Tie Restraints: For Your Safety

I once worked with a butcher whom I knew only as “Earl,” a very interesting fellow. As he would go about his end-of-day activities, his bloody coat sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he would drench all of his equipment in bleach before rinsing away the most tenacious blood, he would pass on to me interesting butcher stories. E.G., the time, back when he was working at Delchamps in the early 90′s, his dress code dictated that meatcutters wear ties. At the end of one day, he had removed his butcher’s coat, and was working on the meat cuber.

This is a meat cuber. It's basically like a paper shredder, except made for meat.

I don’t know if he’d already cleaned the blade guard, or if he was dealing with a particularly large piece of meat, or if he just was feeling dangerous, but he had the blade guard removed and propped up on the machine so that the safety magnets were still allowing the machine to run. Then, before he knew what was going on, he felt a pressure around his neck, and his airway was more constricted than a young nephew in the boa-constrictor embrace of his obese aunt. Earl was being strangled by his own neck tie!

Yes, as we all could have predicted, his neck tie had dangled right into the clutches of those blades, and he, unable to breathe and disoriented, was being led to sharp doom. The other butchers looked up, probably twitched their mustaches for a second or two as they mustered up a plan, and then, in one fell swoop, unplugged the machine from the wall, cut the necktie from Earl’s neck right below the knot, and then ripped the band from his gasping neck.

As a man who wears neckties frequently, I rarely face certain death at the hands of deadly butcher’s equipment; but I am, nevertheless concerned about unrestrained neckties. As a tall man, I must stoop considerably to reach sinks; in fact, I have to stoop quite often. And, as I stoop, my necktie succumbs to gravity and strives to maintain verticality. For quite a while, I was irked by my necktie’s excursions from its intended placement.

Fortunately, I found a solution in tie clips. Some of you may have problems with tie clips. Perhaps you consider them to be obsolete; perhaps you don’t like the way they look; perhaps you associate them with old men. Well, I can’t really convince you that they look good if you don’t think so already, but I do wish to differ with you on the matter of old men. If you were actually old enough to have any sense of history whatsoever, you’d know that tie clips, neat, sturdy, simple, trim, and linear, are the young man’s accessory, and that tie chains, looser, delicate, complicated, and sagging, were for old men (notice any parallels?). That was true even up through the Reagan years (Reagan, the best-dressed president since Eisenhower, wore tie chains [example], and he was definitely an old man), so if you think that tie clips are for old men, you are historically nearsighted.

So, anyway, I became fond of tie clips last Autumn. Initially I just had a simple ridged one that I wore all the time . . .

My First Tie Clip

. . . but I’ve started to get some with my surname initial, S, on them.

Hickok tie clip with initial S in Blackletter.

Gold plated on mother of pearl with initial S in Roman Majuscule. Sadly, the plating is rubbing off, but I doubt anyone will complain.

I like the initial directly over the tie's axis of symmetry.

I don’t really know what message goes with wearing your surname initial all over the place, but I do like my surname, and I think S looks good on tie clips. Actually, I think that these letters make good initials for tie clips and cufflinks:

A
D
E
F
G
H
K
M
N
P
R
S
W
Z

As for why I left out the other letters, I am not sure why. I really just can’t picture them looking good on a tie clip or cufflinks. B, C, J, O, Q, and U are just too curvy. L, T, V, and Y have awkward angles. I is just too narrow; it’s like a sideways H, but with the proportions all wrong. Maybe I would work, but it’d need to be a carefully chosen typeface, maybe a blackletter. X carries connotations of death, failure, or whatever, and I’ve never met a person whose last name started with “X” who wasn’t Chinese, and wouldn’t a Chinese fellow rather have his name in Chinese characters on his tie clip? Sure, maybe they don’t make tie clips with Chinese characters on them, but would he really want some Roman letter that can only clumsily approximate his Chinese name? Maybe so, but anyway he’d probably have a hard time finding an X tie clip anyway. I think A, F, H, K, M, and W are the best looking initials. I guess it’s because they’re very angular. A G with a spur would look cool, as well.

Anyway, I also wanted to point out that I am considering a paradigm shift. I have colleagues who disapprove of tie pins. I initially was intrigued by the idea, but I was turned off when I discovered that the pins damage silk ties with their pin marks. However, I have since discovered that wool ties are not susceptible to such damage. I am, therefore, considering adopting wool ties as my casual standard and reserving silk ties for informal attire and nicer casual. The wool ties would then be worn with tie pins. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this idea, but it’s an interesting one.

A Tie pin, placed about where I would want to put it, securing my Black Watch wool tie in place. With ancestry from every nation of the British Isles, I feel comfortable doing this.

One of the problems this would address is the problem of width. Wide ties overwhelm tie clips (which often force the tie to hang somewhat off-center), and narrow ties are overwhelmed by tie clips. Most wool ties are narrow, so they would be well-suited to a tie pin. I’ve considered getting some thin, square-ended knit ties, and these would benefit in the same way. Wide ties are perhaps better suited to tie chains, although I have yet to contrive a good solution, since I am currently operating under the assumption that tie chains are, like elbow-patch sportcoats and mustaches, reserved for those with more seniority than I.

Here's a closer look at the tie pin--the color is a bit warm so just remember that it's supposed to be silver.

So think whatever you will of tie clips, but at least I don’t look like Dilbert.

My End-of-Year Activities: Ironically Unrelaxing

The first thing I did when the spring semester ended was to go up to my dorm room, remove my pants, and put them in the freezer.

Yes, yes, I am guilty of a sensational introduction. Anyway, some gum-chewing fool decided to stick his spent wad of mouth-cud underneath the table I sat at to take my accounting exam today. I was unaware of this until I shifted positions and realized that my trouser leg was sticking to the table.

I’m really quite upset though. How much trouble is it, really, to just go get up and put it in the trash? I personally am an avid gum chewer and aspiring economist, so naturally I have performed a thorough cost-benefit analysis.

The ideal solution is to retain the paper gum-wrapper (which that disgusting litterbug probably just dropped on the ground somewhere, polluting our good city with his unsightly rubbish). Upon finishing the gum, the chewer simply jettisons his gum into the paper wrapper, which can be pocketed and discarded upon the next passing of a garbage can. This has several advantages:

• The chewer does not dirty his hands with his mouth-flora. This prevents the spread of disease.


• The chewer does not have to fumble with getting the sticky gum on his fingers.
• The chewer can minimize his DNA trail. This may not be advantageous for the average person; but, for serial killers, saboteurs, and incompetent plumbers, this is of paramount importance.
• The chewer does not have to litter the world twice with his paper trash and gum. Moreover, as the “broken window theory” in Gladwell’s The Tipping Point posits, the mere presence of litter exacerbates the problem of litter by encouraging others to litter.
• The gum safely contained in the paper wrapper, the gum-chewer can throw the gum away whenever his ambulation happens to take him near a trash can. If the gum-chewer had no piece of paper to spit the gum into, he would have to go to a trash can so that he could transfer the gum as directly as possible from his mouth to the trash, since retaining the gum in his hands or pockets would lead to a sticky situation.
• The chewer does not jeopardize the expensive suits (gift of my parents) of people such as myself.

So, in short, there are three possibilities as to why this gum-chewer left his gum there:

• He was forced to do so under duress. In this case, I apply these possibilities to the coercer, including the possibility that the coercer was coerced into coercing the gum chewer by some superior coercer.
• He is mentally retarded. In this case I would reduce his culpability but question whether mentally retarded persons should be allowed to purchase gum, for the same reason that the criminally insane are not allowed to purchase handguns.
• He is a jackass. Anyone who chews gum ought to analyze his behavior and realize, if his mental faculties are adequate (see bulletpoint 2), that it is in his objectified subjective interest to do exactly as I suggest. A mentally competent person who wantonly disregards what is best for himself and society, and what is his moral obligation to God, deserves no relief from the worst punishments known to our criminal system.

So anyway, this is all just a really roundabout way of saying that I’m sitting here, my exams and final papers all taken and handed in respectively, not wearing any pants, waiting for some fool’s gum to freeze so I can scrape it off. I’m going to retain a little bit of that gum, then send it to a DNA analyst, have the analyst extract the genetic material, fertilize an ovum with it, find a surrogate mother, wait until she gives birth to the child, then wait for the child to mature into an adult, and then I’m going to take a good look at this monster I’ve created and beat it to death with a tire iron, since it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get the chance to do so to the actual gum-chewer responsible (unless the gum-chewer does something else meriting death by tire iron and I am able to execute my sentence upon him), so annihilating a clone of him would be just as good.

I suppose this is only tangentially related to my blog’s focus, but I really do hope that the gum comes off.

A Return to Duty

I shall wear a sportcoat and necktie today because I haven’t worn either since last Wednesday. I would like to add that I haven’t been this long without them since Winter Break, and that I was starting to feel nebulous, dissolute, and ungrounded.

How my peers wander around in the middle of the day in their pajamas is beyond my comprehension. Exam week has depressed my standards, too, however; so perhaps I should not be so quick to criticize. Anyway, their laxity has brought to my attention just how much I was slacking, and today I am returning to my norm. Now I’m going to stop procrastinating and write a paper about Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Some day I’ll read Keynes too, but the economics department here is, shall we say, less receptive to government interventionism. I don’t really have enough of an opinion to care at the moment. I just need a good grade. Learning, decision making . . . these are secondary.

Summer Activities

I realize that some of you may feel duped that the weekend has come and gone for the most part and still there are no posts about lapels, but I assure you that once I finish my final papers Tuesday, I will resume work on the article.

Meanwhile, I just wanted to talk up my plans for the summertime. I’ve got some books on how to make clothing, and my plan is to make some of my own clothes. Mostly I’m interested in making some vests, trousers, and knickerbockers, but I may even try making a sack coat. I have no idea how far I’m going to make it with this. I’m going to start with a vest, constructing the four body panels, then darts in the front, the lining, then the facings for the lapels, the collar, welts for the pockets, pocket facings, and finally adding the buttons and buttonholes. I’ve been wanting a lapel vest for some time now, and I am hoping that this procedure will be simple enough for my first foray into the field.

If things go very well, my plan is to make a three piece suit, with sack coat, trousers, and lapel vest. And if things are still going well, I want to try making a frock coat, but that is an exceptionally ambitious goal. I’m not fond of shoulder padding, so my coats probably will have none of that. I’m envisioning wide trousers for the sack suit (for a boxy silhouette, suggestive of the 30′s suits I am fond of), narrow ones for the frock suit (for a more trim, athletic look, to harmonize with the trim fit of a frock coat and the flaring of the coat’s skirt). The frock coat is an absolutely ridiculous idea, consuming probably twice as much fabric as a modern suit coat, but it’s on my to-do list if everything else goes well.

Upcoming Discussions

On the horizon: a thesis, months in the making, on lapels.

In summary, tuxedos have, in their century and a quarter of existence, featured all three shapes of lapels known to man. Today, all three coexist. Fortunately, I now have access to all three types, and work can continue.

Initially I was only concerned with this topic insofar as it applied to tuxedos; but, as I contemplated the matter, I realized that, because this topic had evolved into a much more significant problem, I must conclusively establish a prescription for the lapels of coats, not only specifically for tuxedos, but for upper-body outerwear in general.

And I will address the issue of botwies as well. Self-tie only, though–pre-tied bows are for Christmas presents.

A Color to Avoid

Far too often I see men of all persuasions today sucked into the ephemeral popularity of the color pink. The color pink is absolutely unusable in garment construction. This has nothing to do with manliness; even women look bad in pink. It is a color that matches the mucous membranes of the body. It suggests the nail beds, the lips, the inside of the eyelids, sunburn, dropsy, nipples, etc. None of these should be echoed in the color of clothing. For the pale, pink clashes with the skin tone. For the sallow, pink clashes with the light brownish or yellowish tan of the skin. Blacks and Indians (not Amerindians) are the exception to my rule–their different skin tone and mucous membranes can harmonize with pink, and I have seen Blacks and Indians whose pink clothes did in fact balance with their bodies’ hues. My statements about pink do not apply to these races.

I have no problem with the femininity of pink. Even women and gay men who are not Black or Indian should stay away from pink. The hues do not harmonize.

The day will come that I no longer see frat boys strolling in their pink shirts. I only wonder what they will be bothering me with next.

Mea Culpa

I must admit that today I trespassed against my own principles. This morning I donned a pair of light greenish-gray pants and a gray herringbone sportcoat. The hues distorted by rosy-fingered dawn, I, sensing a contrast that would not in fact translate in purer lighting, thought this was a good idea. In the end, it turned out to be a terrible mistake.

The contrast between coat and trousers is essential for the man who does not wear a suit. The similarity and especially the relative drabness of the shades suggested truly poor judgment on my part, or at least some deficiency of my X chromosome, a deficiency that had effected colorblindness in me.

One of the more interesting debates I have had is whether the trousers should be lighter than the coat or vice-versa. There are theoretically principles by which the corpulent, thin, short, and tall can accentuate their proportions favorably by varying the relative darkness of their coats and trousers.

But they would fare poorly to wear similar but not matching trousers and sportcoats. It’s like all the blandness of a suit without the crisp, impressive uniformity. I’ll try not to make this same mistake again.

A Reflection on Refraction: My New Glasses

Eyeglasses: no longer are they made of glass, so perhaps “spectacles” would be more apt a name. As I peer down at small texts close to my face and drink from the swollen-to-bursting udders of knowledge, first the lenses in my eyes contract, then eventually my eyeballs lengthen until finally it is required that my spectacles’ lenses thicken, further isolating me from the world of light.

My Winter Solstice visit to the ophthalmologist (a phlegmatic man in his late 50′s with a handshake limper than a latex glove partially filled with beef trimmings) confirmed that yet another iteration of this process had occurred, and that I would need new lenses if I wanted the visual acuity to read the street signs three blocks away and not just two. And so today I retired the frames that I have worn every day excepting two weekends since April of 2003. Everyone I know I have seen through these frames, and all of you have seen these frames. Dozens of you have even tried them on. It was difficult to let go of them, but they are worn out and corroded.

When I embarked on the journey to find new frames, I decided that I did not like today’s frames. Current aesthetics favor thick, plastic frames. So, naturally, I set about obtaining the exact opposite: thin, gold-filled wire frames with rimless lenses, rounded at the top but cut into an octagonal shape at the bottom; and I bought some old American Optical frames from the 40′s in the “Numont” style. I recognize the concerns of buying used glasses, but, after thoroughly scrubbing them with soap and water, I deemed them just as clean as any frames that have been handled again and again by dozens of prospective buyers at an eyeglasses store. Perhaps the true contamination lies in what the previous owner saw through them. For all I know, someone died wearing these glasses, which now are forever-imbued with the afterimage of death.

I could not replace so important an article as my glasses all willy-nilly. This was an excrutiating decision, backed by no fewer than nine months of deliberation and contemplation. No amount of rational inquiry alone could bring me to this conclusion–I required the full endorsement of “raw feels,” which take months to crystallize. Also, there was a slight problem in that nobody in town will actually make the lenses for these frames, which require drilled holes in the lenses for mounting. So that was a slight hangup.

Anyway, my friends, as I set down the glasses that have truly been for the past seven years a more permanent fixture on my face than my face itself, I can only look forward to a future of seeing all of you and writing more posts from behind my ever thickening lenses.

New Glasses: When one realizes how scratched up the old ones were

Pretense & Nuisance

Three out of five days of the week (excluding weekends) I wear a dress shirt, necktie, and sportcoat (when it’s not too warm). This seems utterly incomprehensible to many people. Why is it that I, a college student with virtually no societal expectations for my dress, would choose to do this?

Well, are you expected to provide housing for yourself? Doesn’t the government subsidize housing? Yes, but that housing is extremely shitty. And that’s why you don’t want to live there. No, most people would rather work harder, make more money, and spend more of that money on a comfortable home in a good location.

This is an impolite response that doesn’t even really make sense, so let me try to answer the question more directly. The real reason for my wanting to dress to a higher standard is this: people tend to show more respect for those who are well-dressed. I guess that someone who dresses well is also, by corollary, quite likely to be a pretentious, self-absorbed nuisance. But let’s focus on the positive.

When I wear a coat and tie, I find that I am much more likely to be addressed as “sir” by people who don’t know me. I find that people are more polite to me. Moreover, I find that I am more polite when I am well-dressed. I feel like I need to be polite and courteous to others as well. I think that putting effort into one’s appearance sets the right tone for going about the rest of one’s business. Conversely, shabby attire is prima facie evidence of a sloth, rudeness, and other bad qualities. When I am not dressed well, I don’t feel as good about whatever it is I’m doing, and my attitude and productivity probably suffer.

There are some out there who see a well-dressed man and hate him immediately. These haters are, I suspect, primarily punks. I have always been afraid of punks, in much the same way that Chuckie Finster of Rugrats was afraid of clowns; so I don’t really spend much time around punks. Anyway, these punks are perhaps not entirely unreasonable. Perhaps they were unique, bright, beautiful children who were sent into the beast of education and, rather than emerging, diploma in hand, successfully from the anus, as do the lucky ones, they were spat out, covered in cloudy drool and slightly chewed up. Now they sit with the scorners on the sidelines, and they look at anyone who adheres to conventions, especially clothing-wise, with jealous resentment. Or perhaps they rightfully assume that many people who dress well are in fact pretentious jackasses whose selfish snobbery is a true burden to society.

But to any punk who looks at me and says “he is not my friend” (I would prefer for the punk to say “non meus amicus potest!“, but that’s not actually a quote from anything and it would just be gratuitous Latin-using, which I do from time to time, but not when there are actually other people listening; it would also be unbelievable since most punks do not go around speaking in Latin ordinarily), I can hardly feel responsible for having annoyed him. Punks’ attitudes do not abate me.

My main reason for dressing well is to motivate myself to work harder and to be nice to others. Of course, the pretentious, self-absorbed nuisance probably feels this way as well (which is part of why he is so effective a nuisance). And perhaps I am a pretentious, self-absorbed nuisance–this can only be known by the rest of you. After all, a self-absorbed nuisance would probably fancy that there is some kind of vain, noble end to what he does. But this is the best reason I can come up with as to why I do it. Really, though, it’s probably about as good as if I were to try to explain to you why I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, or why I don’t think that high-heeled shoes look good (on women, and men, too, but women would probably be more surprising).

Anyway, I’m probably going to wear a tie tomorrow. I’m sorry if you don’t like that, but I hope you’ll still talk to me anyway.

The Socks Song

My love of socks was too great for me to contain. They are the dura mater that covers my feet (the shoes being analogous to the skull), and at the end of the day I toss them into a pile like spent cartridges from a clattering, banging machine gun. Except they’re a little less hot, and contain less metal. This is what I have to say about them:

Special thanks to John Valdespino, who played the piano and sang some as well. He is the guy on the left.