Archives
Gift ideas for your favorite grads
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing editor
Savings bond? Fuhgeddaboutit!
Anyone can give a graduate 50 bucks or a fleece blanky for the dorm room, but with a little help from the UB librarians, you can give a teenage boy a statue of the lovely "Francine, a study in languor," from the online shop, the Pillaged Village, or a chocolate diploma from Hershey's Web site for a sweet $18.85.
David Bertuca and Fred Stoss, librarians in the Arts and Sciences Library, created the "Graduate Gifting Ideas" Web site at http:// ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/gifts.html and it could be a life-saver when it comes to finding memorable presents.
"You can buy a standard gift, of course," writes Bertuca on the Web site. "But if you want a gift that really says something about your graduate's specialty or peculiar genes, please read on before doing the easy way out by buying a graduation sports car..."
To begin, go to the UB site and link to Graduation Gift Ideas or to the Web sites that tell you How to Select a Graduation Gift and this year's Top 10 Graduation Gifts.
The selections are nearly endless.
Bertuca notes, for instance, that the Web site links to an online store that is actually called Unique College Graduation Gift Idea (sic) where visitors can pick up a discounted bust sculpture of Honore de Balzac, that elegist on the irreparable decay of good society, or the selfless warrior hero and strategist, King Leonidas of Sparta.
A troubled young woman named "Carmencita" (bonded marble, $86.40) is available at the site's Statues Gallery, where you also will find her sister, "Extase."
If an eighth-grade witch or warlock is on your list, no need to truck down to the local Wiccan outlet—TwistedFeather.com offers a variety of gargoyle treasure boxes and Celtic-tower jewelry boxes in which he or she can store the crystals, spells and microcosmic crosses also offered on the site.
Got an MBA or management student on your list? Then check out the Top 8 Gifts For Business Grads or Computer Gear, where you can pick up a geek t-shirt and other random bytes of fun.
The UB site links to museum stores, observatory gift shops, sites that feature gifts for actual or amateur biohazard managers, math lovers, paleontologists, musicians, historians, biochemists, meteorologists, poets, artists, cartographers and geography enthusiasts (maps, globes, ties printed with pictures of West Nile Virus). There even are gifts from the Curmudgeony Librarian.
Never again will you be the aunt or uncle who "gave me this stupid gift."
Instead, imagine your favorite graduate exploding with delight when he opens your gift and finds a box of Frida Kahlo and Che finger puppets from the Unemployed Philosophers' Guild. The guild also sells the ever-popular blue, plush Freudian Slippers topped by replicas of the psychoanalyst's head (small to extra large, $24.99), perfect for grads with maladaptive personality traits.