Huge Clothing Sale!

Here's an old thought from a couple years ago:

I’m guessing that you’ve never actually taken the time to think about it, but a huge clothing sale is almost never what it’s advertised as. Most of the time a huge clothing sale is a really big sale for clothing, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Why isn’t a huge clothing sale a sale for really big clothing, and a clothing huge sale a really big sale on clothing? You should really be careful about the order you put words in and the message you’re trying to convey.

So Scott Thought

Toys vs Clothes

To clear up any confusion about the last topic, I want to give all a closer look at my life so you know exactly what is a toy and what is clothing. I have always liked toys. Ever since I can remember, I always need to be doing something. Sometimes I can be content just listening to something or just watching something, but not often. That thing needs to be really important to me, otherwise I tend to lose my focus on it. However, when I combine listening with watching, it is commonly much more entertaining. Similarly, just being about to hold an object isn’t really fun, I need to be doing something with it. The more interesting parts on an object, the better it is for me. It can have sides that move like a Rubik’s cube or things that move on their own like magnets or an interesting exterior like a koosh. So anything that can occupy my time will probably entertain me and is therefore a toy. Also, sometimes toys need to be combined in order to work properly. Allow me to give some examples:

·         Juggling balls: toy

·         Book: toy (note at one point in time books were not toys because I didn’t like them and they were not fun)

·         Gameboy: toy. Game boy is a toy because it can be played with when added to other toys such as pokemon games

·         TV series on DVD: toy. TV (toy) + DVD Player (toy) + DVD (toy) = fun for me (toys!)

So that’s toys. On the other hand we have clothes. Now I’m a man (like not a XX (pronounced double X)) which means I was a boy. I won’t say I didn’t like clothes because that was only true twice a year. I didn’t care about clothing at all. There were two requirements I had for clothes: they covered me and they weren’t uncomfortable. Beyond that I did not care about clothes enough to throw them out if they were too small. This lead to a healthy amount of clothing in my possession, which means I never had to get clothes for myself, nor did I have the desire to. I got all my clothes from two sources twice a year: parents and grandparents on Christmas and my birthday. I always felt like my receiving clothing inhibited my receiving toys. I would always think to myself why don’t they forget the clothes and just give me double toys. So as a kid I didn’t like clothes gifts and I did like toys gifts. This can lead to some confusion about what is toy and what is clothes. If I didn’t like it, no matter how much of a toy it was, it went into the clothing, for example:

·         Clothes: clothes

·         Books: clothing until I was about 15

·         A watch box: clothes, and not because it holds watches that could be considered clothing, but because when you get a watch box when you’re younger than 19 it really sucks as a gift. Luckily, then you turn 19 and it’s pretty awesome.

·         A crazy watch that lights up to tell time: trick- both, fun to play with and wearable. Clothing and toy

I hope this give people a clearer picture of what is a clothes gift and what is a toy gift. I would also like to reiterate that I actually quite enjoy receiving clothes now because, as I said, I don’t get my own clothes. I’ve bought myself maybe one outfit of my wardrobe, but I really like it all. So the people that have been getting me clothes are doing a good job, which makes me excited to get more clothes. I also still like toys. I will never stop liking toys.

So Scott Thought.

Gift Giving

As a child, my parents and my grandparents used to like to make holidays a magical occasion. They would do lots of things, like take us in a limo ride on St. Patrick’s Day, or going to the cabin for Memorial Day and Labor Day, or hiding Easter eggs and Easter baskets. Christmas time in particular was always fun, the seasons are finally changing and it’s snowing, you just got off thanksgiving break and have all of December to look forward to Christmas. If we take a look at Christmas in particular, it gets better still: there are extra gifts all around, it’s a day of complete lounging around and relaxation, there’s good food, you get tons of new stuff, and it’s at the beginning of break. But honestly as a kid you tend to miss a lot of that. Christmas is still best but it’s a lot more about presents and the break. As a kid, I kind of grouped my presents into two categories, toys and clothes. Toys were exciting, clothes were boring. Basically, if something wasn’t a piece of clothing, it was in the toy category. This was a pretty good system because about half of my gifts were toys and the other half were clothes. This grouping actually still works quite well even now, with the key difference that I enjoy the clothes much more now. One other thing that is a little different now as opposed to when I was a kid is that I’m much more integral in the picking out the gift I give to others part, and it disappoints me a little. I think it’s really hard to give people gift in the clothes category if you are a guy. It takes a somewhat good knowledge of a person to know some clothes they want, and an even better one to know their size. This is doubly true if he is giving that gift to a girl. So that immediately takes out half of the gifts someone can give. I think this is why jewelry was created: so men could give girly gifts to women.

So Scott Thought.

Anatomy of an Inside Joke

Hopefully the people that have interacted with me a good deal have figured out that I’m not serious a lot. In fact, most of the time I am joking around. This probably has something to do with my family, we’re always doing crazy stuff, and I’m ok with that. This has lead to a lot of inside jokes for my family and I. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m not the only person that has inside jokes, but I do have some shared inside jokes. Since I was actually part of making something funny at the time it occurred at some point in my life, I know a little about the process. For me, it normally starts with a serious statement, even though it can be a sort of commentary on how the world is viewed, it is normally said in a serious fashion. A lot of the time the phrase that makes up the core of the joke is silly in and of itself, which can lead to an initial bout of laughter. But then, after everything that has lead up to the key sentence, it finally sinks in and people laugh at the sheer absurdity of the idea. And many times, at the end, people are just laughing because other people are laughing. You see them laughing and remember how funny the joke was, then you’re laughing, then you see them again and somehow that’s funny again… and if you do it right, this one simple, often silly, joke can keep you laughing for years (not continuously though, because that would be bad). And nobody else will think that it is as funny as the people that were there that initially started the joke, in fact most people won’t think it is funny at all. They’re all left outside your inside joke.

So Scott Thought.

Backwards English, Backwards

Have you ever noticed that the English language is sort of geared to make us, the people that use it, think or say or write one thing as opposed to another? For example, if somebody wasn’t being truthful, they would be a liar. But what would they be if they weren’t a liar? You might first be tempted to say they would be honest, but that’s not quite right. I can say somebody is a liar, but I can’t say somebody is an honest. It might be my lack of command of the language that I call my native tongue, but the only equivalent I can think of for liar is truth teller. Now why would we want it so that the word which we (or at least I) would like to use less (liar) is only one word, where as the word(s) with the good connotation (truth teller) is two words? It just seems to me that it would be better if it was easier to say good things and harder to say bad things, not the other way around.

So Scott Thought.

Toaster Strudel vs. Pop Tarts

 I think toaster strudels are doing a little bit of over advertizing. Now I’m no marketing expert, for that you would have to talk to my brother, but I think their ads against pop tarts are a bad idea. They start off by showing what clearly looks exactly like a pop tart and calling an other breakfast pastry or fruit pastry or something. Then they inject fruit goo into the middle which plumps it up a bit, and wrap it all up in flaky doughy pastry. First, if you actually took a pop tart, then added gooey goodness to the middle and wrapped it all up, I would think that deserved a taste. That, however is not what a toaster strudel is. A toaster strudel is everything they say it is, without the original pop tart looking thing. It is gooey middle with flaky pastry outside and frosting to top it. If we take a second to think about this, a pop tart and a toaster strudel, if they are even in the same family, are on opposite sides of each other. A pop tart has a compressed, packed dough outside with a (more or less) solid filling, and an already hardened icing top. Toaster strudels have a light, airy pastry outside with a gooey liquid center, and a fresh icing top. They are so different, my desire for each of these is not related whatsoever to my desire for the other. But now that I think about it, they probably would make a pretty good breakfast if they were combined…

So Scott Thought.

Super Villians Rule

Super villains are sometimes way cooler than the superheroes that they fight whom we so commonly root for to win the aforementioned fight. A bunch of superheroes have really weak ways of getting their powers, and as a result, go through almost no trials. For example, superman was born with his powers and had to do nothing to get them, as opposed to Two Face, who gets sulfuric acid splashed in his face, then has to build himself into a villain. It just seems that the villain way of life (building a name for yourself) is more impressive than the hero way (having powers be given to you). Also, villains can be way more creative, in the ways that they torture their respective superheroes.

So Scott Thought.

Hat History

Now I’m not going to say I’m a hat expert, in fact I had the good fortune to learn a little more about hats (and the world) recently when my mom, and then later that night, our waitress, correctly identified a millinery as a women’s hat shop. So I’m not a hat expert, but I am an enthusiast and great hat wearer. I can’t quite recall when I decided I wanted to do this, but at some early point in my educational career, I decided to wear a hat to school. Now for a long time kids weren’t allowed to wear hats in school, so when I say I wore a hat to school, I literally mean on the way to and from school (and like every other waking moment of my life not in school). I liked hats. I really liked wearing hats. In accordance with this I actually wore the hat right up until the school day actually started, sort of as an act of defiance (that was about as defiant as I ever got), but mostly just because I liked wearing my hat. Also, for a long time I liked to use hat to express my enthusiasm for my team. Enter ninth grade, the hat ban is lifted and now I get to wear my hat all the time! Now this brings up a new problem: consider if you will, wearing a hat pretty much from the time you wake up until you go to sleep (sometimes past that) it tends to get pretty dirty. So I came up with a rule for myself, one new hat a year, meaning every hat I had was the only one worn for a year, then it was retired. More recently, I’ve gotten an interest in hair, namely my own hair on my head because it’s awesome. Normally, if my hair wasn’t so long, I would be wearing a hat. This derives from the pure satisfaction I get from wearing a hat, whereas the new trend derives from the fact that I now care more about how my hair looks than about wearing a hat. So like I said, I’m no hat expert, but I sure do have a lot of experience with them.

Scott hat stats:
Favorite practical reason to wear a hat: to cover up ugly in-between hair that isn’t long enough to be a flowing mane but isn’t short enough to look good either
Scott’s number one used hat type: the baseball cap (bonus, my favorite variety is fitted)
Number one thing featured on my hats: university of Michigan
Number two: university of Wisconsin
Rising trend: winter hats/beanies
Trend that should come back: top hats

So Scott Thought.