September 3rd, 2009, 7 Comments »
I’ve recently had an insight into the unfortunate phenomenon known as ‘flying low’. That is, forgetting to zip your trousers zipper and, you know, wandering around in public. Wikipedia, incidentally, lists an excellent set of international euphemisms for this.
Zipping one’s fly and buttoning the top button are rote activities. Two simple gestures: zip and button. We do them several times a day for most of our lives. I’ve done it for, what, at least thirty years.
I’ve realized that my risk of flying low increases dramatically when my trousers have more than two fastening steps. For example, a lot of suit trousers have a hook-and-bar system in addition to the usual button and zipper. This makes for three fastening gestures, with the third being the critical zipping step. On auto-pilot, I’ll sometimes get through the first two and just stop.
This is doubly bad because my wearing a suit often implies a speaking gig, where I’m able to advertise my misstep in front of dozens or hundreds of people.
Similarly, I have a pair of surfer shorts which have two buttons at the waist. Again, three gestures makes for a high risk operation.
Button flies, interestingly, never cause a problem. I guess this is because, in one sense, the fastening process is one gesture.
Am I alone in this? Should I just concentrate more when getting dressed?
7 Comments »
April 7th, 2008, 26 Comments »
I’m sitting here listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time” (check out the nice black and white video full of beautiful people). The chorus goes:
All the women tear their blouses off
and the men they dance on the polka-dots
and it’s partner found and it’s partner lost
and it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It’s closing time
Just yesterday, I used the word ‘blouse’ and felt awkward about it. In recent years, the word seems to have disappeared from our popular language. Female friends have kind of smirked at me when I’ve used in it conversation.
The word seems to now belong only to my mother and my grandmother’s generations. What words do we now use to describe women’s shirts? Besides the word ’shirt’, that is. ‘Top’, I guess. What else?
On a related note, I feel like I’m the only Canadian under 40 who uses the word ‘trousers’. I learned to eschew ‘pants’ while living in Ireland, and have never really gone back. There’s similar scoffing when I say ‘trousers’. Undeserved, I think.
26 Comments »
April 29th, 2007, 13 Comments »
For the past couple of months, everybody’s been remarking on the crazy adoption of Facebook. It’s like all those MySpace kids graduated from high school, went off to college, and out-grew the social network that looks like their bedroom.
Out of a growing sense of obligation, I joined Facebook a couple of weeks ago (my meagre profile). Since then, I’ve received about 30 friend requests from people who found me. What surprised me about these was that a decent portion of them weren’t necessarily Web 2.0, alpha Web users, drinking-the-Koolaid folks. Some of them are just regular people using a tool they apparently like.
I’d deferred those requests until tonight, which was a mistake. There’s no apparent way to approve friends in bulk (what an odd phrase). You have to affirm each request one at a time.
Here’s the difficulty I have with all these generic social networks. I don’t want them to be my central point of presence–that’s what I’ve got this site for. I’m happy to have a network of loosely-joined small pieces (Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth). However, I want them to orbit the planet that is darrenbarefoot.com, not http://www.facebook.com/p/Darren_Barefoot/570290599.
Essentially, I want sites like Facebook to be big detour signs pointing to this site. That’s obviously not what the makers of Facebook intended, so it’s a bit tricky.
Regardless, mine is an outlying use case. Most Facebook users probably want it to be their central node of web presence or (an awkward but apt phrase) ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’.
Alex has some more extensive and insightful things to say about the social networking tool du jour.
13 Comments »
August 15th, 2005, 11 Comments »
In a recent post describing her latest ridiculously high standard (her term–they sound fair enough to me), Jen recounted some shortcomings of a suitor. These included the following crimes:
-HORRIBLE Kisser. Like, worst I�ve ever encountered. Sad but true. Although he can, Man should not kiss with (stiff lips and) tongue alone. Picture if you will (or don�t if you�d prefer not to): open mouth, seal it with other open mouth, swirl tongue around while leaving lips completely still. Drooling ensues.
-He wore pants with pleats. PLEATS!
-Goofy teeth! (Not horribly goofy, but I’m strangely hyper-sensitive about teeth.) For Christ’s sake, your father is a doctor! Don’t tell me you couldn’t have had braces when you were younger!
It’s that middle one that threw me. Pleats are verboten? Why didn’t I get the memo? I know I’m sartorially-challenged, but this had me really worried. Happily, Jen clarified in a later post:
The thing with pleats is that they add extra fabric to to the front of your thighs. If they’re not able to lie absolutely flat from waist to mid-thigh, they’ll just pucker and pooch out and look silly. This means that if your beer-gut prevents you from actually wearing your pants on your natural waist, or means that your body does not have a flat surface from navel to crotch, you can NOT wear pleats.
I actually thought pleats were designed for people with beer guts, in order to give them, you know, some more breathing room. But what do I know?
11 Comments »
