The Cleveland Theater of Operations

There are several nice things about having readers. One, they send you things like peppermint bark every year. Which happened for the first time last year. But I'm sure will become a tradition. Because I just broadcast to the internet my desire for peppermint bark, and I have faith someone will send me some. Blogging is like the form of prayer that works.

No, but the other reason readers are nice is you can be really lazy and let them create your blog posts for you. For instance by having everyone ask you anonymous questions. Or by just telling your twitter friend to give you a topic. Which is what we're doing today. Courtesy of The Little Big, our topic today is:

Tube Socks. Or UFOs. Extra Points if I can make a logical bridge between the two.


The first thing to note is that the wiki entry for "sock" is a whole hell of lot shorter than the wiki entry for "UFO". Which seems weird considering one of those things is in our life every day, and the other...not so much.

So I recently bought myself a little tin box of Maxwell House International Instant Coffee, French cafe flavor, which as far as I can tell means with milk. I've had like 5 cups of it today. First of all, it's totally yellow when you add the boiling water. Second, it tastes exactly like the "coffee" that would come out of the cappuccino vending machines at work. Third, I realized that if you used this stuff to make soft serve it would be awesome. Fourth, I am probably for sure going to have pancreatic failure at some point in my life.

Growing old makes you do weird things, like drink a lot of instant coffee, and buy actual winter wear when it gets cold out. I bought boots recently, something I have never ever done. No, literally. The only winter boots I've ever had have been the ones my mom buys for me like every other Christmas. I'm just not a shoe person. I usually have one pair of sneakers, one pair of black flats, one pair of heels, and one pair of hiking boots, the end. I wear a pair of shoes I like every day until the bitter end. No changing to match outfits. No oohing and aahing over pretty little things. I am rough on my feet. I walk them through water and snow and mud and rotting ceiling tiles or moldy carpets or concrete/rat feces dust. I'm the same way with my fingernails. Why bother to paint them? Or even grow them out, when they are just going to get dirty and chip immediately? I'm a grubby little girl. Or at least I used to be. Now apparently I'm a girl who buys grown up women boots. But not with too much a heel, because I'm not walking around in two feet of frozen lake sludge with heels. They are sensible cute motorcycle style boots. I bet I wear them for the next ten years.

As much as it sucks to realize you are a girl and you are getting old, I imagine it must suck more to be a guy getting old. Cause lets face it, there are very few cool old guys. There are nice old guys. There are really smart old guys. There are even hot old guys. But I don't know a lot of old guys who manage to keep up with style. I mean, its harder in general to be stylish as a guy, and most of them weren't stylish when they were young anyway. Its awfully easy to be the guy who only wears t-shirts. Or only wears his work clothes. But see, and here we come to the meat of this post, why do guys start wearing tube socks?

It's like a universal sign of old age when you see your father or spouse start wearing tube socks, pulled up his leg. My theory is that you guys wore them all along, but just not with shorts, and when you get older and your feet get uglier, you wear sneakers with your shorts rather than sandals, and thus the tube socks make their public debut. This does not explain however why none of the guys I knew in school wore tube socks. I'm trying to picture their footwear now, and while its fuzzy, I can say for sure I don't see long white blurs on their calves. Where is the tube sock line?

Maybe it's a sports thing? Like, when they were young nubile lads, they all wore them for practice, so now they keep wearing them? I would be a way bigger supporter of the tube sock trend if they came in stripes and paisley, like ties.

I feel like most of the guys I know now who wear tube socks with their shorts and sneakers are also the kind of guys who listen to Foo Fighters, and spend their weekends mowing the lawn then playing xbox for five hours.

And finally, Foo Fighters were what the Allied fighter pilots used to call UFOS over Europe and the Pacific. SO BOOYAH.