Last year we were trying to find super-warm coats for our winter trip to Alaska. It's hard to put a coat on in a warm store and really know what it's going to do for you. Mostly you're kind of guessing, judging the coat for bulbousness or fuzz factor or some such. So I was pleased to find a tag on the coat I ended up buying. It said it was good to minus four degrees Fahrenheit.
That is a freakishly specific tag. So many questions arise. Are you just dandy to minus four and then you lose a degree and it's Whoa Nelly, Boy Howdy, Katy Bar The Door? Do they figure in wind chill? Are we walking briskly or are we hunkered at a bus stop? Shouldn't it add "or minus fifteen during menopause?"
 |
| Oops! Missed this one. |
But the coat just said minus four. A temperature that Alaska gets a big kick out of and thinks is adorable, but should be unthinkable here. So I figured I wouldn't have to test their claim too closely in Portland.
It's like seeing a hat with a label that reads "87% endearing except on Tuesdays and Murr, where it will make her tiny head look like the nipple on a baby bottle."
Or a sweater scoring "7 to 9 on the schlumpy-to-fab spectrum depending on choice of brassiere."
 |
| 9. |
There had to be research to produce a tag like my coat has. They had to have lined up a significant number of subjects and zipped them up and put them on the train platform while temperatures dropped, and made notations of precise temps when asses froze off and clunked onto the concrete. You throw out lows and highs from the Albanian fellow who is furred like an otter and the little skinny girl from Ecuador, and you average the rest. You've got the tag people in Indonesia on speed-dial, and your coats are on the market the next day.
Give me another few years, and all my clothes are going to be fleece, cut loose. The tags will say "net weight 130 pounds; contents may have settled during shipping."
Posts
Cute and true as usual. It is rare to combine humor with truth and you do it so well.
ReplyDeleteBut the truth is so funny! Meanwhile it's about 60 degrees F here and it looks like I could spend the winter in my skivvies.
Delete60F is cold here in Australia, most of us get around in jackets and beanies. Well, I do.
DeleteI would love to visit Australia if there was a time you could guarantee temps like that. I am deeply miserable in the heat.
DeleteI'm pretty sure that ANYTHING I've ever found funny (or tragic) has been true. Fiction is just ... fiction. That's why you do funny so well, Murr. (along with our friends Colbert and Stewart, if you don't mind me plugging them too.. . You are in their class).
DeleteDang! Thanks! But does this mean you won't buy my novels? When they're, you know, eventually published?
DeleteI went to school where it could stay at -20 for a week at a time. Once you are below -10, it's all the same. Check out LLBean. They used to sell things rated on degree they worked to. Have a great trip!
ReplyDeleteOops. You've already HAD a great trip to Alaska.
DeleteYou mean, once your ass has fallen off, there's no gluing it back on?
DeleteGood to minus 4F. I must assume it was a summer trip.
ReplyDeleteFebruary. With a quite frozen lake that I recall waking up on. I was only out for a minute...
DeleteWait. Are there two Pooties?
ReplyDeleteThe husband here gets infuriated every time the nincompoop on the local NPR station feels compelled to tell us how to dress for the day. "Bundle up!" "Don't forget your umbrella!"
That bugs me too. That's Pootie's best friend Hajerle there. He used to live in Maine and knows how to dress.
DeleteKimb's question was gonna be mine. Or, is that vice versa? Anyway, I need a pronunciatiion guide for Hajerle, please.
Delete"Harley." Thanks for asking. Like Dan Majerle. Both the boys are basketball fans. Pootie's kind of the Round Mound Of Hound.
DeleteI love your last line - so true, unfortunately. Gravity.
ReplyDeleteI can't whine. I like gravity. It's cold out in space--colder than minus four.
DeleteAnother post which has filled me with (very) mixed emotions. Alaska? Minus 4? The green-eyed jealous thing to the max.
ReplyDeleteFollowed by rueful recognition. I have settled and spread. Spread wins out over settled though...
We are more accurately occupying our rightful volume. I think that is what it is.
DeleteAnd no one has yet commented on your Frederick's of Hollywood Hubba Hubba Pointy Points? Let me be the first.
ReplyDeleteOld pic--from the old bra post of yesteryear.
DeleteOver here, most of our clothing now seems to be made in China. By rather small Chinese people.With twigs for arms and legs.So any garment that fits the torso is likely to have lymph-drainage sleeves.
ReplyDeleteNow, there's an image.
DeleteI bought a coat that was rated to minus 20F. I wore it on a day the temp was about 0, but there was a wind chill. I was SOOOO cold. Last time I will ever go to a winter baseball game. And no, we didn't stay for the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteWait wait, back up--you have WINTER BASEBALL? Are you living in HEAVEN?
DeleteA lot of my winter clothes now are polar fleece and let me tell you they are an absolute magnet for cat hair! I spend a good portion of my day brushing myself off. If only I'd thought ahead and got satin or something else where the cat hair would just slide off. Fleece lined satin of course, because just satin would be way too cold in winter.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we just apply spray adhesive to the cat?
DeleteSki jackets are usually windproof, they'd have to be to stand against the mountain wind speed multiplied by the speed of a skier, I have one that I bought cheaply many years ago, I wear it from Easter to mid spring every year. It's showerproof too unless the rain is a solid sheet of drenching rain. Even then it takes a few minutes for the water to penetrate. Also I believe real leather is windproof, but hellishly expensive.
ReplyDeleteReal fur is ridiculously warm too. And gorgeous. And not even conceivable for a Portland girl who wants to keep living.
DeleteEmotional math. I needed that term. I do so much emotional math in my days.
ReplyDeleteAnd that closing photo? WHY IS IT NOT YOUR FB AVATAR ALREADY?
It frightens me.
DeleteI am usually dressed in short sleeves throughout the winter, but this year have felt the chill...maybe it is menopause as my friend likes to say. At 62 ain't I over that??
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young and under 120 lbs I had a jacket that made me look 45 lbs. heavier, couldn't even put my arms straight down to my sides. But I was warm! Not steady, toppled easy, but warm. If I added hat and gloves and scarf, you could barely tell I was in there!
The beauty of those coats was you could topple without hurting yourself. I remember my boyfriend hating the shapelessness of them though. He said he felt like he was walking with a raspberry.
DeleteI gotta get me a pair of those. More daunting than a gun.
ReplyDeleteI've probably lost my mind yet again, but back up--a pair of what now? Oh, the sweater contents?
DeleteThe warmest coat I ever had was my great aunt's "Hudson Seal" which wasn't seal at all but muskrat dyed black. It had shoulders that a matador would have envied and ginormous black buttons. I wore it to uni in the hippie 70s, patched it with leather patches when it began to disintegrate, and was never cold even when it went to -30F (plus a windchill). Nobody ever tried to spray paint me for wearing fur because the poor old thing looked so pathetic. When that muskrat family finally died (again), I moved to a regular parka, which only works ok because of global warming.
ReplyDeleteYou just reminded me that I had some kind of black fur antique flea market coat in the early '70s. It was ratty but it was great. And no one bugged me about that one either. What did I do with that?
DeleteI used to have a mink-dyed muskrat coat. Apparently it was ugly because a friend I went to dinner with said you should always leave a restaurant with a better coat than the one you arrived in, and that I was in no danger of losing mine. I sent it off to Afghanistan via PETA when we started bombing the people there back to the stone age. I hope someone did get use out of it.
DeleteReally? PETA recycled fur coats? Huh! I did not realize how very much warmer they are than all the synthetics until we went to Alaska. Anyway, good on you.
DeleteYou can judge the cold in Alaska by the degree of nipple erection or dick shrivel. Minus four won't get it in Fairbanks in January: try minus forty, and you will still need layers.
ReplyDeletethe Ol'Buzzard
Dick Shrivel would be a great fictional detective name.
Delete