Tie a Day (Year 2), Number 129

I decided to go bold with the tie I wore on Tuesday, September 28th. I was inspired by my trip to the outlet mall in Williamsburg the weekend before. The styles I saw placed together in the men's clothing stores made me think of an angry Garanimal cage match.

I saw vertical stripes shirts matched with diamond designed ties. I saw diagonal patterned ties with stripes and even box patterned shirts. To me, they were a little much, but I have a tie mission to fulfill. So I threw caution to the wind and embraced this shirt and tie in a men’s fashion throw down.

The polling at school that day left me with mixed results. My wife was on the hater side, while I did find a surprising number of supporters. I am not normally comfortable having what I wear scrutinized, but it was a fun day. Not that there will ever be a repeat performance…

Tie a Day (Year 2), Number 127

On Thursday, September 23rd, I wore this boldly striped tie. Bright, diagonal stripes. Kind of nice, but what I really want to share is the moment of enlightenment I had over the weekend…

I have always wanted to be in a gang. Specifically, a motorcycle gang like Hell's Angels or something, but it seems that owning a motorcycle is a prerequisite to membership. So I am thinking I will start my own gang. Dad's with minivans.

I will give our group a dangerous name. Something scary and powerful like, "Devil's Pit Crew." I am still working on the name, but have already turned down my wife's suggestions of "Geeks on Wheels" and "Dorky Dads." I don't think she understands what I am looking for in a gang name.

You will find us doing donuts in the Wal-Mart parking lot. It’ll be ok, one of the Dad’s will be a cop. He can get us donuts half price at Krispy Kreme.

We will be a tough group; you don't want to mess with this bunch. We will hang out and dare some skate punk to mess with us. He won't, because he knows we have 911 on cell phone speed dial. It is listed right after poison control.

And when we see agood looking woman walking by, she better watch out! You know we will fall all over ourselves trying to get the door for her. And we will offer to help her with her bags. But she will ignore us because mini vans aren't her idea of cool. But we don’t care- because we are rebels.

The only time our language will be coarse in public is when we talk smack about our Fantasy Football team. But no one will know because we will disguise our vulgar words with nonsense screens, as in, "Grebalson mack frabbit!" Just like we do when our children accidently hammer us in the privates while playing a family game of whiffle ball. Other people don't know what we are saying, and that's the way we like it. Daddy code talk.

We are powerful and we know it because we do things like vote (but that is really only so we can be late for work or leave early to go home). The issues we really care about are; When can we turn the channel off of Teletubbies? and Does McDonald’s have the right Happy Meal toy so the kids will stop screaming?

We will be easy to recognize so that you know when trouble has shown up. We will wear t-shirts that are at least ten years old with a couple of holes in it, but we don’t care because it is the most awesome t-shirt ever. We might have cargo pants to carry all the stuff our family shoves at us (because stuffed cargo pants are way cooler than carrying a man bag around). Or we might wear jeans that are too tight, or maybe too large, but they have holes in them because we hate shopping for clothes.

All groups stand for something, and ours will be no different, except that we won’t tell what our real mission is to anyone. We will tell everyone our cover story which is that we want to promote world peace. Did you really expect that the Devil’s Pit Crew would tell the truth?

We will all get cool, scary looking tattoos. But they will the water transfer kind so that if we gain a couple of sympathy pounds our tats won’t sag. Or at least not for very long.

Yes, I think it is time for the Devil’s Pit Crew to form…

Tie a Day, Number 91

Tuesday's tie was a yellow tie that looks like it has red, green, blue and white paint slashed across it diagonally. I am not really a yellow wearer, but in keeping with my tropical Atlantis theme (here is a movie I made from our trip photos), I thought the tie fit well.

There have been many interesting things that I have discovered about men's neckwear in my tie research. I found things out mostly because I was curious, but sometimes it was an accident just so I could have more to say about my ties than,"this tie stinks," or "this tie is awesome."

For example, I always wondered why so many ties have diagonal designs going across them. Originally, I thought that it was part of the overall men's wear thing. A diagonal to offset the pinstripes in a suit or the vertical lines in a shirt. It seemed logical, but it was completely wrong.

When woven fabric is cut across the grain, or on the bias, it is cut at a 45 degree angle related to the vertical thread, or warp, and its horizontal thread, or waft. The reason that tie fabric is cut in this manner is so the tie will come out of the knot evenly without twisting. If the pattern on the tie fabric is a woven pattern, such as stripes, when the fabric is cut on the bias and a tie is created the pattern will become a diagonal pattern.

Now the problem with this new found piece of information is that doesn't explain ties with a diagonal slant that are prints, such as the tie I wore on Tuesday. Maybe Countess Mara is just messing with my head.