A Commentary on the Origin of Neckties

I wore my new scarf for the first time yesterday. Very cute, that little piece of turquoise cotton. Those decorative ones are about as useful as men's neckties. I like scarves more than neckties, actually. An alarming number of men seemed destined to be perpetually bad tie choosers. Some are even worse at tying the things, for that matter. Here I shall insert an edit - a wonderful use for neckties I had previously not thought of. Better than stealing that dude's baseball cap - catch him in a tie and yank him around by his neck. Oh my evil mind.

I remember discussing neckties when we recorded our podcast at The Oklahoman last year. The other aspiring young reporters chosen for my group were almost strangers to me, and podcast studios are uncomfortably intimate places to get to know people. You can view the giant headphones you all wear as either a bond of coolness between you, or a dorky piece of recording equipment that just makes you look dorkier to match the idiocy coming out of your mouth. Your choice.

But back to neck ties. One of the girls had researched their origin for the podcast, and announced that they were originally some sort of battle attire worn by Croatian soldiers. My inherent skepticism led to my own internet research endeavors, and I unearthed a large number of arbitrary websites of questionable authority. Some agree that they came from Croatia, some say they come from silk pieces wrapped around the necks of the members of the Terracotta Army in China...and a plethora of other theories. That's pretty much where my interest petered away, and redirected to more reminiscing of Newsroom 101 at The Oklahoman.

My blog archives provided this humorous excerpt, obligingly referencing those headphones....

We got to go into this tiny recording studio with bumpy foam on the walls and sit around this little round table and sit there....well, talking. Into the mics. The headphones were broken, so we were denied the coolness factor of sitting there feeling like real radio people with spiffy headphones. Ha.

I would've felt much more relaxed and secure had not my stool been determined to throw me to the floor. I had to brace myself on the table the whole time to keep from swinging wildly off in a counter clockwise direction with a succession of frightened screams and the probable end result of a screwed up podcast. The world's first stainless steel bucking backless swivel chair. [http://singdanceandplay.blogspot.com/2008/03/do-not-be-satisfied.html]


One morning we had a particularly entertaining guest speaker. He was the Life and Entertainment reporter, maybe? Or perhaps he was actually on the crime beat....don't remember liking the crime guy, though...Too bad I took an entire semester of news reporting and never learned to take notes.

Anyway, he was talking about a case in Europe where this man volunteered to be eaten by another man. We sort of got off topic then (seriously, do you blame us) and Carrie mentioned that there were people all over the internet volunteering to eat and be eaten...we collectively decided that there was big money to be made in the creation of CannibalMatch.com - let's get all these people matched up...

There are all sorts of disturbing news stories, really. There was a story yesterday about these women who buy baby dolls and pretend that they are real children. They give them birthday parties and take them on outings in the park...reportedly getting all the best parts of motherhood without the dirty diapers. Now really. http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=43464502661&h=klw4T&u=X8YLl