(Not the greatest picture but it’ll have to do.) The pink parts are bleached, and then the black is screenprinted over. I likes it. I’m kind of picky about t-shirts; Threadless isn’t really my thing, Urban Outfitters rips off too many independents, and after that I don’t really know where to look other than Etsy (which has some awesome shirts, but can be a bit inconvenient). Julian’s are a little pricy at around $40, but by the time you get a $25-30 shirt on etsy and ship it to Canada…

In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone to an orbiting space station for what would be called Mission Six- to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed all four crewmen of the last research mission.

By the third day, Peckmann’s broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He claimed that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him, and that he had to keep moving to evade them. He shouted that if he could capture consume these spirits himself while he still had strength, he could move to the next level of consciousness…

Truly the rantings of an insane man. Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman….pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons.

He had exhausted the entire cargo of vitamins, pills, and fresh fruit well ahead of schedule. There was no way another crew could be assembled to rescue him before he starved. After one rather violently garbled transmission, the static cleared and the last live image on record is that of Peckmann’s empty, wilted spacesuit on the cabin floor.

(via Global Nerdy.)

New Sorels
Originally uploaded by mendel

I bought boots today! Sorel’s 1964 re-issues. I wanted winter boots that I could tuck jeans into that didn’t look like I was going on an Arctic expedition, and I liked these because they don’t look like modern high-tech winter boots. I figure they’re anti-fashion enough to be hip.

There’s going to be a lot of trudging around snowy and slushy neighbourhoods in the next month and a half, and my only insulated boots are ankle-height — the net effect is that the bottom of my jeans get wet and salty, and with dry denim I’m trying to break in that’s not good, because it’s not like I can just throw them in the washer or even scrub spots to get the salt out.

But now I have my dorky boots.

(I went for a walk earlier just to walk through some slushy corners and unplowed spots. This is basically the winter equivalent of buying rubber boots and going out splashing in puddles. Whee!)

would you think that it was just a look, or would you think it was a pro-Palestinian statement? (And where do you live?)

Today’s purchase: American Apparel two-metres-of-cotton-jersey purple scarf. So simple but I love it! Thin enough to wear indoors and be The Guy That Wears A Scarf Indoors which is basically me in a nutshell.

Does this look like an MBA student? No? Whaddya know.

So now I need more of these scarves. Here’s the range of colors. I think I want black, white, and the darker of these striped ones, but I’m open to suggestions too.

(Also: Love these jeans. Would you believe they’re from the Gap? “Morrison” slim-fit. I’m so glad I can finally wear slim-fit without looking like an inverted triangle — down to 180 lbs from >200, and a 34″ waist from a 36+. A few years ago that was 220 and a 38″, too. Yay!)

Trying to come up with a b-school wardrobe has been more work than I expected, half because of Ottawa’s dearth of menswear stores and half because I have only a very rough idea of expectations. Some schools demand smart business casual and up from students, who they feel are representing the top tier of the b-school to the undergrads and visitors; others only recommend it.

I realized today that for the next year I am going to be predominantly selling: selling ideas to classmates and professors, selling my abilities and judgment to my group, selling myself to potential employers. And one of the rules of business dress is that the person doing the selling dresses smarter than the person being sold to.

So based on that I suspect that as long as I stay within business casual I probably don’t need to worry about overdoing it.

I’ll get to take advantage of the perk of men’s business wear, at least.: people don’t notice when you wear the same pants (or even suit) twice a week, providing your shirt (and tie, in the case of a suit) differ, provided the pants (or suit) are solids. So basics it is, then.

I’m looking forward to having something to dress to, though; the problem at Mitel was that I couldn’t justify even business casual given that coworkers tended towards vendor polos and jeans. Wearing a dress shirt and wool trousers had me dressing like senior IT management which just felt awkward. At school I know I’ll be underdressing the faculty provided I don’t wear a suit and tie to class.

(I will need a suit or two, though, for presentations and events and interviews and so on. First one will probably be H&M or Zara, since I need it for early September; second one I might get through my father, although I’m also tempted to try out Thick as Thieves, a made-to-measure line launched by a StyleForum regular.)

You can see how the thin leather’s already starting to crease a bit. That’s fine for these guys, they’re meant to be a bit beat up. But you can also see that I’m fighting the creases with shoe trees!

If you’re a typical guy, you probably have at least one or two pairs of shoes with leather uppers and sole like these. (Or maybe with leather uppers and a rubber sole made to look like a leather sole. Those probably count too, although it’s not as urgent.) If you do, you should have at least one pair of shoe trees.

Shoe trees are cedar (or plastic, but you want cedar) forms which wedge into your shoes to restore their condition after you’re done wearing them. Here’s what the sort you’d pick up for $20-$30 at a typical mall shoe store look like:

There’s a few moving parts: the bar between the toe and heel parts is hinged vertically at the toe and spring-loaded for length, and there’s an expander wedge between the two toe parts which pushes them outwards to fill the toe box when the heel is pushed down into the shoe.

Two particular elements of daily wear greatly accelerate the wearing out of leather shoes. First,when you walk around, you roll on the ball of your foot, and that curves the sole upwards. That creases the upper and slowly bends the sole up at the toe. Second, you sweat, which means the shoe goes through moist-then-dry cycles with every wearing. That’s hard on the leather to begin with, but it magnifies the potential damage of the sole-bending: moistening stiff leather is how cobblers intentionally bend it!

Shoe trees address both of those problems. The unfinished cedar slowly absorbs the moisture from the leather, and the spring between the toe and heel stretches the sole out flat so that it dries in that position.

Because shoe trees work on moist leather, it’s important to get them in the shoes as soon as they come off your feet, and then leave them in for a day or two. (You can leave them in longer if you want; some people buy a couple pair of trees for all their shoes, and others buy one pair of trees for each pair of shoes.) Note that that means that you need at least two pairs of shoes for daily wear. The easiest way to destroy a pair of leather shoes is to regularly wear them two or more days in a row without letting them recover for a day.

Shoe trees can easily double the lifespan of a pair of inexpensive (sub-$300) leather shoes. I recommend considering them a necessity, just like a hanger is a necessity for a suit jacket. Shoe trees come in sizes, so be sure to find the size that matches the shoes they’re going in. (Don’t confuse them with shoe stretchers, which are of a similar shape but which apply much more pressure between the heel and toe and across the toe box, intended to stretch the leather instead of maintain it!)

(Leather dress boots like Chelsea boots also benefit from trees and can often get by with shoe trees, but it’s worth looking for boot trees that also shape the ankle of the boot. Expensive shoes often include their own shoe trees, carved to match the last on which the shoe was formed!)

But not today! Today I went shopping.

Bought a couple of spandex-cotton polos from America, one brown and one light blue, two for $50; a couple of t-shirts from AA, one fuchsia to go under a black polo, the other army green; a mango, brie and coriander panini for lunch; and a chambray shirt (which that link inexplicably calls “denim”, but it’s not) on sale at the Gap for $20, one size down to keep it snug. I have to be careful washing that one, though. Tried on some gray jeans, which I want for the summer, but it’s too early in the season for me to have any judgment on whether or not it’s the right gray. They didn’t fit well anyhow.

I also picked up the latest Details to read over lunch. Details has been good lately, maybe just because the stuff I’m wearing and the stuff they’re showing intersect a bit more than usual, but also because they’ve been running some great articles about fashion don’ts that I’ve been meaning to share with you: last month’s Say No To Square-Toed Shoes, and this month’s Get Your Wallet Out Of Your Pocket. The PT Cruiser analogy in the shoes article is perfect.

Odd thing I noticed driving home today, tried to get a picture of, but failed because of the light changing before I had a chance: A dry cleaner downtown has a sign up that says “Support the Troops – Red Shirts Half Price”. Now, I know that the “red shirts” connection is that there is a thing going on lately in which people wear red on friday to somehow telekinetically support our troops in Afghanistan, even if half the people wearing red do think they’re in Iraq — but the only thing I can think of when I see all these mentions of “red shirts” is Star Trek, which is a bit off-message.