I have to admit that sometimes I'm a style over function guy. I've been known to suffer for fashion. What can I say? I'm an extremely visually-oriented person, so things that look unspeakably cool juice my brain with all sorts of pleasure chems. So it's no wonder that I just HAD to have the black MacBook, even though you basically pay at least a hundred bucks extra for a black paint job. I'd also heard beforehand that it was a royal pain to keep clean. But that satiny, matte black finish -- it was just too damn tasty to resist. So I got one, and I love it. I love it so much, I polish it every day (okay, often *several* times a day) like a classic car. Good thing too, 'cause the BlackBook attracts grease like you can't imagine. By the end of a busy day, it looks like a cross between a bus station vending machine and a crime scene dusted for prints, slick with grease and dotted with finger- and handprints.

I was lucky enough to already have the ultra-soft cleaning cloth that came with my equally high-minded Logitech DiNovo keyboard. But I kept misplacing it, or having to traipse all over the house to find it. I started also using an old Minolta lens cloth I had, but it's kind of small.

This past week, while staying at the Radisson Hotel for Maker Faire Austin, I found the perfect BlackBook cleaning solution: the hotel shoe mitt! There were two of them clipped to the laundry bag in my closet. They're the perfect scratch-proof fabric and you can put your hand inside to apply more rubbing pressure, clean around the edges, etc. It's quicker than a small flat cloth and you can do a much more thorough job. And the mitts are free! If you travel a lot, you can collect a bunch of them in no time. Now my foolishly impractical grease-loving BlackBook looks as untouched by human hands as its pretentious designers intended. And I'm a much happier fashion victim as a result.