The Order of Mass

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve said before that I was a non-standard size for Portugal for my generation. This is true. Nowadays you can get clothes in almost the same range you can get in the US – though shoes still stop at 12 for men, but then so do most shoe shops in the US – but we’ll leave for another time the effects of better diet, clean water and antibiotics.

When I got married, I wore a size 7 and was five six. (I’ve lost a couple of inches.) I could go the entire length of the city of Porto (the second largest city in the country) and not find a pair of pants I could buy. In fact most shops told me they didn’t “carry clothes for fat people.” This was at a time when you could literally count my bones through my skin (no, I’m sure it wasn’t healthy and yes, I’m sure it has a lot to do with my weight problems now, but I was trying very hard to fit in.) But I was a non-standard size and therefore “fat.” Also I grew up with nicknames like “Whale” and “mastodon.” At a size 7. But I was bigger in all directions than a standard woman, in a country where the proverb about feminine beauty is “Women and sardines should be the smallest possible.”

No, I’m not whining. Yeah, it used to bother me, until I came to the states as an exchange student and realized my native culture was out of its frigging mind.

Also, this wasn’t personality warping, because we only started buying me off the rack clothes when I was in highschool. (And even then mom often had to alter them.) Before that, mom made the clothes for me, in her spare time.

And that, yes, is where I’m trying to get to – you see, women in the village came in as varied shapes and sizes as people at a science fiction convention, and to tell the truth, if you looked closely, you’d think they were all either too big or too small, and their figures were not what we’ve grown to expect.

That’s because they didn’t expect ANYTHING. There was no TV (Okay, two in the whole village,) to even buy a fashion magazine you either sent for them from relatives abroad or you schlepped to the next large commerce area to buy one. But there weren’t many native ones, and you didn’t take the German or French ones seriously. I mean, their models looked odd, but what do you expect from foreigners, anyway?

The interesting thing looking back is that none of the women in the village not even the ones who had no obvious body definition, felt a need to diet or pinch or tie. I am actually the more or less same rough shape and size as my grandmother and great grandmother, (translated taller) but I can’t let myself go, because I’d never fit ready made clothes.

I mean, before you guys say something about “well, being too fat” – yeah, it’s not a good thing, and these were mostly working women, tending the family farm, cleaning and cooking all day. If you started being impaired in that, then you MIGHT make efforts to lose weight. (They rarely worked.)

What I mean though, is that all these women were non-standard. I was the closest to standard issue and shops in the city didn’t know what to do with me.

But more importantly, none of these women THOUGHT of being standard. If you asked them if they were normal, they’d have said “Yeah. I can cook, clean, look after the kids, etc. I’m normal.”

(Most of them were “somewhere in normal range.” I have a theory that a reason those sizes in Portugal ran so narrow through the middle eighties is that most people were still having clothes custom  made. Only the “fashionable” set, already making efforts to look right, which if I remember in the seventies often  involved girdles and pressures not normally found in nature, bought from shops. But what I mean is that there was a total lack of worry about being “a size” or “fitting in.”)

This is not about body sizes, though – that was just an illustration. People in the village didn’t worry about fitting standard sizes because by and large standard sizes happened to other people. Take shoes for instance. Most women’s shoes stopped at 6. (I thought I was a size six. I THOUGHT it was normal to “break the shoes in” by wearing them through the raw flesh and the blisters, till they stopped hurting. I’m actually a size nine.) Grandma was a size, at a guess, eleven. She wore clogs. Clogs were unisex, and so came in her size. (The male laborers likely had larger feet than 12 too.) She didn’t like the noise they made, so she’d cut strips of old tires and nail them to the bottom. It worked. For formal occasions, she would find men’s shoes that looked a little more feminine and wore those.

IF Portugal had been a more “standard” society at that time, her shoes would have been a real problem. But they just weren’t. And I was blissfully unaware how non-standard my feet were, because I thought everyone “broke shoes in” the way I had to. (Mom did.)

What I’m trying to say is that we live in a “post mass” society. Our perceptions, ideas and expectations have been deformed by mass manufacturing and the catering to the “normal” – that is to the broadest range, be it of sizes, interests or personalities.

For mass manufacturing to be profitable, it needed to appeal to the broadest range possible. This not only set a certain number of standardized sizes (and body types. When I’m skinny I can’t find jeans to fit me without wrinkling under the behind, unless I buy “Italian cut” – apparently my inseam is … odd. And clearly hereditary. I mean, type wise.) but it set a certain “standard way to be.”

What I mean is, how much of the way we think families should be comes from watching families on TV? And how many marriages might have foundered because the internalized ideas from childhood failed to materialize?

And how many people feel uncomfortable – still – and possibly “crazy” when they disbelieve the mainstream news channels? (Despite repeated proof they lie with every tooth they got (as grandma would say) more often than not.) And how many people read atrociously written “bestsellers” once those get initial push and they’re “what everyone is watching”. And how many people start watching a TV show because “It’s so successful?”

Yes, part of this is the human herd instinct, the need to fit in. But it was given a greater force by the idea that there was such a thing as a “standard” or “normal” way of being that we should all fit into. (Curiously, I wrote about the perils of originality at Mad Genius Club.)

That was an idea fostered by the manufacturing methods and profit margins of the industrial age. The MASS-manufacturing age, the MASS-information age, the MASS entertainment age.

It was necessary for the then extant manufacturing modes to serve the broadest strip of people possible and to make them fit into the mold as much as possible.

That is past. Yes, it might mean some of us will happily get as blobby as some village women, or as skeletal. (I’m more in danger of the first, but it’s actually unlikely, if I can get out of here and stop getting sick (partly through not trying to look after this huge house). I like moving too much to get massive to that degree. It’s the times I’m sick and can only sleep that are bad.) But it also means you don’t need to feel “weird” when you think that whoever has succeeded Dan Rather is full of it and making things up wholesale.

Mass manufacturing, mass information and mass entertainment are ideas of the past.

We’re not absolutely sure what the future will bring, and we’re likely to never get fully there. Like Moses looking onto the promised land, we can glimpse it but not fully cross over, because our mind was formed in another time and in different circumstances. We’ll never fully be free of wanting to fit in and – c’est domage – the mainstream media will retain at least a little power until our generation passes from this world.

Which is part of the reason we need to remind ourselves daily that while there might be some virtue in the standard body (Well, I shop at thrift stores, and fitting things helps) there is no virtue to the standard mind.

The mass is over. We’re free to go free.

232 thoughts on “The Order of Mass”

  2. Interesting turn of thought. Yesterday I was pondering the success of Amazon and eBay as a result of of the ability to bring niche markets to niche customers (blame the Blogfather), and the subsequent ability of minimally produced products to turn a profit. With newer manufacturing techniques (and previously invested capital having covered the cost of some large manufacturing equipment) it’s now practical and profitable to consider short-run production.

    But I hadn’t made it to the pressures of standardization, or the lessening.

    Pondering.

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            1. Horror, joy — it’s all the same sort of thrill, isn’t it?

              “Garlic!? Why’d you bring garlic?? For the stakes? Puns are the key. Puns, man! Puns!”

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                  1. Given the population of punsters at ATH, ANSI has declined to publish a standard rubric for puns merely for our own portion of the population (however partial to said puns we may be).

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                  1. And all the partial portions of the pun punishing, Hun population; think they’re poets.

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                    2. There once was a fellow in Austin
                      Who thought he’d make Texas like Boston
                      And he blew and he puffed
                      and protested and stuff
                      till we took him out camping and “lost” him.

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                  2. Big fan! My dad likes the Irish (and I’ve found him some reserves I was fond of) but I like the bite of bourbon. And Devil’s Cut delivers.

                    Though I’m currently* working on a bottle of Rare Breed from Wild Turkey, not bad.

                    *Currently = this month, not this moment.

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                    2. In whiskey lingo, the Angel’s Share is the portion of a barrel lost to evaporation. Devil’s Cut is the whiskey that soaks into the barrel and is then squeezed out of the wood.

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                    3. Also– before anybody goes out to try to find the origin– they made up the “devil’s cut” name for their own brew. The Angel’s Share is traditional, though. (since I’ve been on enough wild searches myself…)

                      I hadn’t heard about them having a good justification for it, though!

                      Drink the Devil’s Cut– rob him of his illgot goods! *grin*

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  4. I wrote a paper for my communications class on the mass media vs. blogs as news source, was the latter the death knell of the former. I didn’t have enough time or space for extensive research, but my conclusion was that there has always been a center, and a fringe, it is only the balance between them that has changed.

    I agree with you that the extreme mass society is going, going, gone, but think there will always be a center, which is probably different from a standard.

    and I like your statement “there is no virtue to the standard mind.”

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  5. Henry Ford – one of the best known proponents for Mass Production, is reputed to have said, “You can have any color automobile you want – so long as it’s black!”
    And Bell Telephone produced thousands of wall phones – all black.
    It was only when they found that people wanted MORE choices they started using colors. People paid for the privilege, but they got what they wanted,
    Market demand trumped mass production; now market demand drives mass production.
    People may clamor for social services for all, but when they find they are limited to one color – black, they’ll demand more.
    I wonder what future Amazon will take over providing niche based social services?

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    1. It might be noted that from 1909-1914 you could get your Model T in red, green, gray or blue. Black arrived in 1915, and was the only choice through 1927, after which you could get them in various shades of red, green, gray, blue, maroon, blue, brown or beige. Other car makers, both before, during and after the run of the Model T offered any number of different colors. Which don’t come across too well in black and white pictures.

      IIRC, Ford went for the black for several years because the one they chose to use dried fast enough to not slow down the production line. Eventually reduced sales forced them to offer other colors again; they could only get by with a low price and no color choice for so long.

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  6. Beauty is one thing which did get way more demanding with mass media. Once upon a time you were compared to the most pleasing looking women in the village, or in the town, or part of the city perhaps, and if there were stories about this most beautiful princess/noblewoman/mythological figure ever there probably weren’t too many pictures to be had so the idea of the most beautiful ever probably had a strong resemblance to whoever the person imagining her had thought was the most beautiful of the women he had seen in his life, perhaps with a few places here and there molded according to his personal preferences.

    Now we get compared to somebody like Kate Upton or Monica Bellucci, who themselves got picked out as ‘the beauty’ from a really huge crowd of contenders, and not just the person as she is but as she was at her best age and looking her best (and probably smoothed over by photoshop too). No miracle so many women and girls have gotten a bit preoccupied with their looks. :D

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    1. They also did that study showing that men who are working hard and maybe having a bit of trouble surviving are less picky about looks than character. Same thing with women. (Although the Pill’s hormone goggles have something to do with that, too.)

      Having leisure and safety tends to change your priorities.

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      1. In the long run, merely physical beauty will fade. Character lasts, and kindness has a power and beauty that endures.

        Wise men still look for these things- even though love and lust make us look like bloody idiots when trying to impress a girl. *chuckle*

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      2. One of the bits of advice floating around said “Marry a good cook”

        I’m very happy to say I did that. Not only is my wife a good cook, she enjoys cooking.

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        1. Jimmy Soul – If You Wanna Be Happy

          If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life,
          Never make a pretty woman your wife,
          So from my personal point of view,
          Get an ugly girl to marry you.

          A pretty woman makes her husband look small
          And very often causes his downfall.
          As soon as he marries her then she starts
          To do the things that will break his heart.
          But if you make an ugly woman your wife,
          You’ll be happy for the rest of your life,
          An ugly woman cooks her meals on time,
          She’ll always give you peace of mind.

          Don’t let your friends say
          You have no taste,
          Go ahead and marry anyway,
          Though her face is ugly,
          Her eyes don’t match,
          Take it from me she’s a better catch.

          Say man.
          Hey baby.
          Saw your wife the other day.
          Yeah?
          Yeah, she’s ugly.
          Yeah, she’s ugly but she sure can cook.
          Yeah?. Okay.

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    2. It’s hard to compete with a woman who is tall, skinny, wasp waisted and big boobed. Flat tummy, slender hipped and small bones.

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  7. When I got married, my wife wore a dress she made herself. She also made all the bridesmaid dresses, vests and ties for the men. Every time she starts grinding her teeth about not contributing to the family budget (as if being a stay-at-home mom doesn’t save us a TON on gas, fast food, daycare, etc.) I tell her she could take a few classes and start up a business making and selling custom-fit clothes on Ebay.

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    1. Oh yes. And if she makes them a bit fantasy, she’ll sell tons to sf/f fans.
      BUT for the record, I used to worry massively about contributing to the family. Sometimes I still do and I make about 1/2 what my husband makes (some years more, some years less.) But there’s all those years I made NOTHING — except for cooking, cleaning, etc. I tell myself that is worth money, but you know, society makes it hard to believe.

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      1. …society makes it hard to believe.

        Society is full of idiots. Take it from a single man: Society is FULL of IDIOTS!

        The devaluation of domestic work is one of those unacknowledged stressors that contribute to burning out people, careers and marriages.

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        1. quick question, but did anyone like me (2 parents with full time jobs), notice that the kids who had a stay at home parent seemed more, i want to say more balanced and less angsty in school? Or was that only in my world?

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          1. I think it has more to do with the engagement of the parents. I had no stay-at-home parent, but I was the one who always felt sorry for the home life of some of my friends. Not because I thought being alone was better (though I didn’t care one way or the other), but because some of their parents were a**holes.

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          2. My mom wasn’t really “stay at home,” but with ranch work we could spend all the time we had while not at school with her, with maybe once a month exceptions. Or we’d be with dad. Or both of them, since a lot of things take two ranch-hands

            My sister had some angst, but looking at it with adult eyes I’d say she was normal-to-good compared to the kids who were pure daycare. Then again, my scale of “normal” is also set with people who would leave the country for three weeks and the kid would stay….a couple of the parents were only there a week out of the whole winter.

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            1. I didn’t know any that were gone for the winter, but there were some who used the YMCA Camp where my dad worked as babysitter while they went to Europe for the summer.

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          3. Read an article a while back in which a journalist confessed to the real, central reason why his family was moving: because the new home was cheaper.

            Since it was cheaper, his wife could afford to work only parttime, as she had the last semester.

            Since she had worked only parttime then, she had been home when their son returned from school, and his grades had shot up, and they had stopped getting discipline complaints.

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      2. I make about half of what my lovely bride does – blue-collarish computer tech support pays okay, but managing research trials pays much better – but we both have our strengths.

        I, for example, get stuff off the high shelves in the kitchen. (And keep the cars going, the house stocked, groceries bought, cook dinner 3-4 nights a week, keep the electronics and computer infrastructure working and upgraded, handle plumbing, electrical, and air conditioning issues… and gently evict the occasional spider or wasp.)

        And SHE is the organized one. ;)

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      3. I have to second Eamon on this, society is full of idiots, especially on this point. Place I used to work, the married guys would tell me how envious they were of me because, being single, I didn’t have to get anybody’s permission to buy whatever I wanted, or to go or do anything I wanted. To which I responded, that without a wife, I had no one to help with anything either. I had to do the same lawn work they did, clean the house, do the laundry, house maintenance, cook, laundry, take care of/cleanup after/take to the vet the cats, take care of the car, handle the bills and budget, and as the single uncle of 7, I was still expected to be at their events even with a hour drive, and regularly work 60 hour weeks with the occasional 48 to 72 hour shift thrown in. And I still found time for computer games, teaching gun classes and my other hobbies.

        Having someone that takes even a little bit of that off your shoulders is worth their weight in gold, EVEN IF THEY DON’T BRING IN A DIME. I told them to quit their whining about their wives and come talk to me again when they were man enough to live alone and on their own.

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      4. You know, as a man who’s currently doing a lot of that stuff myself, don’t sell yourself short.

        I can’t wait until I can pay someone to do it, and it’s worth a lot of money to me to hire someone. That must mean it’s worth something, right?

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        1. I’m easy, not cheap! (Oh, alright, I’m neither easy or cheap, but I’m probably easier than I am cheap…maybe) :)

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    2. So did my mother! Thus leading to Chase’s Law of Marriage: The length of the marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. My parents made it to 47 years, only ending with my father’s death. And they still loved each other.

      The trouble with doing custom fit is the measuring, alas, otherwise I’d be one of her first customers ;-)

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      1. I’ve ordered custom fit boots, they send you a diagram of where and how to take each measurement on your foot, you measure and write it down, send it to them and they make the boots to fit your feet. Works very well, and I assume would work equally well for most types of clothing.

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        1. There’s a company (based in the Ukraine, I believe) that does that for Renaissance and Medieval clothing (they supply a lot of SCA and Ren Faire people), and their customers love their clothes, so it must work fine.

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            1. As I said, their customers all love them, so I presume they’re very reliable. They’re called ArmStreet, by the way.

              Takes a little time in delivery, but my wife says it’s worth it.

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      2. I hope you’re right on Chase’s Law of Marriage.

        Ours was both fast and quickly planned – on the advice of an immigration attorney we did a quickie Reno wedding instead of the big family gathering in Hong Kong we’d originally planned for 6 months later (something about “get married here FIRST – otherwise she’ll be stuck there for months while they adjust her immigration status”).

        We’re still together 30+ years later, though I still worry about her learning the Awful Truth about me and throwing me over for a better behaved mate. Like a boar, say ;)

        We’ve been telling our daughters for years that this is now our Family Tradition for weddings – would they rather spend the money on a wedding or on minimizing debt/getting a new car/down payment on a house? Maybe we should be pitching the “stability” angle, too.

        Though they seem to have figured it out – I half expect to get a call from our older daughter some day that starts “Guess what! We had some free time this weekend and decided to go get married!”

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        1. yep, yep, yep. This is why we had two weddings. First wedding — York County, SC courthouse, me in a dress I’d had since I was fifteen (it was the only white thing I had) and the only people present Dan’s parents and his sister and (then) husband. We went to dinner at a sit-down (just about) steakhouse. Total probably under $100. 30 years next year.

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              1. It does. “Now it’s official and blessed in the eyes of all the other folks in the village.” I had a professor who had a JP wedding here in the states, and his mother still was not certain it was legal, since they didn’t invite 400+ close relatives to witness the ceremony. They ended up with two receptions – one in NYC for 250+ of her relatives and family business associates, and one in Venice for 300+ of his relatives and family business associates. After that Mom settled down.

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                  1. We had the whole nine yards, relatives came to town, a friend made my dress, reception in my parents’ backyard. Total cost: $1,100. Thirty-one years as of yesterday.

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    4. Yes, she could. Hell, custom made stuff is always in demand. I have a list of stuff I want custom made…

      …as soon as I’ve got money, at least. :)

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        1. Or muslin dress form pieces, which you get someone to pin together on you until it fits like a second skin. The trouble with measuring yourself being some places are hard to get to :-) I am flexible enough to do my own accurate inseam measurement, but not everyone is…

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        2. Give it a few more years, and those laser measurement booths are going to be in fairly common use. I think Amazon is doing something about that as we speak–If you were able to go down to a local kiosk, get measured, and then upload those specifications and measurements to Amazon, they’d reduce the number of their returns on clothing items exponentially. Which saves money, for them and for us. I think I heard/read something about this being probably five-six years out. The technology is here, it’s just that someone needs to adopt it and get it into common use. Amazon is the most likely candidate.

          It’s already in use in parts of the UK:

          http://www.bodymetrics.com/

          And, it looks like it’s further along than I thought–Apparently, there’s a Kinect plug-in for it, as well as a few others. You may not need to go down to the mall for a measurement session…

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          1. Brooks Brothers (Don’t look at me like that, they used to make good cloths, and yes I *can* program while wearing a tie. About as well as I can program w/out one anyway. ) has one at their flagship store in NYC, but apparently it’s not sufficiently useful to deploy nationally.

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            1. As expensive as custom is in the US, if you can afford it, you expect the personal touch. Now, tools like that may bring the price down, but which part do you try to change first? It’s somewhat self-perpetuating.

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              2. While I’m all for the advent of technology, i find myself hoping wistfully that this doesn’t kill the expensive personal custom suit makers.

                I have always had a dream of having enough money to go in and have a custom suit made by a small man who goads his tailors into making my suit with lots of hand waving and shouting in Italian while i quietly sip the complementary espresso or champagne that was provided while i wait between measurements. Maybe even a fat Cuban cigar in one hand a snifter of brandy.

                I know, completely decadent, and possible a tremendous waste of money, but in my mind this was always my idea of a guy’s version of a trip to the spa.

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        3. That’s what I love about Recollections: if you have a question, you can e-mail or call and get the exact measurements for the size, and negotiate adjustments if necessary. They have the information right there and are very happy to help.

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          1. Fortunately men’s clothes are less tailored to their shape than women’s. If you go dressy, you can do amazing things with sleeve garters and proper tucking in of shirts.

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              1. When I lived in San Jose there was a shirt shop in one of the malls that did semi-custom shirt making. They measuered you and sent the measurements off to some sweatshop somewhere and in a couple of weeks shirts showed up that fitted you. They weren’t notably more expensive than regular mall bought shirts (at least not brand name ones) but they did fit me a ot better (and still do since I don’t seem to have changed my upper body dimensions much in over 15 years)

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                  2. If you go to any mid to high end haberdasher they will be able to point you to a tailor (if they do not have one in house) who can shorten the sleeves a bit.

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                    1. Key question I’ve been wondering about: how do I go about finding a mid to high end haberdasher? I don’t know anyone in this area who frequents that kind of business to ask for referrals. There are a few high end chains here (Jos. A. Bank, Nordstrom, etc.) but that’s not really the same thing. Suggestions?

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                    2. Go down to the local dry-cleaners. A lot of them have contact with people who do alterations, and they can give you some idea where to go to. The local shop alters my suit-jackets that I buy at thrift shops (’cause I’m incredibly cheap). I had a friend who was trying to get some re-enactors uniforms made and talked to the really small businesses that make wedding dresses, it seems they get a rush in the Spring and early Summer, but go idle the rest of the year.

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              2. And the constantly changing sizes don’t help. I used to wear 2XL dress shirts – I still have a long sleeve one that I bought 14 years ago that still fits as well as it did the day I bought it. Today, if I buy 2X most places, I can split them up the back just by flexing my shoulders without trying, and on long sleeve shirts, they are tight enough around my forearms as to be uncomfortable. Again, not that way with the one I bought 14 years ago…from Wally world of all places, so you know I didn’t spend much on it.

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                2. Do NOT get me started on changing sizes. There should be no good reason why I wear a size 8 from 1995 and a size 12 from 2012 – both shirts from the same manufacturer. Both are in my closet right now.

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                  1. How about the fact that I wear jeans from the same manufacturer that are two inches different in waist size, simply depending on whether they are ‘pre-washed’ or ‘shrink to fit’, and don’t get me started on the fact that the brown duck ones are a different size than either of the standard blue denim options; at least the size in the black jeans correspond with the brown duck sizes. :/

                    Or the fact that I can order five or six pairs of the same model boot, and they fit great. Then they move their manufacturing to a different province in China (actually all I know is that they moved it, I don’t know where it was previously) and all of a sudden that size no longer fits. And it isn’t even a standard variance, I wear a 10 1/2 and all of a sudden have to go to a 10 and that is too wide, while my dad always wore an 8 1/2 and all of a sudden had to go to a 9. There is a reason I am going back to custom made boots like I used to always wear.

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                    1. Let me guess. Dickies? Because I’ve been having the same issue with them for years now. Hard enough to find good work pants that don’t shred like tissue paper these days. *shakes head*

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                    2. Have you looked at Duluth Trading Co.?

                      Pricey, and I’m sure not immune to the sizing issues (though everything I’ve got so far has been consistent). I’ve only recently tried them, the Fire Hose and DuluthFlex Fire Hose Work Pants. The Fire Hose in particular are robust. I have hopes, we’ll have to see how they bear out. I am happy with fit, finish and build quality so far…

                      I’m not paid by ’em, I didn’t receive nuttin’ from ’em, they don’t know me from Bob, except when I order from ’em. FCC – an acronym for things I can’t say in polite company…

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                    3. Also to note, have two pairs of those pants, both say 32″ waist… and, yup, two inch different in waist size. Bought from the same place, about a year apart. In total, five pairs, all 32″, three sizes.

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                    4. That’s ok, I have two pairs of pants, bought at the same time, from the same store, the same brand, that are the same size (as labeled), but which are at least two inches different in waist size. The only specified difference is they are different colors.

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                    5. I’ve heard of Duluth, though it has been a few years, mind. Might be worth a look, as well. Carhartt and Dickies are what I’ve been used to. If they can stand up to a summer and autumn on the farm without something failing, they *might* be worth the price. We’ll see!

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                    6. I’ve got Carhartt and Dickies, the full Fire Hose is a stouter material but still fairly supple, with nice stitching and some riveted reinforcement on pocket flaps. I’m a cargo pocket fan, and they have a very nice pocket design and arrangement (tuckable flaps!). The Flex is not as stout as Carhartts, being a lighter canvas with some spandex woven in. For full on rough-work pants, I probably wouldn’t pick those, but I think they’d compare favorably to Dickies.

                      There’s some videos on the site with more info, and my experience with them is all of 2 months old. Apply salt to flavor.

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                    7. Key and Carhart, haven’t tried Dickies, they always seemed a little lighter weight to me. TXRed recommended the Fire Hose Pants on here a while back, and I was going to try them out, but haven’t yet.

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                    8. Dickies I wore for summer work in the heat, Carhartt for anything else. Key I had one pair that fit okay, but got eat up when I was cutting pipe and brazing copper one spring break in college. Three months, and I had holes straight through (to be fair, Carhartts did the same the next year).

                      Work pants I had before them were local make (can’t remember the name of the plant to save my life, and I drive by the empty shell every day now). Heavy weight, hard to rip, triple seamed and pockets everywhere. Then they shipped the company overseas, lost the quality control they had, and went out of business. Ah, well.

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                    1. It matches my closet, though. Even if you figure that there’s a lot of stretching/shrinking, it’s odd that my size 8 from high school fits while the size 12 from a few years back is tight.

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                    3. A thought– I’m comparing basic no-special-cut jeans.

                      Maybe the fancy stuff is “getting bigger” if you ignore that (sorta normal) humans are wearing them? Seems ironic to point it out on this post, but there are extremes of body design that are just not common, especially among those hired as models.

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                    4. What really irritates me is men’s clothes are measured in inches, didn’t we standardize the inch back about the fifteenth century? I mean where the heck are these people getting their tape measures?

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                    5. The inches game is scuttled by “Relaxed Fit” and the like (which often enough aren’t labeled that way). Possibly for the fiction “I still wear the same size pants I did in high school!” And possibly because the manufacturing process doesn’t have the quality control itused to. It’s annoying as crap.

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              3. “I really hate these stubby arms.”

                I tried on some hickory shirts made in china a while back that would probably fit you well. Body fit fine (well a little short in the torso, but still long enough to tuck in, just short enough that they would probably come untucked on the sides when you started working) but the sleeves ended about four inches below the elbow. Have a couple pair of long johns made in china that are similar, fit great in the waist, skin tight on the legs like longjohns should be (I despise baggy long johns) and end about mid calf, like womens pedal pushers). I claim it is because the Chinese making the clothes are sawed off little fellers with stubby arms and they make clothes to fit them instead of normal Westerners, which is where their product is actually being sold.

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            2. Most men dress like crap, and get anxious when other men dress better (I’ve personally been *ordered* to “dress casual” at work) because they’re afraid they’ll have to learn to dress well.

              The thing is that men’s clothes aren’t (when done properly) less tailored, but that men have less deviation of body shapes than women.

              Heck, there are some online “custom shirt makers” that work down to 1/4 inch on some measurements, and Alex Kabbaz routinely works to the 1/8 and 1/16th (IIRC. I know 1/8th).

              Men’s business and dress clothing is far more likely to be tailored at all than women’s and men’s clothing at that level is expected to fit properly).

              The difference is that men’s “grown up” clothing is meant to hide deviations from the norm in favor of some ideal, while most women’s clothing is to display.

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              1. More fitted is a better term. But it’s not just an effect of breasts and waist, they’re more snugly fitted all over. That’s I meant by less tailored – they are designed to hug the various parts of the body less. Button down shirts are a good illustration. It’s not just that they have to accommodate the extra curves of bust and waist. They will be trimmed as tightly as possible even in the circumference of the arms, or the breadth of shoulder. There is no wiggle room. Literally.

                For example, my flexed bicep is 13″ in circumference. I haven’t found a button down shirt in the last 3 years that fits my biceps that isn’t a ‘boyfriend cut’. The arms are tailored to be not at all baggy, the result is that given the average wimpy ladies arm, I can’t wear them.

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                  1. I once managed to get down to 16% body fat. I looked wonderful. But from my starting form to that… I lost a sum total of 8 pounds. Because muscle. And yes, I didn’t fit blouses; I had to wear a man’s dress shirt to my presentations.

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                2. I was poking around on your blog. You’re not by any chance in CO? We’re going to be getting read of a bunch of modular bookcases that are not worth selling but which you might find useful. (I mean, they still look fine, but they’re the pressboard type)

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                  2. Also, I’m sorry for the paucity of the content. Raphael has a special talent to wake from a dead sleep the moment my bottom hits the computer chair. *sigh*

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            1. Honestly, never tried. But with a 29 inch inseam, it was always hard as hell finding pants that were really right.

              I usually just get 30’s and wear off the extra inch. :)

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              1. I got lucky there. My fat guy store of choice “DXL” has an in house tailor. And i’m big enough it’s either them, or the interwebs. I prefer the free in house tailor on my 60 dollar jeans TYVM. :)

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                1. I’m living in a black hole of decent stores.

                  Luckily, there IS a good tailor here in town, and I hope some day to have a three piece bespoke suit made by him. Need to sell a WHOLE lot more stories for that one.

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    5. If she can do bespoke, there’s a heap of money if she has the time and inclination. Even just customized from a standard pattern can be lucrative, and much appreciated by those of us who are oddly proportioned. Do you have pictures of any other stuff she’s done? I might like to place an order in the near future; the Oyster Wife and I are both tricky to buy off-the-rack for.

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    7. I was an Air Force E-2 when I got married, in 1966. MY gross pay was $98 a month. As a MARRIED E-2, I got $185 a month, gross. My wife was a bank teller/bookkeeper, and pulled in between $250 and $350 a month. By the time I re-enlisted for the first time, I was an E-5, and making enough money that my wife could quit working and stay home with our daughter.

      My wife wore a size 5 dress when we got married, was 5’7″, and weighed about 100 pounds. I was 5’11”, 220 pounds, with a 32-inch waist and a 46-inch chest, and could lift and CARRY 375 pounds (done it). Neither of us are like that now, but then, almost fifty years have passed. We’re both more or less happy with the way we are, and with each other. We both could wish for better health, but that’s not possible at the moment.

      A lot has changed in 50 years, and we’ve watched it happen. Some things have changed for the better, others haven’t. The idea that everything should target the “masses” is one thing that has infuriated us from the beginning. “One size fits all” isn’t comfortable for anyone — not in clothing, not in automobiles, not in religion, not in politics. I hope I live long enough to see the pendulum swing back toward satisfying individual wants and needs.

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  8. There’s a lot to be said for the new world of the non Mass market, but I think there is one drawback to the freedom we have now: the potential for balkanization and all its associated evils including the utter rejection and intolerance of those heretic splittists down the street.

    Mind you if you want to see true intolerance you need to go read the climate chaneg blogs – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/14/shameless-climate-mccarthyism-on-full-display-scientist-forced-to-resign/

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    1. Yes — what I was thinking in the shower — yes, I showered late, deal — is that what someone said is true. There will always be a “mass market” and a normal, but not the way he meant, more like “a hundred normals.” Like, I might be “instapundit normal” — I disagree with him on some stuff, but if he says something is one way I at least consider it before discarding it, which brings me on a “normal” with his readers, which… means we’re a “mass market” of sorts, just not THE Mass market. I don’t know if there WILL be THE mass market, anymore.

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      1. Yeppers!
        Any successful mass market product targets the profitable peak range of the market’s normal distribution bell curve. But the critical detail is normal distribution of what. The assumption one might make is of course it’s a plot of customers looking for clothing that fits, and for men that’s not a bad assumption, though not always. For the ladies, forgive my sexist bent, it seems that fit takes a back seat to appearance and style. So, if a manufacturer of women’s clothing tries to create a product based mainly on fit they are targeting the wrong distribution.
        My field is industrial and systems engineering, but those often overlap with elements of business and marketing. I have a hunch that a full up graduate level marketing degree would get deep into things like target markets, statistical distributions, and how to survey a customer base to derive the true drivers to purchase a product.

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    2. Please see my rant further down.

      What we’re experiencing is the petty tantrums of the formerly anointed gate-keepers discovering that they’re really not such special snowflakes, and that they’ve never been “speaking for the masses”. As those nasty little “masses” have figured out how to bypass and supplant them, they’re not happy to discover that their heretofore extra-speshulness and power is evaporating. Academia and journalism both have the same problem, particularly since we “academized” journalism starting back in the late ’40s and ’50’s. They’ve never known how to make themselves useful, and they thought they had managed that by hijacking and warping the channels of communication. Guess what? Now you don’t need a damn printing press to have a voice–All you need is a computer, internet access, and the will.

      The transition is going to be rocky. A lot of these people are going to have to find jobs that actually, y’know, produce something worthwhile that people want…

      Now that there are alternatives, that ain’t journalism as we’ve known it.

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    3. One thing I’ve learned throughout life is that EVERYTHING can be judged using a bell curve. There is a large center, and narrower groupings on either side, in just about every field imaginable. As Odds, we don’t usually fit in the large center in many areas, and we at least are usually comfortable with that. What the Internet has done is allow people who don’t have the capacity to fight it out in the center group to focus on meeting the needs of the outliers. It’s a niche market, but sometimes, it’s a BIG niche market. Savvy entrepreneurs have recognized this, and are now targeting those niche markets, and being successful at it. That infuriates the people that believe everyone should be in the “center mass”, and they try to stifle it. It’s not going to work without total control of everything, and even then it’ll be rough. I don’t think the people wanting to create that total control are bright enough to carry it off.

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  9. If you’re free to go free, it’s urgent and important to have a well developed way of dealing with the consequences. If everybody is going off doing their own direction, you have a much higher need to be able to logically assess and competently judge the value of these different paths. There’s just more different iterations to judge and fewer occasions where you can shortcut and do copy-and-paste judgments on paths that are near identical to each other.

    We are not institutionally ready for that world. We aren’t even seriously preparing for the arrival of that world but it’s already arriving. In some sense it’s been here for a while already.

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      1. Communist country refugees often were sickened during their first visits to supermarkets because their brains had to process far more choice there than they were accustomed. It could take a few weeks to adjust. Of course, in the US, we don’t have that happen because we’re used to it.

        Now take that effect and crank it up a few orders of magnitude so the most picky shopaholic of today is overwhelmed. That’s the downside that needs to be prepped for. It’s not insurmountable but the problem is already demonstrated as real.

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        1. Ah, yes. The tyranny of choice and related discussions.

          Yes, a demonstrable cognitive hurdle, requiring its own set of compensatory mechanisms and adjustments. But, as you say, not insurmountable, and I’m not certain how much further impact is likely as sectors of the society diversify. The biggest salve for this complication would be the simple fact that so much of the compounding opportunities will be in areas that any given individual will be uninterested in.

          Wherein we’ll have additional choices, it will be reflected in niche categories and each of us only have to tend to the relevant categories. The entire society will be awash in an unimaginable number of choices, but each individual? Manageable. Particularly as our society has small primers in various hobbyist fields for establishing and ‘defending’ preferences in the face of a multitude of options.

          Wherein I think complications are most likely, it will be new entrants to the society, immigrants such as you referenced and the young. The young will be fortunate to borrow some of their parents preferences, at least initially, and the difficulties will be offset. The immigrants… different challenges.

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        2. You might have a point if you took people straight to the “promised land” directly from the pre-internet era, but watching the uptake going on around me as it grows organically, I don’t think you could be more wrong.

          I just watched a sixty-three year old carpenter who’s still doing manual labor win an argument with a twenty-something building inspector. The building inspector showed up onsite with the old hard copy of the Simpson Bracket manual, and told the “old-timer” he had the nailing patterns wrong on the brackets. The old guy called him a dumbshit, and pulled out his phone, went online and got the newest version of the manual from the Simpson website, pulled it up, shoved it in the inspectors face, and walked off muttering about dumbass teenagers who are stuck in the dark ages… Turns out, the nailing requirements changed.

          I don’t think there’s going to be a problem with this. At all. The people who you’re looking at and thinking “Geez, they’re going to have a hard time in the new world we’re building…” are either already way ahead of you, or they would have had problems keeping up with things in 1950’s America in the first damn place.

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          1. Kirk, I’m not really talking about continuing education in your profession. That sort of stuff is as old as professional licensing.

            I’m talking about things like the coming breakdown in the taboo against infanticide. How do you deal with a professional colleague who has, with a straight face, attacked the Gosnell documentary people as anti-human extremists? What do you do when people ‘go Nazi’? What do you do when the Nazi is calling out the pro-infanticide fellow. It’s the Iran-Iraq war 24/7/365, you’re far too frequently hoping both will lose to keep your sanity entirely intact. And in such a grandly insane clash of civilization, do you sit on the sidelines in order to stay clear of any association with these various lunatics and be thought to acquiesce to it all by your silence or do you jump in and defend your positions, ending up in a 30 years war type of situation where it’s all against all at one point or another?

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            1. Free market of ideas. I think you have to defend the things you believe in, regardless of your fellow travelers, and condemn the things you abhor, again regardless.

              The will be social conflict, and the rules of society will be slow to adapt with friction and irritation. But I think (and hope) a better society springs from it.

              If not, I guess I’ll have picked my hill.

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            3. This is at the 15 May 2014 3:37 post by TMLutas.

              I think you’re being really overwrought with this. Like, seriously, clinically overwrought, if that was an officially sanctioned disorder.

              Here’s the thing: That strange guy who’s attacking the Gosnell documentary? He was always that f**ked in the head. All that’s changed is that he’s managed to gain the confidence necessary to voice his opinions because he has found reinforcement and support for his ideas by discovering the other idiots in the country that think on the same wavelength he does. Before, that would have happened by sheerest accident. Now? You want deviancy of thought? Google it. You’ll find someone with your same line of thought. Is that a bad thing? I think it’s kind of a neutral one, given that we can now find people of good will just as easily–And, I’m pretty sure I’ll find more of those than the other.

              This, however, is not at all what your first post is saying. There, you’re going “Woe is us, there are no longer any broad social influencers to control things…”.

              My response?

              A.) There never were. Those “…good old days…” of social and media unity? They didn’t exist, and those controls didn’t, either. You just thought there were, because the only people you heard talking were the ones inside the journalistic echo chamber, and they were all speaking with a unified voice. There were no opportunities for people like myself to speak up and say “Bullshit. That’s not what I think or agree with.” when some enlightened dimwit from the New York Times made some idiotic statement of a fact that “…everyone knows…”. Disbelieve me? Consider all the things these predatory assholes have gotten wrong, over the years. Just in the military realm alone, which I’m most familiar with, the number of times these jackasses have gotten fundamental facts indescribably wrong is incredible. Remember how the M1 tank was going to get all of us killed, in Desert Storm? Or, how the Bradley was so screwed up? Remember how the vaunted “combat-experienced” Iraqi Army was going to cost us tens of thousands of casualties?

              Gee, there were some real benefits to that, weren’t there? Those same ignoramuses would have left us without either of those systems, if they’d been listened to, back in the 1980s.

              Oh, but what’s better? That same bunch of idiots drowned out those who knew that those stories were wrong. Why? Because they decided they had The Truth ™, and they were going to spread it. The fact that they were utterly wrong, well… That’s apparently something you look back on with nostalgia. Because. Unity. Unity of Thought. We’ll always do better when we have a unified structure, and everyone thinks alike. Won’t we?

              B.) Even if there were benefits to this control, and I don’t think there ever were, because it didn’t actually, y’know, exist… I’m not sure that we should be seeking to return to those wonderful days when jackasses who were educated far past their level of intelligence were the sole social arbiters for “what is right”, and who were based in either New York City or LA. The former media structure in this country was very, very unhealthy, and has led to a bunch of severe mistakes being made, not the least of which has been the last decade-plus of stupidity. That was their last gasp, though, and I expect that once they’ve blown the last little bit of their credibility, we’re going to start seeing more things like the journalism of Michael Totten. Freelancers, supported by actual readers, as opposed to the assholes who ran the New York Times, and let Walter Duranty bullshit the American public about what was going on in the Ukraine. Holodomor, anyone?

              I think what you’re finding disturbing is that the veil is being taken off. Nobody out here in the flyover part of the country really believes a lot of what the anointed mass media has been telling us, for years. There has always been a very large number of contrary viewpoints out there, and the only difference now is that they’re able to participate in the free market of ideas across the entire country, instead of being that curmudgeonly character down the street who doesn’t toe the party line.

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        1. Welcome to every generation from now until we’ve learned all there is to know.

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    3. Either I’m dumb as a rock, or this is an exceedingly obtuse post.

      I can’t even parse the meaning of what you’re saying here. Are you trying to imply that with no mass market cookie cutter “one size fits all” paradigm, that things in the intellectual sphere will be too complex for people to handle?

      If that’s the case, you’re overthinking this to the point of being delusional. We’ve ALWAYS been fragmented, in the terms of whether or not “everyone” has the same unified source for news or whatever. If you seriously think that “everybody” was on the same page as the former mass media conglomeration would have had it (actually, abortion would be a better term, and we’re in the process of performing that particular curettage, right this very moment), you’re quite wrong.

      What we had before the current “fragmented marketplace of thought” was a situation where only certain select people and interests had a VOICE. Because of the echo chamber effect, those with voices believed that they somehow represented what everyone else believed, thought, or wanted to know about. Which was emphatically not the case, and never has been.

      In the former era, people who didn’t agree or go along with the “conventional wisdom” had nowhere to go for alternative viewpoints or even much in the way of discussion–Today, that is emphatically not the situation. Before, those people were isolate, unable to find others of like mind, and most believed that they were “the only ones…”.

      The internet has enabled a situation where it is possible for these people to discover that, no, they’re not alone, and that they can now actually find and talk to other people who think in similar ways. What’s happened is that they’re no longer silenced, and that confuses and frightens the old-school types, who are used to being the only ones in the room with voices. It scares the shit out them that the “common man” may not think or believe as they do, and that they really don’t set the standards.

      Fragmentation? Foolish one, it’s always been fragmented. What’s changed is that the illusory controls are gone, and that people can now speak their minds and be noticed in the public sphere. Before the current era, what some rancher in Wyoming thought might have penetrated the pages of his local weekly. Today? His words and thoughts can be disseminated across the entire nation, and may well influence people in communities from Maine to Oregon. That’s the thing that scares the shit out of the elites: They’re no longer the ones in control, no longer the arbiters, and are no longer able to silence the voices of the ones they regard as insignificant.

      Whether or not you believe it to be so, that’s a good thing. Wisdom is often found far away from the self-focused and self-involved centers of power, and what we’re actually experiencing is a tectonic shift from the organized mass media to a far more democratic system. Get used to it, because instead of the elite being the only people able to “speak and be heard”, now everyone else can. And while that may mean a bunch of complete idiots will be heard, there’s a whole bunch of very smart people who never had the chance, or the interest, in going through the process to become one of the so-serious “enlightened gate-keepers”.

      THAT is what you’re scared of, I suspect. Stay fearful, my friend, because if you’re one of elite who has had the illusion that you were some sort of arbiter for public opinion, you’re about to discover that you never were, and never will be able to have that illusion again.

      I’ve run into this thinking before, and the people voicing it were always the sort of people I used to listen to politely, and then walk away from, thinking to myself “What an idiot…”. I rarely engaged such people or tried to disabuse them of their stupidity in articulating things “…everybody knows…”, when in actual fact, just about nobody in the room shared their beliefs or opinions.

      That’s precisely the position the so-called intelligentsia finds itself in, today: They’re actually getting feedback that tells them that they’re wrong, and that scares the ever-loving shit out of them.

      So, in short, the world is not getting any more fragmented than it was before. What it’s getting is more articulate, and the articulation is coming from sources that heretofore weren’t able to contribute to the discussion. That’s the scariest thing, to many: When everyone has a voice, the people with them aren’t special little snowflakes any more.

      In terms of adaptations, it’s not going to take much. Once upon a time, everything was custom, and unique to the owner. We’re going back there, but instead of everything being bespoke hand-crafted, it’s going to be bespoke machine-crafted.

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      1. Well, let us be just. The all-sex-is-rape, women-can-talk-with-plants-and-get-answers, men-are-destroying-life-on-earth-and-so-should-massacre-all-males woman also is finding a group of kindred paranoiac online and they are battening on each other.

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          1. Well, duh.
            Please name me even one invention, concept, idea that hasn’t been to some extent a double edged sword. Every change has the potential for good or ill depending on innumerable factors. We can either gripe about the disruption to our safe and quiet routines or take advantage of the new opportunities.
            Of course when folks misjudge what those opportunities are and fail to identify the true new reality you have things like our recent dotcom fiasco.

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        2. Which also probably points to where the recent rise in things like child pornography and so forth is coming from. Where these deviants were once in isolation, now they’re finding each other, reaching critical mass, and we get results like that idiot in New York who wanted to cook and eat women he kidnapped.

          It is definitely a two-edged sword, but I like the new world better than the old, even with the new issues we’re getting with it. Growing up in a time when the local big-city newspapers and the general-issue national news magazines were our only window on the world, I really like being able to get online and read what the Frankfurt papers are saying about an issue.

          People and institutions will adapt. For all the evils this new information paradise enables, it also enables a lot of social good.

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          1. Makes it easier to identify and destroy the stuff that is really flat out wrong– and harder to paint as wrong the stuff that’s just, to borrow a word, Odd.

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  10. Clothing wise… it’s still a nightmare. I’m 5’8″ and 200 pounds, and I can’t find a stitch to wear outside of blue jeans (difficult) and plain knit shirts. Because when you’re a size 14-16, the manufacturer assumes your shape is round. I’m not round, just big. I have to either substantially alter anything I buy, or make it myself. I’m fond of making things myself, but with everything else I do, I don’t really have the time.
    I can’t even wear off the rack button downs. Either the shirt is too short for my long torso, or (depending on current fashion) the sleeves are too tightly tailored. I’ve put on a lot of upper arm muscle hauling babies around.

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    1. Sleeves are usually too tightly tailored. Also, — size sixteen, much shorter — the bulges are all in the wrong places. Mostly I have hips from hell, and my top only bulges in the cups (I’m 36 DD — that’s hard as hell to find. they assume if you’re DD you have a fat back too.)

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    2. If you want to wear Indian clothes from India, there are some great sites out there that ship cheap. (I think they market to US people from India.) You pick out the measurements, the clothing piece you want, the style of cut you want, the color you want, the fabric you want, the embellishments you want… pretty much total customization. Of course, it’s mostly things like saris and shalwar kameez, but they also carry European/American style clothing.

      I don’t remember if they had sites like that for Indian male clothing. I was too busy drooling over the idea of fancy customized clothing. :)

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      1. Any in particular you could mention/link? My brother spent a few years in the New Delhi area and my aunt married an Indian (and visits often), so the Oyster clan has an affection for the styles. I’d love to see what the Oyster Wife looks like in some of those outfits, too.

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    3. If you are interested in skirts and can stand old-fashioned stuff, look at Recollections.biz. their skirts generally come in 35″ or 40″ lengths, officially “boot length or floor length” but with the same waist measure. They tend to leave large seams, should you need to take in or let out, and will tweak to order for a fee, depending on how complicated the tweak-age is. And their stuff wears well.

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        1. There are slips now that are described as being like shorts, etc. For my money, they are just differently cut pantaloons. Wear one of those under a skirt, or an actual pair of shorts or capris or leggings, and I bet you won’t feel naked. (And it’s a bit trendy, wearing long leggings under shorter skirts.)

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          1. Amen sister. There are also things called…er… ‘tap pants’? THey are a slip that is cut like a skort, only silky. It goes on under the skirt but over the leggings. They breathe, but keep you covered. I’m also hoping that petticoats come back. I used to do that when I was spending all day outdoors in winter– in Chicago– but wanted to wear a skirt to go to church.

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  11. 36’s are always hard to find because So. Many. women measure their bra size incorrectly. They’re measuring their rib cage beneath the bust, and adding 4 or 5 to that to get the band size, then subtracting the bust measurement to get the cup size. A lot of women who need a 32″ band are buying 36s. (I don’t know who came up with this method, but I’d like to have a talk with them.) My blog post on how to properly measure your bra size is one of my most common google hits.

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    1. I wear a 38– used to be a 36– because my fitter told me so. My shape is so odd, I need to buy my bras from professionals. I feel your pain.

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      1. Oh, you can shift a good step either way off either measurement. You can even wear different sizes in different styles.
        Sadly, some professionals aren’t as professional as others. Run screaming from a fitter that adds to the band and subtracts the bust from that. Or drive your enemies before you like cattle. Your preference.

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        1. I had a fitter who told me that I should wear a smaller band and a bigger cup. The band was uncomfortably snug. Or should a bra feel like a girdle on your ribs?

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          2. It should be snug but not constricting on its outermost hook and the breast should rest in the cup without gaping or bulging. The band should support the weight of the breasts, not the shoulder straps.

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            1. I suspect part of the problem is that there seems to be an elusively narrow range between “constricts breathing” and “just loose enough to occasionally slide down by one rib upon the right combination of exhalation/bending, after which it digs in and feels constricting after all.” (In fact I have had bras that seem to be both.) It’s easy to mistake the latter for still being too tight. I think.

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              2. I rarely wear a bra because they are uncomfortable. However I must admit that the customizable bras made by Decent Exposures are the most comfortable..

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              3. I expect it depends on just how much flesh you have over your ribs. I don’t have much, so I drop down a band size from my official 38″ measurement.

                This is the thing with bras. In ONE style, you need to get good measurements – and this is not trivial to do by yourself – and then you need to try on the number size, and start shifting. But band size affects cup size, so you can’t just drop a band size, keep the same cup size and call it good. And you can’t change styles while you’re trying on different sizes – different styles fit differently.

                I really ought to write up an accurate guide to bra fitting, something a little less torch and pitchforks than what I’ve written previously.

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  12. From yesterday’s NYT:

    “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”

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    1. Because “one size fits all” has worked so very well in the past, right?
      Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mr. Merz can kiss my rosy red bum, particularly in regards to health care systems. One size is great from a corporate perspective. After all those who don’t fit die off rather quickly so no real point in worrying about them. Just service the masses and you can maximize profits don’t you know.

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      1. I have a pharmacist friend that would suggest sunscreen and at least minimal clothing when out in the sun to solve that rosy redness issue…

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        1. Sure with proper planning, but there are ever so many impromptu opportunities for me to express myself visually when confronted with abject stupidity such as expressed above.

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          1. But it’s so much more fun in person.

            Being a contrarian, I’ve come to suspect that the real decline in US health care dates back to the WW2 wage freezes – the government froze wages (no competition), so companies started offering health care plans as a way to attract and retain good employees.

            Having major medical insurance makes a lot of sense. Paying for insurance that covers routine care, though, doesn’t for most people. But once it became normal, the bean-counters were on their way to taking over. And things like finding a doctor you like close to home isn’t as important as cutting their costs by another 1% annually, don’t you know?

            I’d think you could properly explain your esteem to him using a battleaxe, mace, or machete. Or maybe a wood chipper. Larry Correia can give you some tips on technique, I’m sure. I’d be happy to give you an alibi, if needed.

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    2. Right. Because it’s inconvenient that I fixate on the cardiologist in the town ten miles away instead of accepting an assignment to the in-network doc at Docs-R-Us eighty miles away. And I chose my local inexpensive drug store to lousy service Chain Store (also in network). Under a plan that won’t cover prescriptions until I’ve paid, eh, let’s just say high four digits. Mr. Merz, behold my central digit.

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      1. And all we really need is a foreign born and educated (and thus very economically compensated) “doctor” at the drive through window of the Doc-In-The-Box, since that model delivers such amazingly lower costs to the insurer. Well, that and the scrip for tranquilizers so we don’t worry about whatever is ailing us.

        We’re just so used to actual medical diagnosis and treatment that we think we deserve to get it. Silly Americans.

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  13. Mass production is changing.

    A few years ago I visited the USA factory of a major manufacturer of professional audio equipment. (They are big when it comes to audio companies, but small next to the average electronics company.) They were very proud of their semi-automated production line. Each day they built the orders that came in that day, rarely needing to hold orders over to the next day. The mantra of the production department was “an economical build quantity of one”. In other words the production line worked just as well and efficiently building one of product A, followed by three of product B, and two of product C, and it would building 100 of product D as a batch.

    With modern automated manufacturing there is no longer a need to produce in large batches to keep costs down.

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    1. No, that might meet their production requirements because of the scale they work in, but if they can’t produce 1000 units for less per-unit cost than they can produce 20, then they have given up productivity for flexibility.

      If they don’t have an order base big enough to make mass runs a good idea, then they are making the right choice, but if they were producing for an audience of, say, a million, then that model would be less cost effective.

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      1. Yeah. I have had run ins with him starting with the “He beats but he’s my publisher” when, without reading me, or looking at the evidence in the article, he informed me that if I wasn’t being pushed by the publishers it was because I sucked and I should pray and learn to be better. But lately he seems to have caught on to what ACTUALLY is going on.

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        1. “Sucked” and “pray” are powerful words, and ones I didn’t use. In fact I have no idea what you are referring to. Quotes are better than exaggerated mischaracterizations.

          “He beats but he’s my publisher” is a phrase that makes no sense to me in English, and even less sense in quotes, since I did not write it. Normally I have at least some vague sense of what I am trying to express, and that doesn’t sound like anything I ever expressed, since it is gibberish.

          Since I actually have read you, and those readings pre-date any interaction, the phrase “without reading me” is one I don’t understand.

          If you’re asserting you are not published by the big publishers who feel your politics trumps your talent, that is as may be. Given the eleventy kazillion fantasy books out there, without hard evidence of a black list, speculative disagreement would not amount to a personal attack.

          My beef is with core SFF fandom, not publishers, about which I know nothing. I had no awakening as you characterized it, but recognized what was afoot the first time I saw the words “white privilege,” immediately recognizable for the concocted racial defamation it is, rather than the neutral social science it is passed off as.

          Finding the source was a different matter, since it involved acquainting myself with literally scores of names I had never heard of before. That takes time. One can recognize a crime in one minute, and take months to gather evidence.

          As for an informal blacklist within core fandom, the evidence is plain, since the PC state right out they will not read books by certain authors. But it is a mistake to believe they blacklist by politics. In almost every single instance I have seen such statements, the person making them is a women, a looney hardcore feminist, and angry at some expression of racism or sexism they made up out of their stupid heads, since it will often comprise the entirety of SFF from the dawn of time til 1960 or thereabouts.

          The other side of a blacklist is advocacy. The QUILTBAG morons in SFF never cease to recommend books for no other reason than skin and gender. To not be recommended, you must be seen as a race and gender traitor, which these clowns then call “conservatism,” though it has nothing to do with conservatism. It is – surprise – race and gender.

          You are not dealing with liberals here; you are dealing with people – the core activists – who have mild to severe mental health issues and who suffer from mass hysteria, and are unflinching racist and sexist supremacist bigots. With the latter four words, I am using their own examples of what rises to that standard. For the rest: you show me a radical feminist activist within SFF and I’ll show you someone who has publicly admitted to at least clinical bi-polar depression, and often more. I have sympathy for people with mental health issues, but that ends when I become a daily target. The PC don’t have to use my name to offend me any more than a Jew is only offended if anti-Semitism uses their specific name – “dirty Jew” is plenty personal, and so are these daily attacks on straight white men.

          That is not liberalism, or even close to it. They hide there because they can hide right next to legitimate expressions of gay rights, anti-racism, and feminism. This entire divide within SFF is a matter of people fooled by that camouflage. In fact this is not “social justice,” but an almost hysterical paranoia and sheer hatred. What you deem “liberalism” is actually a minority of well-meaning morons who have been suckered in by their own ignorance and naivete.

          No one who has an argument turns offs comments, bans people or deletes comments. Only weak-minded morons who are afraid their carefully constructed world of dementia will fall apart do that. There is a difference between tolerating someone who claims to be neither a man nor a woman and being forced to share that delusion. The reason you see so many mental cases flying around SFF is because no one is saying “Hey, wait a minute,” and instead gratifying their least madness, no matter how insane it is. If you think America punches you every day and people want to drag you behind trucks, go get help and stay the fuck out of this beautiful literature you have put on the back burner and turned in race and gender, race and gender, race and gender.

          If you think there are too many stories “of the anointed white heterosexual cisgender man saving the world,” as was just promoted on Scalzi’s blog, tough. Just go fuck off and move to a noble country of PoC where you can immerse yourself to your heart’s content. If it’s legitimate to say a certain culture invented jazz, or native-America this or that, or African this or that, then I invented SFF. Stop acting like anything you do needs UNESCO protection and if I do it it’s some generic brick you found in a swamp.

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          1. No, Fail “He beats me but he’s my publisher” was my title for a post that has got tons of hits here — Charlie wrote about it in PJM and that’s where you developed your charming thesis that it was all somehow my fault. It wasn’t. Oh — okay, it was. I refused to write “Latin” stories (whatever the hell those are) and since the publisher thought I was Latin, I got no promotion.
            If you have no beef with SFF publishers it’s because you never worked with them. They started this issue now spilling over to fandom, by chasing everyone sane out. The essence of my post on publishers was as follows: megabookstores of the nineties left the stocking of books at the mercy of people who probably had never read one (one of the easiest ways to a surprise bestseller was to have a movie that sort of like sounded like your book — even if it had nothing in common.) This meant mostly they took publishers recommendations on what to stock, and mostly the publishers recommended “socially worthy” books. The fandom we have now is the result of the publishers we’ve had for 30 years. I was fighting the system and making no headway — until I did with Baen, which is not like the rest. I have discussed this with Toni at Baen and she said while they too could have done the “push” model and told the bookstores what to stock, it was kind of like blinding yourself to feedback.
            What this means is that they continued publishing what people — real people, not organized fandom — bought. The other publishers not so much.
            While I was aware my best way to get ahead was to be politically correct, I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so it never happened.

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          2. I just said I don’t know anything about publishers. How could I be happy or sad? That’s why I have no beef with them – I can’t. Still, Mormon multimillionaires may have other views about politics, as well as a mid-list author like George R.R. Martin finally breaking through. The type of success you’re talking about is a goofy and elusive thing. In a field like SFF, one was probably more likely to succeed (or fail) on merit when it was closed, like in the ’60s and before, rather than the last 20 years when it’s been a free-for-all.

            I can’t think of any really good SFF authors who weren’t given some kind of shot in the old days. Generally speaking, the old days does seem like a meritocracy. People weren’t scratching their heads going “really?” at a book because those fans were connoisseurs. They weren’t going to elevate crud, generally speaking.

            There aren’t any genius unknowns from that era, and in any event, genre SFF authors didn’t cross over into big time mainstream success until Frank Herbert in the ’70s.

            I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for an SFF author’s chances in the last 20 years. And to go beyond that onto the screen, given the incredibly bad SF films we have, one has to suspect networking is king. There’s just too much stuff out there, and success becomes ever more unpredictable. Networking helps. I didn’t care much for S.A. Corey’s soon to be brought to TV story as novels, though they’ll probably make for pretty entertaining TV. They have the opposite problem Children of Dune did: you don’t have to dumb them down – vomit zombies are already at that level.

            It probably didn’t hurt that Corey (both?) were assistants of Martin or that Martin has connections to TV which may have gotten him his HBO shot. The chance Corey lands that deal on merit is zilch. But how many screen adaptations ever were merited? It’s like a lottery.

            The reason authors are all over Twitter and blogging is they seem to believe, rightly or wrongly, that merit isn’t worth all that much today. Who knows how or why Twilight, Hunger Games and Potter went nutty famous? Agents, luck, connected editors, kickbacks? “Deserve” must be a wildly weird word in all of this. Wool seems to be a magic magnet, where a thing is famous for being famous. Frankly, I didn’t see what all the hub-hub was about, but younger readers have far different perspectives. Something old and boring to one person is bright and shiny new to another. That’s why a yawner like The Road appeals to people.

            As for my “charming thesis,” I suspect it looks slightly different in quotes, especially since you don’t remember Martin didn’t do the post. Truthfully, I myself don’t know what it was.

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                1. I think there must be somebody telling him “hey, they’re saying this, here.”

                  And he doesn’t check, because a quick scan confirms what he already “knows,” and then…..

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                  1. Actually it was “here, they’re saying ‘hey, they’re saying “here this”.”

                    Now quick back onto your spaceship, sailor.

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          3. “You are not dealing with liberals here; you are dealing with people – the core activists – who have mild to severe mental health issues and who suffer from mass hysteria, and are unflinching racist and sexist supremacist bigots.”

            That seems like a textbook definition of liberal, to me.

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  15. One thing I’ve noticed about body sizes: Good God, people moralize mercilessly about them, about something where morals shouldn’t even enter into it, as it doesn’t harm anyone else. I remember something that went up on a billboard where I live trying to shame fat children.

    The fact that, at least for people who are morbidly obese (morbidly obese, here meaning 500 lbs and deformed, not being 1 point over some procrustean BMI limit that leaves tall people looking like holocaust victims) are so not because of any imagined moral fault, but because of horomone and metabolic disorders. People point and shout SIN! SIN!, where I would assume (if I notice) some unfortunate thyroid problem.

    Furthermore, *children* (who usually are all more or less herded through the same industrially processed public school meatgrinder, and fed the same unpalatable pseudo-food, and have no time to call their own anyway these days) probably owe their differences in body type to … differences in body type, not some horrible defect of character. (Besides, do you think they don’t get all the peer pressure they need from other *highschoolers*?)

    Anyway, people’s tendency to moralize and attack their folk-devils is older than the industrial revolution.

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    1. IDK, perhaps they burnt different witches in different eras. Maybe there was always some irrational simmering resentment towards the neighbor’s beefy children. (Is this actually something new? In prior eras did lack of food availability mean that it just seldom ever came up?) I don’t know. It’s very weird though.

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      1. In prior eras being obese was a sign of wealth, and since wealth=power much more so then than now; well you might make fun of them for being fat, but you didn’t do it to their face.

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      2. You know, it’s funny. My dad was born and raised in the thirties in Portugal (born in 31.) Their depression made ours seem like a joke. People were surviving on “soup” made of weeds growing on the street median. My family was A LITTLE better off in that grandma could afford “second day bread” (day old, discounted and local broa — a corn and rye mix dense as stone, made by local farmers — at that, not the good stuff. Sometimes they fried it to make it palatable) and they had a backyard with home grown veggies. However dad talked of eating vegetable soup till he was sick of it, and it very much was “if a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is ill.” Well, he used to say the local kids teased him for being fat. And I thought “this was fat adjusted for the time, right?” Well… no. Found a picture. In famine times, my dad managed to look pretty much like my second son, who is his spit and image. At thinnest he looked “chubby.” So…
        (Older son has always had MASSIVE weight issues, but that probably comes form his being a pre-eclampsia baby. Apparently starving in uterus makes you fat out of it. Shrug.)

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      3. The person whom you accused of witchcraft was overwhelmingly of your own wealth level with a slight tendency for the witch to be slightly poorer.

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    2. Michelle Obama needs a reality check. If that high school freshman isn’t going to lose weight because her classmates call her Orca instead of Laura; what makes Michelle think she is going to listen to her, when she says she’s fat?

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      1. Every time I hear about Michelle Obama’s idiotic concepts about what is considered ‘healthy food’, I think about the meals described in Farmer Boy. The sheer amount of food they were eating back then, on a daily basis, because they needed it, is boggling to me.

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      2. I suspect she was on the receiving end of a fair amount of it when she was in school, going by her body type, and she’s using her position to do the same thing to those who she perceives as representing those who gave her a hard time.

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      3. Getting called “Fat Pat” sure didn’t make me lose weight, even if it did mean that I stopped eating lunch in the lunch room and started bringing three carrots. (Usually had a piece of toast with sometimes an egg for breakfast, and a normal sized dinner.)

        In a movie, it would’ve stopped when folks found out that I was able to change a tire on a car when nobody else could, and various other examples of being fit– including passing the Navy’s fitness exam with a score that would be high for a guy.

        Reality isn’t the movies… thank God for the internet.

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      4. Well, you see, the real issue is that she is a racist.

        Remember the thing about eliminating peanut butter from school lunches?

        Remember George Washington Carver?

        Anyone who has any problem with peanut butter is a white supremacist.

        For her, childhood obesity is just a cover for her racism.

        :)

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    3. I favor the theory that it is partly because you’re not supposed to object to folks being immoral in any of the traditional ways.

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      1. Gluttony’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

        But, yeah, a lot of moralizing that left sex adhered to food.

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            1. Hadn’t heard that line. Just thought it was “pot is cool” but “tobacco isn’t cool”.

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        2. Ah, but they’re not down on eating too much, just on getting ugly from eating. (I have seen arguments that the obsession with “healthy” can develop into a form of gluttony, which isn’t JUST eating like a pig.)

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            1. Oh…dear…

              I just had a disturbing thought that might make sense–
              Gluttony is a sin; Those Folks don’t object to gluttony, but to looking like you got sick from it.
              Lust is a sin; Those Folks don’t object to it, but to looking like you did– have a kid, for example.

              I can’t think of good examples for the rest.

              Also, amazing art here:
              http://www.cuded.com/2010/10/the-seven-deadly-sins/

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          2. C.S. Lewis calls it the gluttony of delicacy, in “The Screwtape Letters.” He says the point isn’t volume, it’s enslaving one’s will and charity to the insistence on gratifying the senses in a certain way, no matter how much trouble it gives to other people, and no matter how impossible to please we become. “All I want is a slice of bread, properly toasted, and an egg, properly cooked, and a cup of tea, properly brewed.” But “properly” means the distorted memory we have of enjoying these simple dishes at a time in youth when our palates were more easily satisfied and we had other pleasures to distract us from those of the plate. Today it would mean harassing restaurant chefs and hostesses with endless demands for organic free-range free-trade purity, and strict limits on salt, fat, carbs, gluten, MSG, etc.

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            1. Today it would mean harassing restaurant chefs and hostesses with endless demands for organic free-range free-trade purity, and strict limits on salt, fat, carbs, gluten, MSG, etc

              Ah — illuminating. Hadn’t really looked at it from that perspective. Having done some time in restaurants…

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              1. The sort of people who demand organic vegetables — and free-range meat. Because it’s WRONG to use factory farming for meat — only for manure is acceptable.

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                1. *evil*
                  I think it was two Thanksgivings ago, my mom and dad took down a bunch of beef for Thanksgiving.

                  Mom’s namesake nephew (long story) is… to be nice, a raging prick with massive inability to critique himself on the same terms he’s applying to others.

                  He spent most of the three days lecturing everyone on various things– including instructing my folks, who have about a half century of practical experience EACH on agriculture, about what they should be doing– and eating only his organic, free range, whatever the heck certified salad.

                  At the end of the weekend as they were leaving my mom mentioned to him that, by the way, all of their beef is certified natural black angus, and when he threw a (predictable) fit, she informed him that he’d been making nasty assumptions and had never bothered to ASK.

                  Sadly, the lesson didn’t sink in.

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                  1. Never does, when you’re dealing with those who hold *religious* convictions in their opinions. *shakes head*

                    I have an uncle who, if you describe to him something without using the current buzzword bingo like oh, say, Ø-care, will nod and agree to the *concept* that effectively forcing you to buy a product is wrong. However, once the soundbite-of-the-day words are back in, will vehemently oppose you, because “that’s different.”

                    Sometimes the kids grow up. I hope your nephew is one of them- he is young, yes? Sometimes contact with reality, personal responsibility, and living on one’s own can make ’em doubt their faith in what other people tell them. We can hope.

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                    2. A shame. My (great) uncle is the youngest of that generation, but still in his seventies. I suppose it’s unlikely that experience will cause him-either of them- to look carefully at their actions and beliefs.

                      For such people the best we can do is endure, I guess. And provide a better example to the younger generations. Living well to task and standard is a high calling, I believe.

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  16. Part of the strength of the Mass Movement is premised on their assumption of the “Right to ask Questions.” Recall the consternation during the 2012 GOP Debates when Newt Gingrich gave a tutorial in challenging the assumptions of questioner. You do not have to “explain yourself” to anybody but G-D, and he already knows you. Defend yourself not, attack the questioner.

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