I had never heard of this Brooklyn indie-rock band until a helpful blog comment alerted me to their existence (unsurprising, I am hardly on the cutting edge of what’s cool in the music world these days) but now they’re on nearly-obsessive iPod rotation whenever I’m in my car. I have their Charm School and The Broken String albums, and both are very good: catchy, imaginative, somehow both sparse and lush at the same time. I particularly recommend “Flight 180″, “Things Are What You Make of Them”, and this happy little song:

If you’re not already a fan, you should definitely check Bishop Allen out. Two thumbs up!

Link: Bishop Allen on Amazon

I saw this at Target and hesitated only a few seconds before buying it. I totally trust Oil of Olay, and I’d been wanting to try a fun new face product.

I tried it the next day in the shower and OMG I LOVE IT. You wet your face, and then put this stuff on, and it’s HOT. It’s actually HOT, like a hot face cloth. The heat is supposed to open your pores, and of course the steam from the shower helps out with that, too. The cleanser has little teensy particles in it, so I picture the little pores opening and then the little scrubbers going to work. You can re-activate the heat by adding a little more water, but it doesn’t add as much heat as the first wave.

I left it on for the rest of my shower (first pores! then scrubbers! now hydrating!) and then rinsed it off, and my skin felt GREAT: smooth and nice and slightly warm. I kept noticing during the day how nice my skin looked and felt. I’ve used it several times since, with the same result each time. You only need a little bit, like a dime-sized amount; the bottle is going to last forever.

My skin is on the dry side, but if you’re more of an oily person, they also have it in a purifying/clarifying version.

I love this stuff. If I were wealthy, I would bathe in it. —Swistle

Link: More info at Oily of Olay’s website
Ballpark price: $10

If you have a new baby, or are expecting a baby, or you know someone who’s expecting a baby and you need to get them a gift, or you just like buying baby products because you never know when someone might get knocked up, may I make a loud, frothy-mouthed recommendation? BUY A MIRACLE BLANKET.

If you’ve ever swaddled a baby in anything other than the Miracle Blanket, you will view this thing as the sheer work of genius that it is. It holds the baby’s arms snugly against their body, it covers the baby from shoulders to toes, it wraps so securely even a squirmapillar like my own personal 3-month-old cannot escape its (loving!) embrace.

I credit this product for our baby’s fantastic sleep schedule, which involves only one wee-hour feeding and the ability to sleep in until at least 8 AM every day. The first night we started using it he went from waking up two or three times to waking up ONCE, which I totally attribute to the fact that he was kicking loose all his previous swaddle blankets and getting all unwrapped. In comparison, the Miracle Blanket keeps him in a snug burrito all night long.

BRAVO, MIRACLE BLANKET.

Ballpark price: $30 from Amazon, and worth every single penny
Link: Miracle Blanket on Amazon

Maybe you have already seen Jonniker and me practically keeling over and speaking in tongues in response to the new Suzanne Finnamore book Split: A Memoir of Divorce. We both PRE-ORDERED it, and I’m not even sure I’ve EVER pre-ordered a book before. I bought it in HARDCOVER and NOT FROM THE BARGAIN RACK! That is how much I love Suzanne Finnamore. In fact, my first reaction to hearing the title of her new book was not, “Oh, how sad!” but “Oh….so she’s available?”

I have, of course, long since finished reading Split, but I also re-read Suzanne Finnamore’s other two books, Otherwise Engaged and The Zygote Chronicles. Don’t let the fluffy titles and fluffy subject matter (engagement and pregnancy) throw you off: these are not silly little girly books. While reading them, I kept having to stop to take a breath: like a poet, she packs a lot of meaning into a few words. She throws them out like they’re nothing, so it takes a second for them to sink in.

Of the three, my favorite is Otherwise Engaged. It would be more timely for me to be recommending Split, since Split is new and fresh, but I thought Split contained fewer carelessly-strewn diamonds than the other two. Otherwise Engaged is a story not about a wedding (though there are brief mentions of things such as invitation styles and dress fittings) but of deciding to get married. It’s about deciding if this is something you really want to go through with, and with This Person. The Zygote Chronicles (my second-favorite of the three) is not just the story of a pregnancy but the story of becoming a parent.

I’m trying not to oversell, because there are few things more difficult than reading a book when you’ve been told it is the best book in the whole world. (There are people who refuse to read the Harry Potter books only because the books got so much hype.) And not everyone is going to like Suzanne Finnamore’s writing style: as with poetry, we all like different things. But I do heartily recommend that you read it and see if you are going to fight me to be her next engagement. —Swistle

Link: Otherwise Engaged on Amazon
Ballpark price: $10

I guess I shouldn’t say that EVERYBODY’S mother would like Agatha Christie books. Surely there must be literally DOZENS who wouldn’t.

What’s good about Agatha Christie mysteries is that they’re clever and satisfying without (usually) getting too gory or too scary. I myself prefer a good Jeffery Deaver (Twisted is great, or my favorite so far is The Cold Moon), but they’re gory and intense and scary, and I wouldn’t risk giving one as a gift to someone who might not enjoy reading about gruesome serial killings.

Where was I? Oh, yes! Mother’s Day! Yes. For my mom and yours, I would lean more toward Agatha Christies, which can get a little tense toward the end but don’t contain risky plot elements such as death by steam and/or taking of souvenirs from corpses. Here are a few of my own mother’s favorites:

Murder at the Vicarage (Swistle’s Mom says: “Funny, memorable characters.”)
The Labors of Hercules (short stories) (Swistle’s Mom says: “Not in same league as full-length books, but entertaining”—but Swistle says, “I like the short stories even better: more action, less interviewing of suspects.”)
Sleeping Murder (Swistle’s Mom says: “A WONDERFUL Miss Marple.”)
Cat Among the Pigeons (Swistle’s Mom says: “Mystery at a girls’ boarding school, interesting characters.”)
Murder on the Orient Express (Swistle’s Mom says: “It’s so famous that I’m a little less inclined to suggest it, but it is famous for a reason — it’s REALLY good.”)

All five of those all qualify for Amazon’s “4-for-3″ promotion, which means that if you put four of them in your cart, one of them is automatically free (it subtracts from your total during checkout). So you get four books for your mom and you only pay for three, and who’s going to tell her? Not me. (Or maybe you get three Agatha Christies for your mom and one of those gruesome serial killer books for yourself.) —Swistle

Ballpark price: $7 per book—or a little over $5 per book if you do the “4-for-3″ thing