Every year, somebody gets me one of those Page-a-Day calendars for Christmas. I never have the heart to tell them that I really don’t want another, and every year I try to stick it out and dutifully tear off a sheet each morning. “There has to be something interesting in this ‘George Washington Carver’s 365 Interesting Uses for Peanuts’ calendar,” I say, then here comes the third week of the year and it’s still stuck on January 8, “Anthropomorphic Dandies.”

Even if you don’t have the stamina to put the calendar through its intended use, you don’t have to waste it. Chuck it in a drawer to make an excellent notepad. And folded in half, the pages by themselves make a fair substitute for the venerable index card, with the added bonus that when you pull them out of your pocket to jot a reminder, you get to bone up on the provenance of Prohibition era agricultural byproducts.