For the first time in my life, I own a pair of Levi’s.
Overalls, of course.
The fit on these is damned near perfect! I knew these were out there but I always assumed they weren’t my size, until someone on eBay sold a pair with pictures of the measurements, demonstrated with an actual yardstick. At that point I thought, “Hmmm….”
And I love the burgundy color! Men’s overalls are almost exclusively blue, brown, or Hickory stripe these days. Those are all lovely colors, but this will be very welcome once we get to sweater season.
Meanwhile, another eBay seller had a pair of vintage Hickory stripe overalls by Key up for sale. I resisted these, since I already own two…but these had one nifty feature in particular: the elastic shoulder straps. On my other two pairs, the straps are Hickory stripe denim all the way down, so these looked really neat. I put a “watch” on them on eBay, figuring that someone else would beat me to the punch.
They lasted for something like three weeks.
“Fine,” I said. I actually got them about a month ago, and I’ve worn them a couple of times since, but I planned to wear them on our annual trip to Ithaca, NY for the Apple Harvest Festival. Yes, I plan my annual Ithaca outfit weeks, or even months, before the actual trip, because I’m geeky like that. The outfit was a new navy-blue Renaissance Faire shirt with those very vintage Key overalls, and wouldn’t you know it…I got three different compliments on the shirt, the overalls, and the entire outfit yesterday! That made me happy as a clam.
More on our Ithaca trip to come…but for now, I note that I saw more than a dozen people in overalls while we were at the Festival. If that’s not a sign from the heavens telling me that Ithaca is where we need to be, I don’t know what is.
The prompt “Drop something blue from your gallery” was going around social media today, which seems as good a basis for a blog post as any, so:
I tend to contrast my overalls with my top more often than not–a dark top will call for lighter overalls, like faded denim or Hickory stripes, or vice versa–but sometimes I like to match it up. Today I wore my blue Ren-faire shirt with my blue Berne overalls, and I rather like the effect.
Highmark Stadium and the city of Buffalo, looking north from Chestnut Ridge Park
For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.
Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges through which streams run. The most famous feature in Chestnut Ridge Park is the Eternal Flame waterfall, which is just that: a waterfall behind which there is a small grotto into which natural gas seeps from underground. This gas is almost always aflame, and if it happens to be out, you can literally reach in behind the water and relight it, if you’ve brought a lighter with you.
Chestnut Ridge was a common destination for Cane and I in our weekly nature walks and hikes, and we covered a great deal of the park’s terrain and trail system over our years of trekking there. My last visit to the Ridge with Cane was last July, I think…which was therefore the last time I was there at all. Shortly after that visit he started limping slightly, and that was the beginning of his end.
Yesterday was my first trip there alone in many years.
Being up there yesterday was many things. It was beautiful, obviously, and being in nature was honestly what the doctor ordered after what’s been a trying few months recently. I kept thinking, though, of the presence I was missing; I’d walk a hundred feet and suddenly realized that I hadn’t had to stop three times for a greyhound to smell this tree, that bush, this patch of dirt, that rock. When you’re used to walking those trails with one hand always holding a leash, it’s a bit strange when that hand is unoccupied. And when I made my way down to the side of the stream at the bottom of one of those gorges, there was no watching as Cane found a deep spot to lay in–you know, to cool off–and to drink.
I won’t be staying away from Chestnut Ridge this long again…but it’s not going to feel the same there again, is it?
Photos:
Stream in Chestnut Ridge, from a bridge. It’s been very dry the last six weeks; usually there’s much more water than this, this time of year.
The trees that I call “the Fallen Sisters”. Again, note how dry the stream is. This time of year that whole streambed is flowing.
Inside an old pump house. The pump is long gone.
It was a good day, a good walk in the woods. There was even time for a touch of whimsy, like plucking a few wildflowers and wearing them in the bib of my overalls. One should always strive for a touch of whimsy. At least, that’s how I see it.
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.
Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.
In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.
The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!
I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)
I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.
A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.
V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.
V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.
Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:
SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfootare sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.
:: Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.
In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.
LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”
A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!
Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.
Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.
Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.
Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.
Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!
In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.
If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.
Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!
There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!
:: Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.
My observation of St. Paddy’s Day this year was limited to what I wore, as luck had it. The Wife and I went out for fish fry at a favorite joint (Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, if you must kn0w–photo here, though it’s not the best work I’ve ever done in terms of food photos), and then we went to Buff State to see Paul Reiser doing stand-up. (I love Paul Reiser and he’s been one of my favorite people since “This is not my locker!” from Beverly Hills Cop back in 1984 or so and if you don’t like him, well, feel free to not tell me so.) His performance was a delight and we’re so glad to have seen him. Mr. Reiser is not an edgy comedian who swears a lot (though he did a little!); his comedy is more…well, I’m not sure how to describe it other than “the comedian next door”. There’s nothing in his act to which I could not relate on one level or another, but given how consistently everyone was laughing throughout, I have to admit deep admiration of his craft because he made everything really funny.
Oh! And also, the fact that he could be funny for a long show–he was on stage for about 90 minutes, and there were several times when I was convinced the “Thank you, good night!” moment was upon us, only for him to take the mike back out of the stand and keep right on going for another bit–to me gives the lie to all those comedians who have been caterwauling the last few years about how “cancel culture” means you can’t be funny anymore. Meanwhile, there’s Paul Reiser, just going about his business of…being funny. He even dissed chicken wings! I love that the man rolled into Buffalo and took shots at the chicken wing in his act. He didn’t pretend to love wings; in fact, he openly cast aspersions on them, calling them too bony and needing all that sauce to cover up their deficiencies. Hey, I disagree, but it actually is kind of refreshing to have someone come in to town and not genuflect to the local contribution to world cuisine. (Now, at one point he also mentioned Tom Brady in a somewhat positive light, but nobody in the audience booed, so there’s that.)
Anyway, it was St. Paddy’s Day. Even though it is an option of mine, I did not wear green overalls. Instead I rocked regular vintage blue overalls, but a pair with a green tag! Ooooh! This I paied with favorite plaid fleece sweater, and a green scarf. I think I had the green well-represented. Erin go bragh!
The overalls are by a brand called Ely, another of the old overall-makers of yore; they are almost identical to the Dee Cee brand that I also like a lot, primarily for the difference in the styling on the bib pocket. (Lee also adopted this kind of bib styling in the 90s; I should blog about those at some point, too….)
Oh, it was also a zero-proof day! That’s right, we didn’t drink at all on St. Paddy’s Day. Not for any particular reason, really–mostly because by the time we got home it was pushing 11pm and at that point we’re just thinking, “Meh, let’s have a bit of ice cream and get to bed.” This was a good choice, as we did not rise this morning until 8:30am, which is way later than I usually rise on weekends these days (though not so early as I used to rise when we had a greyhound who always had to pee no later than 7am).
Anyway, after a stressful week on a number of levels, last night’s activities were a much-needed respite. And now, the lake-effect is trying to do its thing again, so there’s that. We’re not supposed to get much out of this one, but we’ll see. I have always maintained that St. Paddy’s Day is my personal cut-off point beyond which I am officially Sick Of Snow, but this winter has been weird: if you take out the three storms that walloped us, the last of which is almost three months in the rear-view-mirror, this winter was actually really puny in The 716. (I realize that this observation has a strong whiff of “Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, but aside from that, did you enjoy your night at Ford’s Threater?”)
Two Christmases in a row, I petitioned The Wife for a white cable-knit sweater rather like the one Chris Evans wore in Knives Out. I didn’t petition her for this sweater because Chris Evans wore one in Knives Out, but I won’t say that his wearing one in Knives Out had nothing to do with me petitioning her for just such a sweater. I mean, come on:
That’s some iconic sweater wearing, is all I’m saying. And you know what? There’s nothing at all wrong with seeing a look in a movie and thinking, “Huh, I kinda like that.”
I asked too late in the game last year for one of these, but this year, The Wife came through! Of course, unlike Mr. Evans, I am most likely to pair the sweater with a pair of overalls. This is an outfit for cozy winter days…a hot beverage and a good book, while the elements do their icy thing outside.
Note the coffee mug! That was a gift from The Daughter.Dogs remain the best fashion accessories.Detail. This is the only scenario when I do the one-strap-undone thing.Morning coffee and a book. Simple pleasures!
The sweater is by Land’s End. We’ve had a lot of success with that brand over the years; everything they make is of high enough quality that the clothes last, and they just make good, solid staples, like sweaters. This sweater is soft and pleasant, and if there’s one thing my life can always use in greater supply, it’s “soft and pleasant”!
It’s Monday! And as promised, The Wife and I are back from our too-brief (aren’t they all?) weekend getaway. After the general shit-show that was Summer 2022 for us, we really needed a nice getaway. And that’s exactly what we had. The focus was the Ithaca Apple Festival, with a few stops here and there along the way.
I really love Ithaca. It’s by far my favorite place in New York State thus far in my life.
I always plan on taking a lot more photos in Ithaca than I do! It’s weird, really. I just get caught up in people-watching and looking at all the wonderful stuff that I don’t get my phone or my camera out much.
Now, Taughannock Falls? That’s where I take a bunch of pictures. Here are a few from this year.
Lots of raptors on the wing at the falls. I assume these are turkey vultures, which are amazing to watch in themselves in places with high cliffs, like here and at Letchworth.A lovely couple! Hopefully next year we can walk the ravine trail below and finally see the falls from below. The Wife’s surgically-repaired ankle isn’t quite up to that yet, but we’ll get there!
We stop at Taughannock Falls every year. It just doesn’t seem right to visit Ithaca without stopping here. There’s something about all the streams and water and waterfalls and rocky gorges and deep verdant forests in this region that add up to it being my spiritual home.
Starting now, of course, there’s also a bittersweet quality to this place. We brought Cane here several times, while on our winter winery trip. I’d like to think that he had some hand in making this year’s visit almost perfect, with the beginnings of the autumnal crisp in the air and the perfect golden light.
We also stopped at a winery that had a great view! The wines weren’t to our taste, but the view sure was. (Nothing wrong with their wine; they specialize in dry wines, and we generally prefer the other end of that spectrum, being more into fruity and vibrant and sometimes outright sweet.)
Part of the magic of the Finger Lakes is that from atop the ridges you can see for miles and miles, and in many spots you can’t see the deep lake that lies between you and there.
On Sunday we set out for home, with a couple stops along the way, including the Barnes&Noble in Pittsford. This is the most beautiful B&N that I have ever seen:
What a store! An employee asked me at one point if I needed help finding anything, and I laughed and replied, “No, I need help NOT finding things!” Good thing I only go to this store once a year, really.
Of course, we ate very well on this little trip. We always plan our meals, partly because when we’re traveling we want to eat well, but also because The Wife is celiac which always requires some extra planning. Luckily we’ve found a bunch of places all throughout the region that have gluten-free offerings…though sadly, one of our favorites, is closing for good in a few weeks. Ithaca’s Waffle Frolic has been a beloved stop of ours for almost as long as we’ve been going to Ithaca at all, but the owners have decided to move on. We’ll find other options, but a special shout-out to all the times we stopped there for fried chicken and waffles! I remember when I first heard of that combo and thought it was the weirdest thing ever, until we tried it at Waffle Frolic and…suddenly, we got it.
I think this winter I’m going to have to figure out my own version of it.
I won’t subject you to pictures of all the food we had, but just a couple things:
That’s a Cuban sandwich from the Broadway Deli right here in Lancaster, NY. We love to start our road-trips east with a stop here for lunch, before we exit the 716. They have a wonderful sandwich menu, and yet somehow they’re never mentioned in local “Best Sandwich in Buffalo” rankings! They’ve got my vote, though.
We also love getting breakfast on Sunday morning at a place in Pittsford called Simply Crepes. (There are several locations around Greater Rochester, by the way.) They have a terrific menu, lots of GF options, and…well, if you’re looking for hearty-and-filling-and-not-exactly-healthy in your breakfast (and you absolutely should look for those things in a breakfast, maybe not all the time, but once in a while), you should look no farther. Here is my “Crepe Madame”, a crepe loaded with cheese and ham and smothered with white sauce and topped with a fried egg and served with two pools of bacon jam:
Ate this around 10am. I was not hungry again until dinner.
I really love places like Simply Crepes. There’s something about local breakfast joints (they’re not just a breakfast joint, to be fair), the kind of place where you go on a cold fall morning to cup your hands around the coffee mug before the food comes. It’s the kind of place that fills up first with kind-of bleary-eyed people mostly clad in soft flannels and their hair in messy buns, the kind of crowd that you can watch wake up as they drink their coffee and eat their breakfasts. The mood shifts later on, once the post-church “Sunday Best” people start showing up. The new mood then isn’t bad, per se, but it’s more formal and less patient.
Simply Crepes, Pittsford, NY.
Simply Crepes is located in Schoen Place in Pittsford, which is an old industry and trade center right on the Erie Canal. I imagine barges laden with goods used to arrive here, or empty barges arrived to be laden with goods; there’s a grain elevator down the street that has been converted to office space. The area has a terrific vibe that I think Buffalo is trying to capture with its inner harbor area.
Coffee in glass mugs.
I think that my favorite New York region, after the Finger Lakes and Buffalo Niagara, is the Erie Canal corridor and the old rail corridor that runs sometimes alongside the Canal and at other times ten to twenty miles south of it. All those old towns along the Canal and the once great railroads have such wonderful age and character to them, with a sense of weathered history connecting all of it. You can see plainly that in a lot of these towns the boom-times are long over, but you can also see that the people still there are working hard to keep their towns stubbornly alive. Yes, there are a lot of empty buildings in states of decay, but there are also lots of said old buildings with obvious work going on and “Coming Soon!” signs in the windows, announcing new businesses. There are a lot of people who are unwilling to give up on New York, and I salute them, each and every one.
Let’s see, what else? I got a little writing done this weekend, in the hotel room. Not much, but a little. As long as the words keep trickling, it’s fine.
Also, it was a great weekend for my new fashion concept of the last year or two, the “Renfest Cottagecore” thing I’ve been working on.
There were a lot of people in Ithaca wearing overalls, so I can honestly say that they’re finally back! Their banishment during the 2000s and quite a bit of the 10s made for a “lonely soldier assigned to a solitary remote outpost” feel for me during a lot of that period. I hope they stick around now that they’ve recovered from their banishment during that mostly-ugly era of form-fitting, show-every-curve period of fashion that was really pretty unpleasant.
At the bookstore. Maybe a future author pic!
The Universe actually gave me some direct confirmation of my fashion concept yesterday: an employee at Trader Joe’s complimented my shirt, and then, half an hour later, an employee at Barnes&Noble said, “I love your overalls!”
It’s the little things, isn’t it?
Anyway, we’re home now. I’m not back to work for a few days–I always make my autumn vacation a good long one–but we’re home. Back to a bit of normal life, some of which we actually missed. Which things would those be? Well….
As my personal fashion style continues to develop, I continue to find appreciate not just for new styles of garments, but new fabrics as well. Denim, obviously…and more recently, flannel. But I’ve also been finding linen to my liking.
I thrifted these two shirts a few years ago. Both are made of linen, and I like both enormously:
More recently, I’ve purchased a couple new linen shirts from Etsy dealers. One is still in transit (there were some shipping snafus and errors, of which I am being forgiving since the seller is from Ukraine!), but I got the other a few weeks back. It’s the shirt I wore to the County Fair week before last, and I loved it. (I honestly thought I’d see more people in overalls that day, but alas! Just one or two. Though I did overhear a woman behind me saying to her date, “I used to have a train engineer hat just like that guy’s overalls!” I’m perfectly happy to provoke your nostalgia, y’all.)
Anyway, back to the linen shirt, which I (obviously) paired with a pair of vintage Lee hickory-striped overalls, which I chose because besides looking cool, hickory-striped denim tends to be lighter in weight than regular blue denim.
This material is super comfortable. I just loved this shirt! I stayed cool the entire day–the material is light and of an open-enough weave to allow good airflow through it. I found wearing this shirt on a nice summer day (albeit a cool and low-humidity one) very comfortable. I suspect I was more comfortable in my loose, air-flow encouraging outfit of long-sleeved linen shirt under a pair of overalls than a lot of other guys were in belted shorts and t-shirts. I know that we want to avoid cultural appropriation and all of that, but surely we could listen to what other cultures have to tell us–such as the idea that hot weather doesn’t mean tight cotton clothes and bare skin. (Here’s more on linen as a summer fabric.)
Anyway….
(Same pic as immediately above, detail)(No idea what that facial expression is about)I like how “lived-in” linen looks. A nice crisp cotton shirt is lovely, but so is soft and worn-in linen.
(Detail and enhancement of last photo above.)
To sum up: Wear more linen, folks! You’ll be happy you did. Here endeth the lesson!
Yeah, I’m pretty much back to normal this morning. I’m not planning on testing myself again until tomorrow, but it’s really looking like I’ve weathered my own personal COVID storm pretty well. I’m one of the lucky ones for whom it was “just a cold”. Since the worst of my cold passed on Monday, I’ve basically been enjoying what is turning out to be a lovely August week–albeit, a week when I can’t interact with anyone except my immediate family. It’s like house arrest, but without the ankle monitor. Oh well! Writing is also starting to go passingly well again, but more on that in another post.
Meanwhile, the open tabs are starting to pile up, so let’s clear out some stuff. That’s right, folks, it’s a GRAB-BAG POST! Yay!!!!
I love articles like this, because they justify this book-buying lifestyle of mine. I make no apologies. None! Give me all the books! (I do need to do some weeding soon, though. That’s a project for my annual Autumn Vacation.) This article justifies large numbers of unread books in a way that I’d not thought of before in quite this way, however:
These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.
People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are 80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.
A large personal library as an expression of acknowledgment of our own ignorance? I like that.
:: On lesbians and overalls. (“Dungarees” in the article; I believe the author is British and that’s the word they use over there.) I don’t have much of anything to add, but I did note during the 2000s and the 2010s–when overalls almost completely disappeared after a solid three decades of their being somewhat common, and downright ubiquitous in the 90s–that the only people really keeping them alive were the gays. I thank them for that! I couldn’t do all the heavy lifting myself, after all.
:: Loose lips sink ships. A typically superb essay by Jim Wright, a former Naval intelligence officer who now writes about politics and current events on his own.
What did Trump take?
I don’t know. But the very fact that he could walk out of the White House with classified material shows you that we as a nation need much better oversight and control of this process.
Trump’s own supporters often talk about “our way of life.”
And that’s ironic, because the very foundation of our way of life is that the president is not a king and he can’t just wave his hand and make it so.
This material does not belong to him, it belongs to us.
The president is not above the law.
Shortly after the 2016 election–and by “shortly”, I mean, minutes later–I started believing that that single election might well turn out to be the biggest self-inflicted wound in American history. The ripples from 2016 will be echoing through history long after I’ve joined the Choir Invisible, and I see to this day a reluctance on the part of Americans to admit that in a democracy, the blame always should go to us.
I’ve been paying more attention to baseball the last few years than I had basically from 2000 to, oh, 2015 or thereabouts. In the 90s I loved baseball and I almost always had a game on the teevee if there wasn’t something else we were watching (and it was baseball season, of course). While I’m not much for televised sport anymore, I’ve found it appealing to follow sport the way people probably back in the days before television: they read about it! You can do this, after all. I find that I can know just as much about what happens without spending three hours watching various sporting events by reading the work of all the fine people out there who write about sport. And then there are the box scores! I’ll let Fox Mulder explain:
It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947.
Of course, no box score is perfect; sometimes you just have to see the weirdness that the box score can’t capture. Like this moment, which I just saw this morning: a minor league batter takes a swing at the ball, makes contact, and the ball goes…nowhere.
Well.
Back to the link above, this year there’s a player named Aaron Judge who plays right field for the Yankees. He’s already been known as a good power hitter, having hit 52 home runs in his rookie season in 2017. But this year he’s on an even more torrid (“torrider”?) pace. As of this writing he has 46 home runs already, which roughly translates to 64 home runs if he maintains that pace for the balance of the season. The famous single-season home run record for many years was Roger Maris’s 60 home runs in 1960, a record which stood until the late 1990s, when it was first broken by Mark McGwire and then also superseded by Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, who set the current record at 73.
But.
Those players were all implicated in the steroid scandals that swamped baseball in the early 2000s, and therefore, a whole lot of people view their accomplishments and records as being tainted. None of those players has been elected to the Hall of Fame, despite near-universal acceptance that Bonds was one of the very greatest players in the entire history of Major League Baseball. This has led many to simply set aside the numbers Bonds and the others put up, and re-establish Maris’s mark as the real record to beat.
The linked writer, Will Leitch, disagrees. Strenuously.
You could make a plausible argument that Judge is having the best home-run-hitting season of all time. McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds all accomplished their feats during an age of unprecedented home-run and scoring rates. And in 2022, nearly every pitcher in the game is throwing 95 mph cutters with late movement, and ultra-specialized relievers mean your final at-bat of the night is usually against some 23-year-old kid who throws 102. Pitching right now is as good as it has ever been. The leaguewide batting average this year is .243, the lowest since 1968, a.k.a. the “Year of the Pitcher” — making Judge’s mammoth blasts all the more impressive. If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.
The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.
I tend to agree with Leitch. I always found MLB’s tippy-tap dance around PEDs rather disingenuous–“There’s a thing we’d like you to not do, but we’re not going to actually make it a rule that you not do it, nor are we going to undergo any procedures to verify that you’re not doing it, and if you happen to enjoy spectacular success that brings good teevee ratings to us in a time when wow, we could really use some good teevee ratings, well, what’s the harm!”–and I find the resulting annual moralizing bullshit by Hall of Fame voters really cloying and ultimately nauseating. Every year we’re subjected to thinkpieces about “Why I’m not voting for the steroid guys again“, and every year–even moreso, really, with the passage of time–this crap reads more and more like the protest nonsense of self-appointed gatekeepers and guardians whose mission in life is to make sure that baseball’s history is always and forever whitewashed with just the right shade of sepia.
(I also have some suspicions as to the degree to which the public’s distaste for honoring Barry Bonds’s accomplishments stems from his being a black man who, let’s be honest, never put much effort at all into being what white people consider “pleasant”.)
(Oh, by the way, the X-Files episode I reference above, “The Un-natural”, is one of my favorite episodes of any teevee show, ever. If you can track down just that episode, watch it. It’s a stand-alone that requires zero knowledge of that show’s weighty mythology.)
:: OK, I gotta talk about this a little.
I’m not going to get into all the many ways this “I am TOO a man of the people!” Dr. Oz moment is a campaign gaffe for the ages (but seriously, it reminds me of the 2000 Senate NY senate race when that nitwit Rick Lazio thought that storming across the debate stage to force a pen into Hillary Clinton’s hand to sign his bullshit compaign-tone pledge was a great idea). You can read about his failure to even know what store he’s in (resulting in his mashing together the names of two real stores into one name of a store that doesn’t exist), and his absurd notions of what constitutes a veggie tray, and his goofy ideas about prices and how to shop, in lots of other places. You can also dig elsewhere into the current Republican trend of ignoring that inflation is a global trend because they want to blame whatever they can on Joe Biden.
I just want to focus on…Oz’s shirt.
Who the hell wears a Henley shirt with all the collar buttons done up?!
The whole point of a Henley is that the collar opens! It’s why you wear one! There is literally zero point to wearing a Henley shirt if you’re going to button up the collar. At that point you’re better served wearing a long-sleeve tee or a sweater. Just go with a friggin’ button-up shirt, you weirdo–or, if you must, a polo or a golf shirt. (My own personal suspicion of men increases directly with the number of golf shirts in their wardrobes, but that’s just me.) It’s just one more detail in a campaign video in which every detail screams out, “OK, guys, I gotta go where and do what, now? OK, how do I dress for that? Fine, is that my size? Does this look OK? It does? OK, let’s go!”
After this, Oz said something about his bungling of the store’s name along the lines of “Getting the names right doesn’t say anything about my ability to lead the Commonwealth.” This shows that he doesn’t even understand what he’s running for. Senators don’t lead their states, Doc. They represent them.
Seriously, at some point Oprah Winfrey has to account for giving this clown the public life he’s enjoying now.
