Had a fabulous time up at Channel 3 in Hartford - we appeared live this morning on the show "Better Connecticut." Big thanks to Scot and Kara, Stephen, Jennifer and Stephanie for a great experience!
"Look, Muffy, a t-shirt for us."
We've officially launched "Connetiquette" and are sending out this Press Release (reprinted below) in case you missed it:
Original "White Glove" Line aims to smarten up a state of mind.
WESTON, CONNETIQUETTE - Doing good by behaving well. Stay-at-home-dad (extraordinaire) Timothy Cataldo was waiting for the school bus with his three kids recently, along with his neighbor's two kids, when the youngest Charles asked as the bus pulled up to their stop: "Mr. Cataldo, who gets to go first?" He said "Ladies before gentlemen." Charles looked puzzled and said "But I'm only in kindergarten." "Are you a gentleman or not?" "No?" Yes you are Charles, Cataldo corrected him, as the girls got on first followed by the boys, and that was that. But he thought to himself; I should put that on a t-shirt... in ALL CAPS.
A week or so later Cataldo’s at the middle school picking up his daughter from play rehearsal when her friend's mother says to him, out of the blue, that she thinks it's great it's ladies before gentlemen at his house. He thought she was kidding, so he said something like "Absolutely - what's it at your house?" That’s what is known as the common touch, and it's one of the reasons Cataldo has so many friends in town.
Seriously, Cataldo started thinking about manners and what matters, and not to get too deep into it because we're really only talking about t-shirts after all, but it seems that culture to most Americans means museums and art, not values. Which is the exact opposite of what it should be, and has been for some time: "Ethics, they're not taught in schools today, and I'm not kidding you about that." Mr. Finasi used to admonish Cataldo and his classmates in 7th grade social studies way back in '75. Which led him to dig out his dog-eared copy of "The Official Preppy Handbook," (Workman Publishing, 1980, Lisa Birnbach, Editor) a tongue-in-cheeky manual about proper breeding and good taste, and turn to the page titled "Etiquette in Connecticut."
“The first guide to Mannerisms, Dress Codes, Proper Breeding and… Winning with Ease and Losing with Grace" is meant to be sarcastic and show-offy - but it has a lot of wry, knowing humor and a pitch-perfect tone that in a bit of intentional or perhaps unintentional irony actually validates the traditional stereotypes rather than satirizes them. It’s just impossible to mock manners and courtesy, and pooh-pooh propriety with such perfect form and impeccable grammar.
Inspired, Cataldo decided to launch his original "White Glove Line" of Uppityshirts (Up-i-tee shirts, get it?) starting with “CONNETIQUETTE.” The reasons, he says, are twofold: to try to smarten up our great state “starting in our own back yacht I mean yard, 06883” with a name we can all be proud of, and aspire to live up to. And to raise the level of awareness that civility around here is about respect and consideration for others, not which fork to use, and that the maxim "Doing good by behaving well" is true even though “I kind of just made it up” Cataldo jokes. He also wanted to give his kids an excuse to wear an uncollared shirt to school for a change (and the tourists something untouristy to take home with them.) Secondly, because he really dislikes "The Nutmeg State."
Cataldo plans on adding new towns every month, starting with Westport, Ridgefield, Wilton, Greenwich and New Haven. "Connetiquette" will also be available in select retail stores in the near future - tune in to his website www.uppityshirts.com for updates. He’s also going to offer bumper stickers, coffee cups with saucers instead of mugs, (pinkies up!) and has plans in the works to introduce an online "Miss Connetiquette" Contest. He might even consider some sort of official recognition, despite his knee-jerk (uppity?) disdain for authority - anyone have Governor Rell's cell phone number handy?
The Official Preppy Handbook
I've reproduced page 38 in its entirety for you to decide for yourselves:
Etiquette in Connecticut
Quiz #1
The following questions are designed to clarify some fine points of the Prep sensibility - to spotlight decisions in four situations that only a Preppy would make. For those to whom the difference between good sense and good manners is not obvious, answers appear at the bottom of the page.
1. You are invlolved in a rear-end collision on I-95. You leave your car and...
a. Violently and rudely gesture at the other driver, using objectionable and threatening language.
b. Exchange license and insurance information as stipulated by state and federal laws.
c. Discover that your law partner skippered other driver's older brother's boat in Bermuda Race of '55, and go out for a drink.
2. At a dinner party, a young guest drinks the contents of his finger bowl. You, as the hostess...
a. Ask, in a loud voice, if the young guest wouldn't prefer his refill on the rocks.
b. Ignore his gaucherie and continue talking to Trip Dunwhistle just back from Bar Harbor sitting on your left.
c. Without further ado, drink the contents of your own.
3. After you save a drowning youth, the local newspaper asks for an interview, which would also be accompanied by a photograph. You decline, because...
a. You don't think you look good with wet hair.
b. You don't wish to receive acclaim for what was a noble, selfless act.
c. Your family believes that you should appear in print only three times in your life - upon birth, marriage, and death.
4. When setting the table for an informal dinner you will serve, among other things...
a. Ketchup in a bottle, salt in a shaker, Triscuits in the box.
b. Ketchup in a bottle, salt in a shaker, Triscuits on a plate.
c. Ketchup in a dish, salt in a dish, Triscuits in the box.
Answer in each case is C.
Upstairs, Downstairs
Notting Hill is a real charmer (and a great script), and I was watching it for the first time in a long time the other night when I came across this gem of a scene, which I had forgotten about. It's not the subtlest or cleverest exchange in the film, but at least it has some relevance to the task at hand, i.e. dumbing (humor about) t-shirt humor up:
Uptown
I was in the video store this past weekend and in the bargain bin I noticed a VHS copy of the 1990 classic "Downtown" starring Anthony Edwards and Forest Whitaker. Classic box-office bomb I mean, and it brought me right back to Milan, Italy 1991. I was working for a small design studio there then that did a lot of work for CBS, Fox and Disney and one of my jobs was to translate all the movie material including videocassette covers and posters from English into Italian.
My boss used to say that the English language was 'plastic' and when he told me this I first thought he meant it as an insult; that English was artificial and kind of fake and inauthentic. But what he really meant was that it was malleable and infinitely adaptive, colorful and fun and that we understand the world as well as our vocabulary is large.
So I'm plugging away at a Yogi Bear and Boo Boo book, when the very first film that I was given to translate was 'Driving Miss Daisy', which coincidentally was shot next door to me when I lived in Atlanta a few years earlier. Lot of back and forth, but they finally went with "A Spasso Con Daisy" which is so wrong it's practically a crime.
Anyway, after the likes of "Worth Winning" and "Turtle Diary" completely destroyed my will to live, "Downtown" comes across my desk. I'll never forget trying to explain the concept of "downtown" to my colleagues, and the atrocious names I came up with for that film: "Via Sporca" comes immediately to mind. But it was impossible - I was trying to tell them what freedom looks like. Sidebar: Reminds me of something I read once: "To see her standing in the sunlight was to see communism die." After a lot of agita, they ended up going with "Downtown" which you would think was a kind of victory for me but was in fact even more of a felony since Italians don't have any idea what it means.
Every once in a while I had to translate an Italian film title or t.v. promo into English. The only one I can think of right now, probably because it was so lame was about two guys living with their mothers (what else is new?) in Puglia or somewhere who meet up, and then meet up again somewhere else like Paris and fall in love and come out of the closet (off camera of course) finally, and live happily ever after. I made a mock mockup poster with the headline "Limp Trysts". The only other American working in the office, P.J. Hill from Dorchester (the yacht club side) saw it and asked "What are you doing here?"
Place-Name Game
We've got another brain challenge going on at Uppityshirts Worldwide HQ, the Topical Toponym Contest. The idea is to come up with a contemporary word derived from a place, such as Shanghai (abduct by force, from Shanghai, China), Paisley (design, from Paisley, Scotland) or Timbuktu (metaphor for a distant land, from Timbuktu, city on the Niger River in Mali), along with a definition. We're looking for originality and humor. Our attempt:
Chicago - to railroad (someone) INTO office.
Send all entries by Valentine's Day to: "Toponym Contest" in the subject line. Winner receives a year's supply of "Smart Pills" - so go ahead and fire up the synapses!
Washington Monumental
I finally got to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in real life. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced. And the Lincoln Memorial too - "I will keep the country united whether or not I free all the slaves. Or none." And Obama being sworn in this week, all brought thoughts of Keats's 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time' to mind: "So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,/That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude/
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,/
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude."
I think the monument speaks for itself, but I also think words matter. Here's Maya Lin's description of the wall in her original design entry:
“Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth - a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial’s walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying those individuals into a whole. For this memorial is meant not as a monument to the individual, but rather as a memorial to the men and women who died during this war, as a whole.
“The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it; the passage itself is gradual, the descent to the origin slow, but it is at the origin that the meaning of this memorial is to be fully understood. At the intersection of these walls, on the right side, at this wall’s top is carved the date of the first death. It is followed by the names of those who have died in the war, in chronological order. These names continue on this wall, appearing to recede into the earth at the wall’s end. The names resume on the left wall, as the wall emerges from the earth, continuing back to the origin, where the date of the last death is carved, at the bottom of this wall. Thus the war’s beginning and end meet; the war is “complete”, coming full circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle’s open side, and contained within the earth itself. As we turn to leave, we see these walls stretching into the distance, directing us to the Washington Monument to the left and the Lincoln Memorial to the right, thus bringing the Vietnam Memorial into historical context. We, the living are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths.”
“Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each 200 feet long, and 10 feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending towards ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing. The actual area is wide and shallow, allowing for a sense of privacy, and the sunlight from the memorial’s southern exposure along with the grassy park surrounding and within its walls, contribute to the serenity of the area. Thus this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.
"The memorial’s origin is located approximately at the center of the site; its legs each extending two hundred feet towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The walls, contained on one side by the earth, are ten feet below ground at their point of origin, gradually lessening in height, until they finally recede totally into the earth, at their ends. The walls are to be made of a hard, polished black granite, with the names to be carved in a simple Trojan letter, 3/4 inch high, allowing for nine inches in length for each name. The memorial’s construction involves recontouring the area within the wall’s boundaries, so as to provide for an easily accessible descent, but as much of the site as possible should be left untouched (including trees). The area should be made into a park, for all the public to enjoy.”
Flying in the Face of Convention, II
Here's another piece to the puzzle, this one a dead giveaway:
Flying in the Face of Convention
Apropos of nothing in particular except that I just came across it and thought of a challenge: if I showed you the sketch below and asked you to tell me what it is, would you be able to do it?
Elemental
3 Uppityshirts to Tricia Backelin for sending in the winning entry in the "Periodic Tableau" Contest:
Tricialadium - A sweet-smelling (though tangy), highly resilient and flexible heavy metal. Highly reactive in the presence of dense gases. Combines well with certain usually stable liquids to form uncommonly beautiful bonds.
Atomic Symbol: Ta-Da
Thanks for all your entries, but we still haven't gotten the right answer for the "Flying in the Face of Convention" challenge. Anyone want to start the new year off right with a free Uppityshirt?
Periodic Tableau
Every once in a while we try to get to the heart of the matter, to the core of our audience so-to-speak, for R&D purposes of course, but also for fun. So we came up with the idea for a "What Are You Made Of?" Contest. The rules are simple: come up with a new element named after yourself (or one of your heroes), along with a brief description and chemical symbol. The winner will receive 3 Uppityshirts of their choice, and complete vindication for that D- in Freshman Chemistry.
Here's ours:
cataldonite - a tasteless, colorless, amorphous and totally inert gas with the atomic number -270 (absolute zero) and the chemical symbol Lb*. Found naturally-occurring in nature. Not known to interact well with other elements; sometimes confused with Ironicum.
If you can't think of one, or don't know who you are, try one of these:
joeschmoenium
obamite
You've got until the end of the year. Please send all entries (with contact information) to:
What Are You Made Of?
Initiation
We thought the best way to get started was to tell you about some of the people we think incarnate "uppity" in life and art. There are the usual suspects; Diogenes, Montaigne, Washington, Emerson, the Wright Brothers, Churchill - but we wanted to kick off with a 21st Century guy who in our opinion is a particularly recalcitrant and clever underminer of the highest caliber.
Wonderful Things
James Sanborn is an American artist whose sculpture "Kryptos" stands in the courtyard of the CIA building in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos means "hidden" in Greek, and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering" but it's really about Sanborn having fun, and the last laugh.
As you can see it consists mainly of a piece of copper about 10' high and 15' long that resembles the Microsoft Windows logo, divided into 4 sections, each encrypted with a different code. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, and despite the best minds in the field staring out at it every day, in what can only be bewilderment, it still has not been completely solved.
The ciphertext on the first half of Kryptos contains 870 characters, while the other half is a Vigenere encryption tableau with 869 characters. Sanborn has said that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle - solvable only after all 4 passages have been decrypted.
James Gillogly, a computer scientist from California was the first person to publicly announce (in 1999) that he had solved the first 3 sections. The 4th section, comprising the remaining 98 characters, however, had stumped him. After this announcement, the CIA revealed that their man David Stein had already solved the first 3 sections too, using pencil and paper, but was also unable to figure out the last one.
Here are the first 3 sections, decoded:
1st Section - Keywords kryptos, palimpsest
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
2nd Section - Keywords kryptos, abscissa
IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO
3rd Section
SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)**
Even though there is an online community, The Kryptos Group dedicated to figuring out the puzzle, the fourth section remains unsolved today - so get cracking!
**This is a paraphrased misspelling of Howard Carter's account of the opening of Tutankhamon's tomb in 1923. The question that ends the passage was posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter famously replied "wonderful things".
'sup?
Got a great write-up in our local paper The Weston Forum yesterday. Thanks Patty for making us look good and sound like we know what we're talking about. FREE DELIVERY for Weston residents this week, and maybe next - so order now!
Out and About
We're debuting our "White Glove" Line today with our fingers crossed and pinkies up! Kidding aside, our goal is to rebrand the state "Connetiquette" with a little fun (and finesse), starting with our very own hometown, 06883. And work our way up, politely.
If you'd like to have us do a version for your town, send us a quick email (with contact information) to:
Our Town Too?
All Aboard
Took the kids to visit my brother down in North Carolina over spring break, and on my way back home pulled into "Fast Stop Number 2" to pick up some "Thunderbird" which you can't get around here. Picture this: it's 7 a.m., I've got 5 home-made Easter Bonnets in the front seat with me (we stopped at the parade in New York on the way down), 60 pounds of pork sausages (my brother has a catering company), luggage, 3 kids and 2 Great Pyrenees "puppies" that I had just bought the night before from a breeder in E. Treestump, Tennessee. Felt kinda sorry for the state trooper who stopped us in West Virginia.
So I go into FS#2 (which was also the Greyhound bus station) and there are 6 bottles of Thunderbird left, along with a pint of Night Train, and I'm standing in line with my arms full (they also had a 3-cigars-for-a-dollar special), when the brother behind me mutters something like "that's what I'm talking about (whitey)."
Fast forward to the other night - we're having dinner with some friends and the wife, let's call her "Bunny", says something like "Preston is going out tonight and I've got a great movie I want to watch." I said "I've got some company for you." and gave her the bottle of Night Train since I had just given the last bottle of Thunderbird to the dishwasher repair guy. She said thanks, I'll just curl up on the couch and get all cozy when I get home.
I happened to talk to Bunny yesterday - she wanted me to pick up her daughter from tap dance - and I asked her "Did you get on the train the other night?" She said "What train?" "The Night Train." Long pause. Long. "Oh." "My." "God."
I'm just going to conclude this unfortunate digression with a quote from bumwine.com - "Don't let the 0.5% less alcohol by volume fool you, the Night Train is all business when it pulls into the station. Some suspect that Night Train is really just Thunderbird with some Kool-Aid-like substance added to try to mask the Clorox flavor. But the night train runs only one route: sober to stupid with no roundtrip tickets available, and a strong likelihood of a train wreck along the way. All aboard to nowhere - woo woo!"
University of the Streets
We just got back from our "Smarten Up!" talk at Housatonic Community College, as part of their "Entrepreneur Week." A special thanks to Professors Alan Weaver and Pam Pirog for the invite, and to all of the enthusiastic students who attended. Read all about it here: "Searching for the startup with giddyup."
Brain Boost
The "Smart Pills" we've been giving out as a joke to our best customers have proven so popular we've decide to add them to our repertoire. They come in 3 sort of original flavors (in name only): "Peppermental", "Shakespearemint" and "Synaptictac".
"Wickid" Cool
We’re happy to announce the launch
of our "wickid" Uppityshirts - due to
unpopular demand (my kids kept
nagging me). Seriously, get an
Uppityshirt (or two) for your kid(s) and
receive FREE SHIPPING - just solve this elemental coupon code cryptogram:
Ba + 2Na =
Classic Comeback
Heads up: our newest “Grown Up”
design has just been released. It’s
actually a re-issue (and slight redesign)
of our first really big hit. See Yalebait for yourself.
Classic Comeback II
"Emotional Cripple"
I ran down to Georgetown Liquor to pick up some expensivo vino for my wife (she was having some of her friends over) last Friday afternoon. I'm standing in line behind an old skinny guy buying a pack of Marlboro's (red) and a pint of MD 20/20 and I'm thinking: the dude's going to party tonight! Anyway, I went out to my huge SUV monster in Beluga (as in whale) Black and there's a lady standing there with her hands on her hips. Not to stereo-type, but I noticed her Prius had a 'Bushit' bumper sticker. On it.
Before I proceed with the (brief) exchange, let me just say I had 5 kids in the "Palin Special", all hungry, 2 of them in car seats, 2 others who shoulda been, and one in the front passenger seat, unbuckled. And did I mention that I look like Keith Richards - on a good day? Anyway, judge for yourselves readers:
Ms. Dogood: "What's YOUR handicap?"
Me, glancing at the 'Handicap Parking Only' sign and then back to meet her eyes, icy knives skinning me alive: “I can't read.”
Man Overboard
Fatherhood in 50 words or fewer:
Cate (5 years old) and I are in the car running errands
when she asks me if I’d like to play the
body-parts rhyming game. I say sure.
She says “Ok, you start.”
“Nose.”
She says “Toes.”
“Good one Cate.”
She then says “It’s my turn.”
So I say “Go ahead.”
She says, smirking “Tasshole.”
No Cowboys
"Indian Summer", a documentary we made several years ago about the original American motorcycle (and the only low-hanging fruit of our Hollywood dream) features this gem of a clip. Talk about
style and wit! Ou sont les nieges d'antan?
Top-Drawer 10
These aren’t in any particular order -
and are offered without comment,
for now.
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner
- William Styron
2. European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages
- Ernst Curtius
3. Lorna Doone
- R.D. Blackmore
4. The Road to Serfdom
- F. A. Hayek
5. Moby Dick
- Herman Melville
6. The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire
- Edward Gibbon
7. Essays
- Michel de Montaigne
8. I Capture the Castle
- Dodie Smith
9. The Bell Curve
- Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray
10. Robinson Crusoe
- Daniel Defoe
Prescriptivists Rule!
We are continually impressed with Motivated Grammar, Gabe Doyle's inspiring computational psycholinguistic blog. Old-school incorrigible.
A Man of his Words
Anu Garg's delightful and quixotic A.Word.A.Day is justly celebrated by the New York Times as "The most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace." And it's practically a free college education.
Amuse-Girl
I've known a lot of women (in real life and in literature, which is sometimes almost the same thing) whose poetic names alone inspire. Here's a list of some of them, with a twist: can you tell which one is made up?
