Friday, August 20, 2004

Cashing in

This George Vecsey column in the New York Times notes that since 1950, the United States Olympic Committee has had the exclusive American marketing rights to the Olympics. So if you were thinking about using the interlocking Olympic rings to jazz up, say, the dust jacket of your dissertation's book version, think again.

But I'm wondering: how did this curiosity from 1976 get by the committee? Were they just so stunned that they gave it a pass?

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

The threads make the man

Last night some friends and I were lamenting the high cost of looking good. Clothes have always been expensive, and metrosexuality is making men's fashions even costlier than they used to be.

And looking good is about more than cash. There are thrift stores, after all. But there is so much trash at them that they require an obsessive-compulsive approach to shopping for which one doesn't always have the time. (Networking also can be important to thrift shopping: thrift-store clerks who are also friends have been known from time to time to set items aside.)

But even if one has the time or money to shop, there is still the problem of taste. After all, it's possible to dress expensively and still look like a dope.

The other day Ereck had to remind me that I am a Southerner, and therefore some important part of me ever has been and always will be a preppie. That comment, in combination with last night's discussion, made me realize something: if I could afford it, I would simply wear Brooks Brothers suits all the time, everywhere I went. I would even wear them around the house, like Robert Young at Saturday breakfast.

Preppie fashions are helpful to sartorially uncertain people like me. Like western wear, which I also favor, preppie limits options. I do better with fewer options.

Still, in the absence of real fashion sense, I wish I could just fall back on good tailoring. But this costs money.

Sigh. Someday.

Monday, August 16, 2004

Olympics IV

I love these Olympics so much, and I'm not just saying that because I'm on ecstasy.
Gentleman? Check. Scholar? Check

Hey y'all, Ereck's preliminary exams begin tomorrow. His address is jejarvis at wisc dot edu if you want to send him some love.
Significant detail

I'd like to hear Jacques Derrida deliver a long lecture for which the required reading is this passage in Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004). Preferably the lecture would not refer to the passage even one time.

I had one more year of life and schooling in Hope. I went to first grade at Brookwood School; my teacher was Miss Mary Wilson. Although she had only one arm, she didn't believe in sparing the rod, or, in her case, the paddle, into which she had bored holes to cut down on the wind resistance. On more than one occasion I was the recipient of her concern [20].
Olympics III: Enough, already

It's a source of annoyance biennially, but must American television announcers sneer so at competitors from nations other than their own (with some exceptions for Canada)? It's really not subtle. This just now from an NBC announcer about a Romanian gymnast's performance: "That was a bad vault." It looked great to me. I suppose you could do better?
Olympics II: Very pretty, but...

The excessive makeup on the 14-year-old female gymnasts is, well, excessive. But the paint doesn't really surprise me. If my recent trips to the University of Wisconsin gym are anything to go by, makeup is as indispensable as bottles of water for young women at the gym.
Olympics I: New favorite thing

Water polo: mesmerizing. Who knew?