I love Magic Erasers. I swear by them. I buy them the way other people buy cigarettes or lattés, they are a luxury but I crave them most when I can't afford them.

Last month I went to my friend Nancy's house and straight out of central casting, me the pudgy girl says to the pretty girl: "Nancy, your house looks so cleeeeean!". Then she tried to introduce me to her new discovery (the Magic Eraser), but I shot her down quickly and gave her just enough time to tell me she cleaned her entire house with it (and it showed.)

I however, was introduced to this supernatural effacer a while ago when I was saving 80 bucks on a cleaning lady. These worked like a charm when I was scrubbing shoes scuffs off the floors at my old Hello store.

It pulls up everything from crayons on your wall to mold between your tiles. It keeps a white coffee maker white and fingerprints off my doors and mouldings.  My brother uses it to clean his boat (lucky bastard). When the kids (notice I am refraining from "brats") put Sharpie on my last piece of decent Kartell furniture, this sponge is the only thing that worked. I even watched an Apple "Genius" (ha-ha) show some chump at the Apple store how to clean their white Macbook with it. (I snickered and told him he wasn't so smart, he was no Macintosh Mensa, I'd been cleaning my white laptop cords with it when he was watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica.)

But today, the Magic Eraser really pulled it's weight. Some nitwit parked so close to the entrance to my studio that I sideswiped her stupid boring car with my gigantic blue toaster (also known as a Periwinkle Blue 1999 Eurovan with a table in the middle). This was my first insurance claim in six years so I'm not a bad driver. Her damage was covered completely by my policy, but my car had a $500 deductible. So after I hung up the phone with the insurance agent I ran outside thinking I needed to go bake brownies and take off my boob-compressing sports bra for some lucky auto-body shop and then the light bulb went off... the magic eraser literally erased all the damage to my car!

Where to buy: It's tricky for me to encourage you to shop local and save $$ at the same time so we have to try: If you have some cashola in the bank, go to your Mom and Pop hardware or grocery store and get a 2-pack for around $2.89. Otherwise, I see them on Amazon for $26 for a "3 pack" of 8 (so I assume you get 24). That's a lot cheaper. A little off tangent, on this same link to Amazon offers a "Subscribe and Save" price of $22.41. "Subscribe and Save" is actually worth it's own blog entry, a frenemy swears by it, more later.