Slave to fashion

Better than the comics

A plastic crate sits in one corner of my dining area, where newspapers get pitched into it every morning. The crate gets to gobble newspapers in two servings. First I strip the newspapers of their sports sections, classified ads, and sales inserts. I never look at those, so they get dumped immediately. The rest of the newspaper follows later, after I've had a chance to peruse my favorite sections.

The comics are also included. I like those. And the editorial and news pages. And, of course, the sections on style and fashion. You really can't beat the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle's style section for the latest word on what the fashion-conscious beautiful people will be wearing.

I'm not sure, however, exactly where these beautiful people are or when they will be wearing these new fashion creations. Not around here, apparently.

I don't flip through these sections for my own sake. You understand, I'm sure, that math professors are exempt from all of the rules of style and fashion. One of the beauties of the academic profession is that you can get away with just about anything, from ties to T-shirts. Hardly anyone cares or notices.

On the other hand, our students are mostly in the target age-demographic for the fashion shows reported by the Chronicle, but mine seem peculiarly immune to fashion-forward trends. I am fairly certain that none of them will be sporting Feng Chen Wang's outré offerings from a recent show at the San Francisco Arts of Fashion Foundation. Although the show was titled “Uniquely Untrendy,” I suspect they were being just a bit insincere. The results look plenty trendy to me.

Anyway, photos like this one are a good reason to refrain from tossing away the style section when I reduce my morning papers to their essentials. It's funnier than the comics section, even at the risk of snorting coffee out my nose every time I turn a page.

I just hope this young couple doesn't turn an ankle.

I can see clearly now

The cheeky student

My students' weird outfits seldom surprise me very much. Young people adopt and abandon various fads with cheerful nonchalance. The bare-midriff craze seems to have run its course. Either the girls got tired of the draftiness or no longer feel obligated to display tattoos on the small of their backs. And the boys have grown weary of pulling their jeans down and exposing their boxers.

Well, most of them have. A few latent exhibitionists continue to sublimate their urges by allowing their trousers to sag around their thighs. I had one in a recent math class. He liked to sit in the back of the room, which was just as well, except for the occasion when it turned out to be an awkward choice.

Usually, when I have papers to return, I call out the students' names and hand them back one by one. It would be a little easier and faster to just toss them on the side table and have the students pick them up for themselves, but I prefer to invest the couple of minutes it takes to return the papers individually, reinforcing my recollection of their names (occasionally a challenge in a forty-student class) and adding a bit of a personal touch. Anyway, my students often need the time to settle down for class, since it apparently takes an incredible number of keystrokes to turn off their cell phones before those devices shut down. (Some of my students even need to keep pulling them back out of their pockets to fiddle with them further. How inconvenient for them!)

On the day in question, “Carl” was taking his ease in the back row when I called his name. He sauntered down the center aisle up to my lectern to take the graded quiz I was holding out for him. One of the girls suddenly shrieked.

“Carl! Oh, my God!”

Carl spun around to look at her, making clear to me the reason for his classmate's outburst. His boxers were torn in the back from waistband down to as far as the eye could see (which was pretty far) before they finally ducked inside his pants. There was serious cleavage. Carl stood stock-still for several seconds, trying to process what was going on. Finally a classmate removed all confusion.

“Your underwear, dude. It's torn wide open!”

Carl spasmodically snatched at his jeans and jerked them up to his waist. The full moon vanished from sight. He hobbled back to his desk with his self-induced wedgie and plopped into his seat. The class calmed down and we got to work on some actual math, although it was several minutes before the glances toward Carl and the intermittent giggles died out completely.

For the rest of the semester, for some reason, Carl decided that low-hanging pants were so over.

PZ breezes by the bay

A suspicious coincidence

The redoubtable PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame was recently in the Bay Area, ostensibly for a big scientific conference, IEDG 2008: Integrating Evolution, Development, & Genomics. Despite the plausibility of PZ's cover story, the San Francisco Chronicle published bits of information that suggest Professor Myers had a secret agenda as well—a clandestine mission related to his ceaseless promotion of all things tentacular.

IEDG 2008 was convened at UC Berkeley on May 28 through 30, the days immediately preceding the gala Black & White Ball in San Francisco, which was held on Saturday, May 31. The ball is a huge fundraiser for the educational programs of the San Francisco Symphony. It is also, of course, an enormous social event and an opportunity to strut one's fashionable self. While this description may not be likely to bring PZ to mind, graphic evidence was revealed in the Chronicle's story on the contest to choose a party dress for Patricia Sprincin, the chair of the Black & White Ball's organizing committee.

The winning design was a particularly octopoidal little number by British designer Sara Shepherd. Judging from the four tentacles appearing on the front of the gown, one surmises that the dress features a total of eight appendages (making a little allowance for the fact that stylistic license allowed Ms. Shepherd to link two pairs of them into loops). This was clearly a dress designed to appeal to the Bay Area's cephalopod lovers. One suspects that the great international mollusc conspiracy was involved in turning out the vote in favor of Shepherd's entry in the contest. Wherever mollusc-lovers are working in concert, will PZ not be found? Perhaps PZ was summoned to the Bay Area to advise Ms. Sprincin on the proper way to display one's tentacles. We cannot know for sure one way or the other.

Alas, I was not able to confirm the details of PZ's involvement when he held court at the Jupiter brew pub in Berkeley on Friday night. I was otherwise committed and could not make the trip into the university town to hoist a few at the impromptu gathering of Pharynguloids. (Of course, as a nondrinker I would have been hoisting whatever Jupiter offers as its house cola.) Therefore this post is a tissue of unfounded speculations. But one has to admit, it is suspicious in the extreme.

PZ decamped for Seattle on Saturday instead of waiting for the debut of the Shepherd ball gown at the Black & White Ball that evening. It's just as well. The actual event was a telling example of the difference between theory and practice—a lesson that all scientists—and fashion designers!—should try to remember. Patricia Sprincin bravely ventured forth on Saturday night in the gown that the popular vote had selected for her. She did the best she could as the Chronicle's photographer snapped a picture for the next day's newspaper coverage. You can see the result in the accompanying illustration.

It was not a tentacular success.