CALL ME SNAKE

Following up on yesterday's exclusive on burnt muffins, I've decided to take up another burning-hot issue--an idea inspired by (stolen from?) "Things I Wonder About" (see link on right). "What's up with people who wear shorts outside their sweatpants?" asked the author of that blog, Old Roses. It's a question I've often asked myself, and frankly I don't have any answers. From a fashion point of view, the shorts-outside-the-sweatpants look is an atrocious statement. Practically speaking, it makes no sense either. Allow me to illustrate: Suppose you're doing a sport, or some other activity, and get warm. You'd like to take the sweatpants off but then you've got the shorts on the outside and the underwear underneath (or worse yet, underwear underneath). Nowhere to go, in other words. If you ask me, the whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. I'd go so far as to say it verges on the nonsensical.

Here's another "News Short": Yesterday was a sad day in my household. I retired a pair of shorts (as in actually throwing them in the trash)--a pair I'd had at least since high school, and before they were shorts, they'd been one of my favorite pairs of pants. My mother did the alteration herself--a job that has long since stood the test of time. We're talking at least 35 years here. But they split right down the back and another hole was starting to form on the side, so it was time to say goodbye--another end to a long short life.

Ironically, I had just come back from picking my daughter up from her grammar school. I'd been debating with the school administration over a new policy that forced parents to pick up their children in the schoolyard rather than in the classroom, as had been the custom. But with holes in my pants, I looked like the kind of guy who should be hanging around grammar school lots.