The folks at Mini, apparently in an attempt to make me feel like the sum I dropped for our new car has opened up new and aspirational lifestyle vistas for me and my family, sent us the small pile of Mini-related swag you see here. It includes a Mini bag, a blank journal to record all my travel, a pen, a card holder, a Mini-centered lifestyle magazine, and a happy face antenna ball.

It’s all very cute and the pen is actually useful (the antenna ball, alas, does not actually fit onto the antenna), but it doesn’t really convince me to descend any further into the Mini lifestyle. I mean, I do already like my car an embarrassing amount. But there’s only so many hours in the day, no matter how many nice, nubbly pens Mini tosses my way. I’m already well sunk into the writing geek lifestyle. I don’t want to have to change my wardrobe.

This is not terribly unexpected but still not good news:

There will be no storybook ending for Borders. The 40-year old book seller could start liquidating its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday.

The chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to liquidate its stores after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business… Liquidation sales could start as soon as Friday if the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York approves the move at a scheduled hearing on Thursday. The company is expected to go out of business by the end of September.

It’s not good news for the obvious reason: One less place for authors to sell books — well, 399 fewer places, as that is the number of remaining Borders stores at the moment. Our jobs just got that much harder. There are other less obvious reasons as well, but the obvious one is bad enough.

I’ve got a project with a hard deadline of Friday, which means I don’t have a lot of time to play here this week. But I hate leaving you with nothing to do, so all this week, while I’m slaving away in the word mines, I’ll post up a couple of silly polls during the day to keep you busy. And here’s your first one:

Feel free to expound upon your answer in the comments.