An Economy Great for An Economist

This is really getting my goat. (And nobody should be getting my goat. I prefer my goat remains right where I left him.)

Economists didn’t predict, or at least do something about, the craptastic fashion in which our economy is spiraling into the crapper. YET – and this is a big yet – they are all over our TV’s, magazines, newspapers, and radios talking about the economy, why we are where we are, and how best to get out of this.

While the current state of the economy – which most economists didn’t predict – stinks, business is moving along quite swimmingly for economists.

In conclusion: Bad economy for us = Good economy for economists

A conspiracy theory: Economists saw the global financial crises coming and, instead of speaking out about…

Fruit of Whose Loom? Where our T-shirts come from

The U.S. imported 1.7 billion T-shirts in 2007, and only produced 244 million. The majority of which were produced by American Apparel. That’s right, 90% of our T-shirts are imported.

This month I contributed to Conde Nast Portfolio magazine. Mainly I gathered data for them to include a map with a feature story they were doing on American Apparel’s founder Dov Charney.

Check out the interactive version of the map of U.S. T-shirt imports.

I also wrote a small bit of text that accompanies the map in the magazine, out now. Basically I wrote a 300 word version of: We used to make shirts. Now we don’t. Here’s why….

The Proud Father of a Vegetable

Lately, Annie is asleep when I go to bed. This gives me the opportunity to be alone with our daughter growing in her belly.

I put my arm around Annie’s belly and quickly receive a short, yet forceful, uppercut or roundhouse (who can tell?) from within.

Each night my daughter kicks me goodnight. I hope that this changes over the years. According to the email updates we receive, she’s only the size of head of cabbage, so it doesn’t hurt much…now. But as she develops into larger produce – a pumpkin and eventually walking talking, soccer-playing stalk of corn – I hope this tradition comes to an end.

But for now it’s my favorite part of the day.

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How about a little pea-sized contest in honor of our baby? The…

A rant: Peeing Calvin

Allow me to go off.

Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame IS a rambunctious boy with an overactive imagination.

He IS NOT, nor has ever been depicted as, someone who urinates on things that rednecks don’t like.

Calvin never peed on a floating Chevy or Ford or John Deere or Case symbol, nor a floating (pick a Nascar number). The only thing I could imagine Calvin actually peeing on is a snowman, in an effort to slowly kill it. But everyone knows that rednecks like snowmen. If they didn’t they would surely have an adhesive on the back of their pickup truck of Calvin peeing on one.

So, if you want to piss me off put one of them there stickers on…

Traveling Fish & Swapping Tomatoes

I caught a bit of Michael Pollan on Fresh Air this afternoon. I love listening to people that tell me how crazy our world is. Some nuggets of info from Pollan:

– We catch Salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted, and they ship it back for us to eat. What, is there a shortage of American filleters?
– We import tomatoes from Mexico and we export tomatoes to Mexico. I would love to get a picture at the border of tomato trucks passing each other.

…

Help a blogger out, would ya?

Annie, my wife who has left one comment in the history of the blog, recently informed me that the blog posts of late have been boring. I know, I know, how dare she directly insult my bloggerhood like that? But she’s pregnant and she’s tough, and, more often than I care to admit, she’s right.

So, this is me asking you for help.

If you have any questions or topics (garments, writing, publishing, rock skipping, etc) that you would like me to write on, ideas of how we can spice things up around here, and/or even silly quests that you would like to send me on, leave ‘em in this comment thread or email me at [email protected] and I’ll try to address them in the near future….

Playing Pirate in the Dayton City Paper

My latest column is up on the Dayton City Paper’s website. It will be on for a limited time so you better read it before the link dies. Some of you may recognize it. The column is titled “Playing Pirate” and talks about the Picton Castle.

Here’s the photo that’s included with the story. I currently have it as my computer’s wallpaper.

That’s not the ocean; that’s Lake Erie. Hard to believe, huh?

…

TAL: Cambodian Garment Industry and Chain Store Defecation

Angela at Mommy Bytes pointed me toward a This American Life piece featuring the Cambodian garment industry. The reporter on the Cambodian portion of the piece, Rachel Louise Snyder, is also the author of “Fugitive Denim.” I stumbled upon Fugitive Denim online this spring and was tempted to order it, but I didn’t want to be influenced by it while writing WAIW? so I chose not to. Maybe I will now.

The best part of this particular This American Life show titled “David and Goliath” is David Sedaris on chain store defecation. Yes, that is not a mistype. While on a book tour someone informed David that the act of people defecating in dressing rooms, in the middle of circular racks of…

My first review: Thy reviewer giveth, thy reviewer taketh away

Where Am I Wearing? was reviewed in the Library Journal. If there is a more nerve-wracking way to spend a minute than reading one’s first review, I don’t know it.

You can read the review for yourself, but I thought it might be fun to mine some of the flattering and not-so flattering nuggets out of context.

Thy reviewer giveth…

There were plenty of good things that would look nice pasted across the back cover of the book:

“not a typical book about globalization”

We’ll score that a good one. If you’ve read typical books about globalization they can be kind of boorish)

“the ultimate boy next door”

I’m thinking about making a calendar. Wait, until you see the manly hot outfit I have for the sultry month of…

In defense of ageing & bad book Karma

Last night I went to a reading by author Bich Minh Nguyen. She read from her memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.

Her family moved to the U.S. when she was a baby and the book has a lot to do with them trying to fit in – about them trying to be “super-Americans” as Bich (pronounced Bit) kept repeating. I’m neither Vietnamese nor an immigrant, but, like Bich, I grew up in the 80s. We ate the same junk food while watching the same corny television shows.

So, I enjoyed the reading. And, it made me aware of something I hadn’t thought of before. For most of my life I’ve read the works of authors older than me, if not dead. Now that I’m almost…