monday evening i watched the aristocrats. i was kind of worried about what i was getting myself into, but the concept of the documentary seemed interesting. wow…that was…something. there were definitely funny parts, but the kind of humour i like generally doesn’t go too far down the path of sexual and scatological matter. seeing as that was sort of the central point of this documentary, i was in for a ride. i think the worst part was learning what sexual actions are tied to certain phrases tossed around these days. i didn’t realize how innocent and naive i was. i mean, i had imagined what they might mean, but i wasn’t really close. *shudder* let’s change topics…
i realized not too long after i bought the mountain bike that blue jeans and cowboy boots aren’t really the best choices for riding. not that i tried it — i came to this realization via purely mental exercises. (i’m smart like that.) i actually own some cargo pants and doc marten sandals too…still not so good for riding a bike. if you’ll recall, i was on a quest to procure some new jeans since most of mine are threadbare these days, so on tuesday i decided to drop by the sears at main and 59. that place is sort of…run down and ill-manned. so why that sears? well, it’s nearby, and i was looking for some dickies. while there, i noticed a lot of their shorts were on sale. remembering that i needed some stuff to ride a bike in, and being aware enough of my body to know i shouldn’t be looking at spandex riding shorts, i decided to go the cool mountain biker look route and picked up a couple of pairs of camo cargo shorts. and i picked up a pair of black dickies for work. i’ve never worn dickies pants before, so this is sort of an experiment to see how i like them.
[aside: why is it a “pair of pants”? is one leg a pant? i mean, it’s called a “pant leg” i guess. but the object in its entirety is called “pants”. did people used to wear just one leg at a time, so if you wore a left pant and a right pant you were wearing pants? because a shirt has two sleeves for your arms but you don’t call a shirt a “pair of shirts” or “sleeves”. of course, you don’t call the sleeves “shirt arms” either i guess. if only there were some way we could collect known information and then make it searchable through some kind of searching interface or something. that’d be pretty cool.]
at this point you may be saying to yourself “okay TeRRY, i understand the camo cargo shorts — but do you really think they go well with cowboy boots?” good question! no, i don’t think they do. that’s why on wednesday after work i dropped by soundwaves to check out their shoe selection. and to pick up centro-matic’s fort recovery cd. i looked through their array of shoes and they had some pretty slick stuff. realizing i’m not 15 years old (note how self-aware i’m being), i decided maybe i shouldn’t try to pull off wearing some new shoe branded by some skater i’ve never heard of. so i made the only logic choice — i headed back to the shoe of my late teen youth: vans. not just vans, but the vans old skool model. here i must admit i diverted from tradition, as i used to wear high tops and now i was looking at low tops. one particular color scheme struck my fancy, but they didn’t have it in my size. another i liked they had in a half size bigger than i normally wear, so i tried them on. they were nice, but i decided to wait.
so, of course, i later came home and started doing google searches. i found a number of different varieties, but most of them were only on one or two sites and most of the time they only had very large or very small sizes left. fortunately for me, the one that caught my eye at soundwaves is common, so i was able to find a pair (see? there’s a reasonable use of the word “pair”) for a good price. i found another site that had one pair left in my size of a style i saw on no other site, so i went ahead and bought them. there were a couple of other color schemes i liked, but i never could find them in my size for sale on sites in the u.s. (japan, germany, holland, etc. though…). both pairs should arrive at my house next week sometime.
thursday evening i decided i should take my bike out for its maiden voyage. i didn’t have any good shoes yet, but i had the shorts and i figured i could get by with my clunky leather sha-sha’s this time around. holy crap. i came to a few realizations. first: i feel completely awkward on a bike these days. i’m sure part of it is the different geometry of a mountain bike, and this one is pretty light — but i felt unstable. i didn’t think i’d have to learn how to ride a bike again. second: i’m not just in horrible shape, i’m actually in no shape. i probably rode it maybe one or two miles, just to get my feet wet with it. it was humid and hot, and i was going fairly fast, but that’s no excuse. i came back to the house and i felt like i was having a stroke. i came in and plopped down and immediately drank a bunch of water. jeebus! i guess i’ll be taking awhile before i can ride with anyone.
since i was sitting on the couch not moving anywhere so i could make sure i wasn’t about to die, i went ahead and watched one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. wow. it was really good. not jaw-dropping good, but it was really good. (and i don’t think i thought that because i’d just had a near-death experience.) i’d seen bits and pieces over the years, but hadn’t seen most of it and never at once. there’s quite a few known people in it, which i didn’t recall. it raises some interesting issues, and does a really effective job of making you dislike the head nurse. you should watch it if you haven’t seen it.
later kevin texted me to let me know they were heading to the house of pies around 11:30pm. i met up with kevin and jo, as well as amy, mark, brian, and sarah (not sure if i spelled those right, but you get the idea). i’d already eaten supper with the potts at lupe tortilla’s around 6pm, but i went ahead and had a couple of eggs, some cottage fries, and an english muffin.
i ended up not going to bed until around 3am, so i wasn’t real excited about getting up in the morning for work. i let them know i was running late, and took the time to take a shower and take care of some stuff at frost bank. which brings me up to my social butterfly friday night… (next post)
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failure is not an option. it's a requirement.
If you’re anything like me you’re not in NO shape, you’re in a round shape. 😉
Pair of Pants…hmm. Did some looking around and here’s what I found:
http://www.dictionary.com
Word History: One would not expect a word for a modern article of clothing to come ultimately from the name of a 4th-century Roman Catholic saint, but that is the case with the word pants. It can be traced back to Pantaleon, the patron saint of Venice. He became so closely associated with the inhabitants of that city that the Venetians were popularly known as Pantaloni. Consequently, among the commedia dell’arte’s stock characters the representative Venetian (a stereotypically wealthy but miserly merchant) was called Pantalone, or Pantalon in French. In the mid-17th century the French came to identify him with one particular style of trousers, a style which became known as pantaloons in English. Pantaloons was later applied to another style that came into fashion in the late 18th century, tight-fitting garments that had begun to replace knee breeches. After that pantaloons was used to refer to trousers in general. The abbreviation of pantaloons to pants met with some resistance at first; it was considered vulgar and, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “a word not made for gentlemen, but ‘gents.'” First found in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, pants has replaced the “gentleman’s word” in English and has lost all obvious connection to Saint Pantaleon.
Here’s my favorite explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_of_pants
In mathematics, a pair of pants is a simple two-dimensional surface resembling a pair of pants. In hyperbolic geometry, pairs of pants are sewn together, leg to leg, or leg to waist, to create Riemann surfaces of arbitrary genus. Because the “legs” can be twisted before being sewn together, there is a large amount of freedom in how the pants can be assembled. This ambiguity is then the moduli space of the Riemann surface.
Formally, a pair of pants consists of two hexagonal fundamental polygons stitched together at every other side. Topologically, a pair of pants is the two-sphere S2 with three points removed. It is homotopy equivalent to the wedge sum of two circles, and thus has fundamental group isomorphic to the free group on two generators (one generator for each circle).
And one more…
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_249b.html
First of all, let’s note there is a class of objects that are thought to consist of two independent but connected parts, usually identical or at least similar to each other. In addition to pants and trousers, there are eyeglasses, scissors, tweezers, shears, pliers, and so on.
The terms for these objects are always plural in form, and they are usually referred to as “a pair of ….” This usage goes back to at least 1297 AD, when we have the expression “a peire of hosen.”
The implication is that the two parts are separable in some sense, and in fact a pair of hose can often mean two separate pieces. (True, you can’t separate tweezers, but I never claimed the English language was rational.)
In contrast to trousers, a shirt is thought of mainly as a covering for the torso, and may or may not have sleeves. Hence no pair.
Hysterical. The whole thing. I may have to read it again.
Also, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is very close to jaw-droppingly great, imo.
Oh and many thanks to Ash for seemingly making Terry’s “searching interface” dream a reality and then reporting on his findings with such thoroughness. I’ve decided that mathematical pairs of pants are my favorite kind although I’m thinking that the hyperbolically geometric ones are probably kind of hard to put on. 🙂