to a theoretical concept of bags.

Dave has more to say about plastic bags in Catchpenny Gazette 9 which is available in pdf at eFanzines.com. Editor Dave Burton talks about racking dollar bills via the internet, Christopher Garcia describes an old how-to-write booklet by one time Weird Tales George Scithers, and some of these blog entries have been attractively packaged into a column. Best of all it is pdf, not plastic. Why you could even print it out on paper.