THIS summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.

In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.

And this “trend” – in men’s fashion, no less – no wait, men’s casual fashion – no wait, men’s casual fashion with freakin’ potbellies! – somehow warranted 750 words.

via Noticed – It’s Hip to Be Round – NYTimes.com.

Slate’s callout: The Bogus Trend Stories of Summer

And for those looking for a more typical Times kind of lifestyle story, they’ll have to settle for the Post, which explores the recessionary suffering of Westchester in a 5-page (OK, that’s Post online pages) article “Squeaking By on 300,000“  Can’t say I could drag myself to the end.

Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.

“I burst out laughing,” she said.

via Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In – NYTimes.com.

On average, people were able to withstand the pain for significantly longer if they cursed than if they did not. Swearing also increased heart rate and decreased subjective reports of pain.

And before anyone criticizes me for Tierney’s politics, he’s not the author of this post.

via Cursing and Pain Relief – TierneyLab Blog – NYTimes.com.

So there you have it. Southerners have little access to healthy food and limited means with which to purchase it. It’s hard for them to exercise outdoors, and even when they do have the opportunity, it’s so hot, they don’t want to.

The image is kind of alluring, too, at least in the foreground:

via Why Are Southerners So Fat? – TIME.

Most Managers are Logical Sloths, says New Rotman Research

Strategic managers, lacking training in how to build their own situational models and reasoning strategies as opposed to “implementing” blueprints and recipes, tend to choose easy problems to make sense of their predicaments and use sub-optimally simplistic methods of framing complex problems, shows new research from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

via The Public Interest Newswire.

I think this sells most managers (including yours truly) short. We are sloths in many respects, not limited to our logical optimization. Not only do we see complexity and recourse to blueprints and recipes – we see hard work and call in sick, we avoid conflict, defer difficult decisions, punish the innocent and promote the undeserving, marshall evidence to support whatever we’ve already concluded, extrapolate from insufficient evidence, and miscommunicate efficiently so as to confuse everyone who takes part in a project.

I’m just getting started!

into something thoroughly respectable, ideally in a melange of shiny stainless steel and earth tones? Well, here’s a hint:

Respectable Sliders?

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Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.

via Parents Pulling the Plugs on Williamsburg Trust-Funders – NYTimes.com.

“Compared with their easygoing clannish ways, our frenetic status seeking and product hunting would look bewildering indeed. Our society would seem noisy, perplexing and maybe psychotic … All you have to do is sit in classrooms every day for 16 years to learn counterintuitive skills, and then work and commute 50 hours a week for 40 years in tedious jobs for amoral corporations, far away from relatives and friends, without any decent child care, sense of community, political empowerment or contact with nature. Oh, and you’ll have to take special medicines to avoid suicidal despair, and to avoid having more than two children. It’s not so bad, really. The shoe swooshes are pretty cool.”

via Sex Sells. Here’s Why We Buy – TIME.

OK, cute idea. But then I got to thinkin’.  Where is that latitude/longitude? Seems awfully far north. And I remember that the 100th meridian is the thumbnail boundary between eastern and western North America, so this would be in the northern part of the west. What are these deciduous trees doing there?

Luckily Google Maps makes it easy to find the answer without pulling out my trusty atlas. It’s in freakin’ Yellowstone National Park! So the trees are all wrong, for sure. But that’s the least of the problem. This location is in the middle of the peninsula/promontory between the Yellowstone Lake’s two arms. There are no roads, no cars there – you can’t even take a motorboat down there. I think  it might even be an official Wilderness Area, if such a thing still exists any more.

So, if I run off a ravine in what looks like Maryland or Pennsylvania, does that mean OnStar will send someone to the middle of a wilderness in Wyoming? It is amazing that they did not check where the latitude and longitude they made up actually was. But I did?