Category: Ties

Greetings from Tie o’ the Day #1. We are bolo-ing today. A string tie always pleases the eye. This one in particular creates a bigly suave-itality, coupled as it is with this Levi’s California shirt. Dig the white/bright white horizontal stripes. And I like the white snaps that finish off the ensuing snappiness of this ‘fit.

The roadrunner depicted on the bolo brings to mind an early Rowan anecdote (not “antidote”, as many mistakenly say). When he was learning the art of telling  jokes, he and I were throwing jokes back and forth to amuse each other, and he came up with this gem: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “To get hit by a school bus!” That was funny and odd enough, but he continued with further chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. Each time the answer was the same, but with various creatures substituted for the chicken. Parakeets, skunks, porcupines, etc. Rowan has an extremely sensitive soul, so I didn’t worry about his somewhat morbid jokes. But I certainly recall what a great time we had laughing our gutty guts out that day.

Oh, the nostalgia we work ourselves into about when our kids were young and learning to navigate the world. (As if we all don’t have to keep learning to navigate this world. 😲😱)

We all have them, you know–those questions that zap us out of our sleep ’round midnight, keeping us from rest. And then they slog around pestering our exhausted brains and bodies the next day. Yes, questions of existence, like What is our purpose? What’s the point of this entire ratty race? Why does Kim Kardashian think we care about her jewels? Mysteries like that.

Well, Tie o’ the Day #2, from Dockers, answers one of the most fundamental questions known to any of us: “What tie design goes perfectly with a red, green, and black, plaid pajama top?”

There is no doubt that the answer to that query is this: Purple paisley, on a dark blue background. Of course. Now you can cross that question off the list o’ things that burden your soul, for once and for all.

Just call it an early night. Throw on those pajamas, tie that tie on, grab the tv remote, and slither into bed.

Tie o’ the Day #2 is happy to have been of service to your heavy minds. Until it be morrow, my little tblogophiles😛

Got Penguin? Tie o’ the Day #1 is a Penguin. Quite stripey (The White Stripes?) below the baby blue. The polo here is from at least thirty years ago. Designer is Facconable. It should be clear to you by now that when I like a piece of clothing, there ain’t no gettin’ it away from me.

When I was a wee whippersnapper, we had this corner cupboard in the kitchen where a conglomerate of misfit clothing was kept by Mom. (The dead clothing cupboard was located to the north of “the junk drawer” everyone has in their kitchen for  small miscellaneous items of no discernible worth, but  which no one dares throw away for fear they might possibly, maybe, perhaps be the exact thing you need one day in the future.)

Anyhoo…  If I wore some piece of clothing that Mom deemed unacceptable, she never told me how she felt. The item would simply find its way into the depths of the never-ending corner cupboard, wadded up and pushed to the back of the bigly pile.

“Mom, where’s my FOXY WOMAN t-shirt?” She would casually say, “I dunno. It’s around her somewhere.” It took me a few months to figure out where my clothing was. I must have been in a mega-snoopy mood one day, cuz I finally discovered half of my wardrobe in that cupboard. Well, guess what I began wearing as often as I could, in order to taunt Mom? She never said a thing to me about it. That huge corner cupboard was just empty one day when I went to retrieve some more clothing. When my questionable clothes got “lost” again, all my Sherlock Holmes-ing in the world could not locate them.

My theory: The bigly metal can we burned our trash in behind the house had likely worked overtime at its cremating duties.

Tie o’ the Day #2 is, of course, a Stacy Adams creation, with matching pocket square. The yellow hues of lines, paisles, squares, and houndstooth  (houndsteeth?) give the tie a sweet visual pop, outward from the dusty goldenrod John Ashford long-sleeved button-down. Sometimes a girl just has to wear a solid-colored shirt, with a glimmering, multi-patterned tie.

 

They belong on Tie o’ the Day #1, I tell you. (Tie is from Penguin.) This is where 3-D glasses belong. Where they are a pain is on your face–“exspecially” if you already wear glasses. Maybe some optic genius can come up with 3-D contacts or extended release eyedrops for the masses.

There exists an episode of the tv series Medium for which wearing 3-D glasses is worth the annoyance.  And I wholeheartedly recommend it. But that’s about the extent of any pleasure I’ve gotten out of going down the 3-D glasses road.

My worst 3-D movie-going experience was Jaws 3-D, with Dennis Quaid. The plot was stoooopid, and it made no sense even in its own insular stoooopid plot world. Wearing the cardboard glasses, did absolutely nothing to clear/clean up the picture on the screen. 😎

 

Tie o’ the Day #2 repeats Tie o’ the Day #1’s earlier greeting, sort of: Have a Merry, Merry Rest o’ Easter! (Bow tie is a Nicole Miller. Button-down is a Bugatchi with hearta dots, instead of polka dots.)

Meaningless, pointless, and shady stories resume tomorrow. Visit this site every day, cuz one day there might be a completely true and absolutely necessary story with an actual point for you. 😜

Tie o’ the Day #1–another Stacy Adams–wishes you a Merry Easter! As do I, and Roxy and Skitter the Scared.

 

Tie #1 o’ the Easter Eve Day has Snoopy and Woodstock being proud of their colored-dipped Easter eggs and basket. The Old Navy is a shirt o’ many colors. It was not dipped in colored vinegar and water. We are in true clash fashion today. We stand out, which means our duds are outstanding.

We went to Costco last evening to buy the giant package of toilet paper everyone buys there. (I think it’s a Costco membership requirement to buy that bigly t.p. pack each shopping trip.) The store was packed! I haven’t seen the place that busy even at Christmas time. All the check-outs were open for once, and the lines were still so long they reached 1/2 the length of the building. I kid you not. Crossing from one aisle to the next was like parting the Red Sea. It was a good thing I had my long wooden staff to hold up to the sky and command the shopping carts to part for us so we could safely cross. “Where’s your Moses now?”

Costco shopping is inevitably filled with Costco employees aiming sample-laden toothpicks at you. “Try this teriyaki butter cube!” “Sample this free-range, grass-fed, organic oregano loaf!”

When I went to college at THE Weber State University, I would occasionally starve because of empty pockets. Once when this happened, I resorted to making a list o’ food items, and then knocking on neighborhood doors, pretending to be on a scavenger hunt. “Hello. We’re having a party, and I’m supposed to come back with these things on this list, as fast as I can–so I can win a prize! Could you give me one slice of bread?” Eggs (not colored) were the best things to ask for. Very filling. What a Happy Meal!

And, of course, once when I was broke and hungry, I did go to Smith’s on a Saturday afternoon, when they were toothpicking samples at people. I sample-grazed through the store a couple of times, until my tummy quit growling. No one got hurt. No one got cheated. Nothing was stolen. And I didn’t starve to a painful death. On that full stomach, I most likely went back to my apartment and wrote an assigned essay about a topic like “Poetic Forms Found Scratched Into Public Restroom Walls.”

And although I wasn’t thinking about this at the time, I got a couple of snappy tblog stories out of my broke and hungry adventures. 😎

Roxy truly does love all mutts, regardless of race, religion, or sexual preference. But I thought the “fake news”, tabloid headline above would get your attention. Roxy is, however, wearing a Tommy Hilfiger tie decorated with dachshunds–to portray her love of her dachsie breed. Tie o’ the Day #2 suits her cutely and bigly well. Her t-shirt is an Easter pink Cremieux. In her photo you can see a proclivity of our Roxy: She always gets dressed in order to not be naked when she naps on the living room floor.

I mentioned in Tie o’ the Day #2’s post last night that Suzanne’s blouse in that photo was the first girly clothing to have been showcased on this tblog. Girly/womeny clothing will show up occasionally, but not often. I wear clothes that are socially designated as men’s, almost exclusively. But the reason does not have anything to do with my trying to express some kind of butchness that might or might not be part of my identity. Nope. I head to the men’s department in clothing stores because the way men’s clothes are cut make them fit me better. For example, I have absolutely no butt. Women’s pants–especially jeans–cannot handle that. They bag and slide down, no matter how well they fit otherwise. (And, yes, that goes for leggings, as well. )And shirts? Women’s shirts tend to not provide me roomy enough width across my shoulders and chest. My button-down shirts might look too big, but they give me room where I need it.

So there. You learned something about me–and about Roxy– that you may have wondered about before.

Tie o’ the Day #1 is one of those huge, Stacy Adams Big Boys like I’ve shown before. Hard to find, and about an inch longer than regular bow ties. I’m gonna wear yet another Bugatchi this morning. Check out the teeny, tiny light green and gray checks.

I can play a mean game of checkers, but chess has eluded me. I’ve never played it at all. Don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything, although I know it’s a thinking man’s game–difficult, mega-strategic, and requires thinking ahead many moves. To each, her own. The game I truly love, but only watch, is pro football.

At The Pub a few weeks ago, one of the not-regular guys was stumping all The Wise Men sitting at the bar with this question:  “What distinguishes baseball from other sports played with balls?” Nobody in the place–and there were only guys, plus me–could come up with the answer. Their thinkers were sore. The guy was stretching out the time to give them the answer, to the point of making The Wise Men almost angry. I yelled from my table to the guy that I had known the answer forever. All eyes turned to me. The guy asked me the question. I demurely answered: “It’s the only ball game in which the defense has the ball.” I win. The guys were dumb-founded. And thus, I became a Pub legend. At least I was legendary for the evening. The non-regular said, “Buy that woman a pitcher of beer.” The bartender quickly said to him, “She only drinks Diet Coke, which she doesn’t even have to pay for.” (There are sports like cricket to which ball/defense thing applies, but that comes under the baseball category, as far as I’m concerned.)

The reason I knew that sporty answer was that, despite the fact that my nephew played pro baseball for around a decade, I cannot stand to watch the game. It, like chess, is referred to as “the thinking man’s game”. I love to play baseball, but watching it makes me sleepy.

I analyzed my impatience with the game a couple of decades ago, and that’s when I realized the thing about it being the only ball game where the defense has the ball. That’s a huge part of why the game moves so slowly–more slowly than even golf to me. I can drive over 300 miles in the time it takes to play an average pro baseball game!

Sorry, pro Ronnie. I love ya, man. And you do hit monster homers. Good on ya!