The NYPD Gift Pack with diecast metal, authentic details, and plastic parts -- in action.

A Tragic History of the IDS Center

This is a form that is being distributed to the people who work at the IDS Center, the tallest building in Minneapolis. Click on it to view a larger version.

The IDS Center is 775 feet tall with 57 stories and it was completed in 1972. It was designed by Phillip Johnson. For a comparison, the Empire State Building is 102 stories and 1,250 feet without the spire.

The building was in the news recently when 52-year-old Fidel Sanchez-Flores, who was pushing snow off of the plexiglass roof of the Crystal Court, fell through and dropped three stories to his death. The Crystal Court is an enclosed atrium attached to the tower. It's featured in the opening credits of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

According to the AP, Sanchez-Flores, a former Marine, had premonitions:

"Fidel Sanchez-Flores told his niece last week to 'pray really hard' because he had a feeling that 'something is approaching,' his family said.

And he was unusually quiet Tuesday night, telling his wife, Vielka Molinar, that he loved her and would keep loving her after death. She said she asked him why he said that. He replied that he didn't know.

The AP says there have been two suicides in the IDS since 1996: a 30-year-old man jumped from the 51st floor and smashed through the Crystal Court in 2001 and a 32-year-old man somehow got out of the 30th floor to jump in 1996.

This was a part of an album cover sleeve, but I don't know what the album was. Can anyone identify this?

Quote of the Day: Mike Huckabee

"One of my last acts as governor was to issue a pardon for a traffic violation that he had in 1975 when he and Ronnie Wood were driving through Arkansas. He got pulled over for a reckless-driving charge. I was a college student when it happened, and I was so embarrassed: I thought, Golly, we finally got the Rolling Stones in Arkansas, and what do we do? They played a concert while I was governor, and I was invited backstage to meet the band. I’m having this conversation with Keith, and he’s telling me that he’d been in Arkansas before. And I said, 'Keith, I can do something for you that no other human being on earth can do. I’m the only one with the power to do this. I can pardon you and get that off your record. You can have a clean start in Arkansas.'"

GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was interviewed in the January GQ. Huckabee continued: "Now that I’ve pardoned Keith Richards, wouldn’t it be incredible if that somehow led to my being able to give him a full pardon before God for all the things he’s done?"

Hmm. Even for snorting the ashes of his dead father?

One Less Reason to Read the City Pages

I just learned that the food critic at the Twin Cities' weekly City Pages, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, is moving on. She was, as a friend observed, often the only reason to read the City Pages. Rumor is she's quitting to write books.

Reminds me of when Chuck Klosterman stopped doing the back page of Spin. That juvenalia-filled music rag was just barely holding on with him; without him, there was nothing left.

I still don't know when or where the City Pages went wrong. Did it have to do with the Village Voice parent company? For me, it was the columns and the reviews that stunk the most. And the blogs were (and mostly remain) incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness abstract expressionistic ramblings.

The new, less readable City Pages gave rise to the irrepressible Diablo Cody -- the student turned stripper turned memoirist turned columnist turned screenwriter. How bewildered and resentful we all are of her success.

It should tell you something that the City Pages' most popular articles are by a syndicated columnist (Dan Savage) and by Dara Moskowitz. The rest of the website is so messy and full of useless content that it's not worth the effort anymore to hunt for readable articles.

That said, what I used to enjoy most about the City Pages was the investigative reporting. They wrote about subjects the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune didn't bother to dig into anymore.

Speaking of the local papers, I remember when the Pioneer Press lost its first-rate music columnist Jim Walsh to the City Pages, which spelled the end of the St. Paul paper's usefullness for me. But once Walsh got to the City Pages, it's as if the free reign given him was too much. His column turned into a disorganized, overly personal bore that left me wanting for the days of genuine local music criticism.

And they really need to make more of their arts coverage. Theater, book and art critics should be more prominent, especially with all the cuts daily papers have been making with critics.

The Star Tribune still has Mary Abbe, though, and she's one of the better regional art critics I've read. The City Pages should be giving her some healthy competition.

Now would be the perfect time for a group like Gothamist to swoop in and take over the Twin Cities web scene.

Armenians Are Everywhere

List of famous Armenians, from Armeniapedia:

Andre Agassi, tennis star
Charles Azanvour, singer/actor
Eric Bogosian, actor/writer
Cher (the artist formerly known as Cherylin Sarkissian), actor/singer
Princess Diana, "1/64th Armenian!"
Atom Egoyan, director
Arshile Gorky, painter
Garry Kasparov, chess champ
Kirk Kerkorian, businessman/rich man
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, assisted suicide specialist
Aram Khachaturian, composer
Raffi (Cavoukian), children's singer
William Saroyan, writer
The Zildjian Family, cymbal manufacturers

You can often identify an Armenian surname by the -ian ending. Armenia was a Soviet republic from 1920 until the collapse of the USSR. It's bordered by Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, Turkey to the west, and Iran to the south. The Turks still deny the killing of about one million Armenians during WWI. Some say that Mount Ararat (which may technically be in Turkey today) is the site of the wreck of Noah's Ark. Ararat was also the name of a 2002 film by Canadian director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) about the genocide.

Rejection Letter

now do shave off yr whiskuhs; stop irritating the cops; remain sober; stop trying to figure it all out for yrself--other minds have been here--avail yrself of them; they are called 'classics' which AINT ACADEMIC; brush yr teeth; find a way to pay th' rent & join the free public library & obey the chinese command: "walk in the courtyard as if alone... not seeing the rest of them..." & repeat the magic formula:

"now it is my time to walk on thin ice & face tigers" & recall the poem the greek sailor left for us :

"I bid you take ship & set sail, for many a ship, when ours was lost, weathered the gale..."

or words to effect/

however did you see the A&P Review?

most cordially

SM

That was the end of a rejection letter Sheri Martinelli sent to the poet Charles Bukowski in June of 1960 after Bukowski sent some unsolicited poems. He hadn't ever seen a copy of her poetry journal Anagogic & Paideumic Review, which was later one of the first to publish his poetry. They corresponded for almost a decade. Their letters are collected in Black Sparrow Press's 2001 book Beeerspit And Cursing.

Martinelli was a literary character of some renown in her day. She hosted Charlie Parker and other jazz musicians in her Greenwich Village apartment, she modeled for Vogue, she was a mistress of Ezra Pound's, Rod Steiger and E.E. Cummings collected her art, and she was a good friend of Allen Ginsberg. She died in 1996.

Manhattan, Circa 1969

Here's a sampling of New York snapshots circa 1969 from the family archives of my friend Christopher, who calls them "banal in the fullest tourist sense." He loves them just the same, and I do too. As awkward as some of them are -- it isn't always clear who or what the intended subject was -- they are vivid little slices of a familiar but long gone New York through the eyes of regular Middle Americans. They were taken by his grandparents.

The Shelby Knot

An article about Don Shelby and his role in the popularization of "the first new knot in fifty years" from MR Magazine:

How did a local news anchor in Minneapolis become the public face for the “first new knot for men in 50 years”? Pure accident.

As the only living man a neck tie knot is named for, Minneapolis television news anchor Don Shelby should be happier. “This has been the bane of my life,” he told me late last summer. “Please tell them,” Shelby says of my readers, “that I give all credit to Jerry and none to myself.” The knot is known most diplomatically as the Pratt-Shelby, and it was shown to Mr. Shelby about twenty years ago in the television news studio by a 92-year-old former U.S. Commerce Department employee named Jerry Pratt.

Shelby, a two-time Peabody Award-winning anchorman at the Twin Cities’ CBS affiliate, WCCO, had been getting messages at work from someone regarding his tie, but he ignored them. “You could be talking about death and destruction and war, and yet 80 percent of the phone calls an anchor person receives are about his appearance,” he laughs. But one day, probably in about 1986, Shelby had a visitor at the studio. Jerry Pratt refused to leave until he could fix Shelby’s tie. He’d been seeing it on the air, and he didn’t like it.

He was, Shelby recalls, “the best-dressed man I’ve ever seen I my life.” And he walked right up to the anchor and undid his tie. Shelby was stunned. “He attacked me and attacked my tie! He untied my tie when I’m standing there and then he re-tied it and said ‘now doesn’t that look better?’” Maybe it did, but Shelby only humored him at first.

“He took it off and made me tie it, and I’ll be damned if the dimple didn’t – whatever it was – it went in there as soon as you tied it. You didn’t have to mess with it. Some people have to, as they say in the business, ‘dress their tie’ as soon as they’ve tied it so they can create a dimple below the knot. Well the sucker just goes bang, and it’s in there and the dimple’s right there. So I went, ‘all right, I’m going to tie this knot for the rest of your life!’”

Jerry Pratt, who died three years later, had apparently learned the knot in military school around the age of twelve. It was a variation on the Windsor in which the tie starts facing seams out. The end result is a perfectly symmetrical knot that looks fantastic with spread collars. Shelby sketched directions for how to tie the then unnamed knot for his St. Paul shirtmaker, but didn’t think anything of it – until the New York Times called in 1989.

Reporter William Schmidt had been sent a postcard with carefully crafted instructions on how to tie the “Shelby Knot” from the St. Paul shirtmaker, who had taken it upon himself to distribute what he called “the first new knot for men in over 50 years” to people all over the country, including men’s magazines. When it landed on Schmidt’s desk, he checked it out. Shelby remembers the reporter telling him that he had researched knots in Italy, and that the “Shelby” was “the newest knot in the world.”

“What’s that mean?” Shelby asked the reporter. It meant the front page of the Times.

“He proclaimed it the newest knot in the world, and me being the only living person after whom a knot is named, the Duke of Windsor being dead!” Shelby laughs, still amazed.

What followed was a whirlwind of press coverage from Minnesota to Europe. “I have a box somewhere that has something on the order of 700 articles that were written on the Shelby knot, whether it’s Gentlemen’s Quarterly, or Playboy, or Esquire,” Shelby said. People Magazine did a story, so did the London Daily Telegraph. He even appeared on the CBS Morning Show to demonstrate the knot for Harry Smith. But through it all, he maintained that he wasn’t the one that invented the knot. “It’s not my knot. It’s Jerry’s knot,” he says.

But he still gets a lot of mileage out of it; now Shelby uses it for benefit auctions. “Auction off a tie, and I’ll teach the guy how to tie it,” he says to the numerous charities that solicit his help. They take him up on it: “It takes a great deal of my life just to go around visiting people I don’t know, teaching them how to tie a tie.”

Today, a simple Internet search will yield about 1,300 hits for the words “Shelby Knot,” but most experts seem to be calling it either the Pratt-Shelby or the Shelby-Pratt. And it wasn’t entirely new, it turns out. What was heralded by some as the “first new knot in 50 years” was merely a variation on the “Nicky,” an older knot invented in Milan, to others. “Since then I’ve run into, oh, a hundred thousand people who’ve said, ‘yeah, I know that knot,’” Shelby told me.

Don Shelby ties the knot every day. In fact, he hasn’t knotted his tie any other way since the day in 1986 that Jerry Pratt showed him the technique. “I tie it every day. Jerry’s long gone, so I’m going to tie it until the day I die.”

--Harry Sheff

For instructions on the Shelby Knot, search for it online or go here.

Meat Cleaver-Wielding Clown Meant No Harm

A poster called "jk252b" left the following question on Ask Metafilter this week:

"I remember around 5th or 6th grade, somewhere between 1991 - 1993, there being reports of a meat cleaver wielding clown running around St. Paul. He didn't actually attack anyone -- just scared children at playgrounds and maybe stared into people's windows. As the memory goes, the clown was spotted at the MLK Center which was directly next door to my school, and outdoor recess was canceled for a week. Apparently it was determined to be a hoax, and everything was back to normal."

The poster asks if it was real, and says he or she had no luck tracking the story down with Google or Lexis-Nexis.

I grew up in St. Paul, too, and I have absolutely no recollection of this. And I was in high school back then. But apparently it really happened. Or did it? A poster called "cashman" responds with an article from the June 5th, 1992 edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune called "Clown says she didn't mean any harm". Here it is:

The case of the meat-cleaver-wielding clown apparently has been cracked.

It was all a misunderstanding, said Jeanne Bromberg, a novice clown and main suspect in one of the alleged clown capers.

Bromberg, 43, said Thursday that the misunderstanding began the night she graduated from clown school at Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake. After graduation, she drove her silver Corvette to the library in North St. Paul to drop off a few clowning books.

That night, police got a report from a 13-year-old girl who said she was followed by a clown brandishing a meat cleaver.

Bromberg, who lives in Princeton, heard the reports but didn't think she and the alleged crazed clown were one and the same.

But as police got further into their investigation, Bromberg learned she was the main suspect. She called police. They talked. And the case was closed, Bromberg said.

The North St. Paul police investigator handling the case was unavailable last night.

Bromberg said she doesn't recall having seen a girl when she went to the library that night. But if she did see a child, she probably would have stuck her white-gloved hand out the car window and waved, she said. But there was no meat cleaver.

"If the girl saw something that frightened her, I'm glad she reported it," Bromberg said. "But if it was fabricated, that's another thing."

Last month the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department received four complaints of suspicious activity in Shoreview and Vadnais Heights by a person with a white-painted face, bright red hair and a green and white polka-dot costume.

Bromberg's clown costume is a long, blonde, curly wig, stovepipe hat, a bright red jacket and rainbow-colored pants and bow tie.

"I'm sorry this misunderstanding caused so much panic," she said. Some clowns throughout the Twin Cities have said they have been harangued and chided since the clown sightings were made public. At the same time, they're appalled by the reports that one of their own or someone impersonating a clown could be frightening children.

"No clown would ever frighten a child," Bromberg said. "Our code of ethics wouldn't even permit us to squirt water at a child. Children are our passion, our joy and our living. There might be kooks out there who might dress up like clowns, but they're not real clowns."

True or not, it's a great story. Does anyone remember this?

[Thanks for the tip, Christopher.]

Art at the Chelsea Hotel.

The poet Dylan Thomas drank himself to death here in 1953 and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death here in 1978.

Arthur Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey here.

A couple of the Hotel's permanent residents have a blog called Living With Legends, which is a great way to keep up with the hotel, hear about the new Abel Ferrara movie being filmed there, and read bitter commentary about its unwelcome new management.

The New York Observer has an article about the new management, in which it calls the new manager a "baby dictator."

Giant Menorah Season is Back in Brooklyn

I've seen "Mitzvah Tanks" roaming the streets of both Manhattan and Brooklyn this year. They are basically just rental RVs filled with excited Hasidim blaring Chanukah music.
The Caton Avenue overpass crossing the Prospect Expressway always has a huge menorah with propane lanterns this time of year.
But this evening, Sunday, a big group of Hasidim (and gawkers) surrounded the menorah for an outdoor service. Mitzvah Tanks and cars with menorah roof racks were double and triple parked on the overpass.

For giant menorah coverage elsewhere in Brooklyn, see the McBrooklyn blog's entry on the big menorah lighting at Brooklyn Borough Hall.

My Chanukah giant menorah coverage from last year:
One Big Minnesota Menorah
Giant Menorah Count: 7
CHANUKAH: DAY SIX
CHANUKAH: DAY FIVE
I can tell by the white hot flare of propane that it's: CHANUKAH: DAY FOUR
What's that giant thing on the overpass with the propane lanterns? Must be Chanukah.

These Good Grades Brought to You By:

This whimsical little number is an actual public school report card from Florida's Seminole County. According to Advertising Age, McDonald's chipped in the $1,600 printing cost for the report card jackets, which contain a Happy Meal coupon for kids who get A's, B's or have good attendance. Says Susan Linn, the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood:

"Lots of companies advertise directly in schools, but I think McDonald's has taken this to an all new low by advertising on report cards. ... It bypasses parents and targets children directly, [telling them] that doing well in school should be rewarded by a happy meal."

The district used a Pizza Hut ad for years until that company pulled out.

Another Masticator. In the Same Neighborhood, Even.

Amazingly, there is another blogger (on Blogger, no less) calling himself "Masticator" and living in my Brooklyn neighborhood: Masticator.net.

He's a 26-year-old illustrator, according to his profile, and his blog is about food. Most of it is photos of food.

I found it via the Kensington (Brooklyn) blog that I have linked on the right here in the links section under the Brooklyn heading. I was browsing the Kensington blog and looking at their links section when I noticed one saying "Masticator". I pleasantly surprised, thinking they had noticed that I was another local blogger. But imagine my surprise when I clicked on it to find someone else entirely.

This other Masticator seems to make meals, and then take photos of each dish on a nice plate. Much like Jeff Goldblum in the 1990 movie Mister Frost. I think the plot of that was that Frost was the devil. But the only thing I remember about the movie was that the character would make these elaborate meals, take Polaroid photos of them right out of the oven, and then throw the food away without eating it.

If you go to a certain part of Goldblum.com called "Ask Mr. Frost," you can ask Mr. Frost questions:

"Mr. Frost is pure evil but he knows all. I've convinced him to share his knowledge to help you out. Even a fallen angel can do a good deed. Ask him any question you want to and he will analyze your intentions. It's like having Satan for a psychologist."

So I pressed the wrong button, prompting him to respond, "PLEASE TALK LOUDER, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" Here's the rest of our exchange, as it appeared on the website:

You : Do you have a favorite movie?
Mr. Frost: We aren't discussing me.
You : Do I have a favorite movie?
Mr. Frost: Say, do you have any psychological problems?
You : Okay. Who will be the next president?
Mr. Frost: Why do you ask?
You : I thought you might know.
Mr. Frost: This is your session, not mine.
You : You're right. Here's a better question: Why can't I find love?
Mr. Frost: what makes you think I'm RIGHT HERES A BETTER QUESTION WHY CANT YOU FIND LOVE
You : Why can't I find love?
Mr. Frost: Why can't you?
You : Do you love anyone?
Mr. Frost: Do you love me?
You : No.
Mr. Frost: Why not?
You : Look, I don't even know you.
Mr. Frost: Don't you really EVEN KNOW ME

Damn you, Goldblum! It goes on like that endlessly.

The site hasn't been updated since 2004, and it's not done by Goldblum anyway. "I am not Jeff. I cannot forward your e-mail to Jeff. I cannot get you in contact with Jeff in any way," says webmaster Amanda Galiano on the bottom of the home page.

For the record, my favorite Goldblum movie is 1985's Into the Night, directed by John Landis, in which Goldblum plays an insomniac in Los Angeles named Ed Okin.

Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster is currently soliciting votes for their annual Word of the Year. Last year's word was Stephen Colbert's coinage, "truthiness," beating out words like corruption, terrorism and quagmire:

By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, you awarded top honors to "truthiness," a word Stephen Colbert first introduced on the debut broadcast of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report in October 2005. And believe us; both Merriam-Webster and Mr. Colbert got a lot of mileage out of that particular choice—thank you!

This year, the options are as follows:

apathetic
babymoon
blamestorm
charlatan
conundrum
cruft
eleemosynary
facebook
hypocrite
linkability
melancholy
Pecksniffian
pretentious
pugnacious
quixotic
sardoodledom
sputum
subpoena
vanity sizing
w00t

The word Pecksniffian comes from Charles Diskens' novel Martin Chuzzlewit. It's after the character Seth Pecksniff, and it means "unctuously hypocritical : pharisaical."

eleemosynary has to do with charity.

I've never seen nor heard the word w00t, which Merriam-Webster says means: "an interjection expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word 'yay'." It's not a word as far as I'm c0ncerned.

sardoodledom means "mechanically contrived plot structure and stereotyped or unrealistic characterization in drama : STAGINESS, MELODRAMA." It comes from a blending of the word doodle and the name of the 19th c. French playwright Victorien Sardou, who Merriam-Webster says was "criticized by [English playwright] G. B. Shaw for the supposed staginess of his plays."

Sardoodledom has my vote for 2007 Word of the Year. But I'm guessing either blamestorm or facebook will win on account of their topicality. Which word would you vote for?

G.K. Chesterton on Anarchy and Art

"An artist is identical with an anarchist. ... You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. if it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

From G.K. Chesterton's 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, in which a poet becomes a policeman disguised as a poet to infiltrate an anarchist group. He befriends an anarchist who disguises himself as an anarchist because no one actually expects an anarchist to be dangerous and then finds that the inner circle of the anarchist group consists entriely of undercover policemen.

The counterpoint to the anarchist statement above is as follows:

“I tell you, that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.”

The Corduroy Appreciation Club

Check out this brilliant article on the Corduroy Appreciation Club's annual 11|11 meeting from the menswear trade magazine MR:

Catching Up: The Corduroy Appreciation Club's Miles Rohan

When I walked into Brooklyn’s old Montauk Club for the third annual meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club, I felt self-conscious, like a reporter who had taken off all of his clothes to attend a meeting of nudists. I don’t normally wear much corduroy, but tonight I was sporting a red narrow-wale corduroy tie and a wider-waled black corduroy jacket to comply with the meeting’s minimum two articles of corduroy mandate.

The meeting was held on November 11, or 11|11, “the day which most resembles corduroy,” and it was packed with about 200 enthusiasts, all decked out in cords. “People like the challenge of coming up with two items,” Miles Rohan, the club’s founder, told me when I met him a week before the big meeting.


The club’s first meeting in 2005 got the attention of The New Yorker. The second one got a write-up in the New York Times by novelist Jonathon Ames, the meeting’s keynote speaker. This year’s big news was that the event would be sponsored by Cotton Incorporated, the growers’ and textile makers’ organization.

Rohan’s comical but earnest efforts to raise the profile of corduroy have brought together nearly 1,300 members worldwide, up from last year’s 864. “There’s something about it – forgive me if I’m getting too metaphysical about it – I think corduroy also offers a protective sense. It’s almost like shelter or armor,” he explained.

He continued, “I think there’s something about corduroy that people can really rally around. Everyone seems to have a memory or a reaction to corduroy. A lot of people ... corduroy reminds them of their childhood.”

When I pointed out how easy it was to find corduroy in clothing stores, Rohan nodded his head. “I like to say that this is the golden age of corduroy because it is kind of everywhere. You can go into any of the big retail shops like the Gap, Banana Republic or even American Apparel or J. Crew, which is to the rafters in corduroy.”

Its profile isn’t as high as it might have been twenty or thirty years ago, but corduroy seems to have found a permanent place in the American wardrobe. The latest issue of Details shows a $1,300 three-piece corduroy suit by Polo with the opinion that “The corduroy suit deserves status as a staple.”

At the meeting, I surveyed the crowd. What does a room full of corduroy look like? Pretty normal. A group dedicated to a pattern, like plaid for instance, rather than a texture might have a greater assault on the senses. Occasionally you’ll see someone reaching over to inspect a fellow member’s corduroy, rubbing the wale between thumb and forefinger. You can tell the veteran members by the more extravagant get-ups, and the reporters and photographers by the less unimaginative outfits.

In the beginning of the meeting, an interloper wearing only one piece of corduroy is dramatically ejected by two guards wearing wide-waled cloaks. There is a rant about velvet, “the great deceiver, the fabric of leprechauns” and another about how denim is overrated. Rohan’s vision of a secret society dedicated to corduroy is very theatrical, but completely egalitarian – as long as one is in corduroy. Its motto is “All Wales Welcome.”

During the “secret rituals,” I got to practice the secret handshake with a reporter from Men’s Vogue. Later, a representative from Cotton Incorporated “brought forth the sacred offerings” – celery sticks and ridged potato chips.

In a break between speakers, I wandered the crowd. “Don’t let too much friction build up around the baby,” a guy in his 30s said to a woman holding an infant in a colorful corduroy onesie.

You can’t just brush past another person wearing corduroy. As I weaved my way through the tangle of revelers by the bar, I feel the sensation of wales meeting, locking, and stopping me in my tracks. I almost spun around as my corduroy sportcoat met with a young woman’s corduroy blazer. We rotated against each other like gears, and then got away. This, I think to myself as I left the meeting, is what the guy was warning the woman with the baby about.

--Harry Sheff

Read the original version here.