VintageGent’s Menswear Daily

Build A Better Team…On Paper

One of my readers was wondering what “Fantasy Football” was. In a nutshell, you pick players for your team that consist of real NFL players. You can choose anyone you want regardless of team. Then, you use their stats to determine how your “team” collectively does. There is more to it then that, but that is how I would explain it at the basic level. WaiverWire right now has a Stimulus Package if you are a fantasy football coach or manager, or aspire to be. With the service, you can go online and pick the brains of the experts, as well as receive news and stats on individual players right in one place.  Old fashioned people, who would be more like me, probably would rely on the little columns in the newspaper, but for you, this provides a whole efficient world.

To some, this is Dungeons and Dragons for jocks.  Not really, as it is not about the luck of the draw, but in choosing the right players and trading them and changing your roster efficiently.   It involves constant strategy. Does it prepare someone for running a real team? I am not entirely sure.  Just like there are not too many openings for Wizards in the workplace, it is really a very small and elite group of people who move into the position of trading and recruiting real players.

If you have always been curious, the regularly $19.99 stimulus package is free for the 2009 season.  There is an upgraded package that can be had for $9.99 more that includes real time email news alerts and a few additional features.  I suppose it depends on how involved you want to get, whether you wish to check in and do all your fantasizing at a particular time during the week, or you want to adjust your team to stack up against those of your friends throughout the day.

Polka Dot Tie…Oh Man Oh Man

When I saw this tie from Arrow, that darn song kept running through my head. Make it stop! All of the “vintage” films of this song don’t seem to work, so here is a more recent performance of Dodie Stevens singing the song that can’t get out of my head. Now it is in yours. Ha Ha

If you would like to sing along:

Now I’ve got a guy and his name is Dooley
He’s my guy and I love him truly
He’s not good lookin’, heaven knows
But I’m wild about his crazy clothes

He wears tan shoes with pink shoelaces
A polka dot vest and man, oh, man
Tan shoes with pink shoelaces
And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

He takes me deep-sea fishing in a submarine
We got to drive-in movies in a limousine
He’s got a whirly-birdy and a 12-foot yacht
Ah, but thats-a not all he’s got

He’s got tan shoes with pink shoelaces
A polka dot vest and man, oh, man
Tan shoes with pink shoelaces
And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Now Dooley had a feelin’ we were goin’ to war
So he went out and enlisted in a fightin’ corps
But he landed in the brig for raisin’ such a storm
When they tried to put ‘em in a uniform

He wanted tan shoes with pink shoelaces
A polka dot vest and man, oh, man
He wanted tan shoes with pink shoelaces
And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Now one day Dooley started feelin’ sick
And he decided that he better make his will out quick
He said
“Just before the angels come to carry me
I want it down in writin’ how to bury me.”

A’wearin tan shoes with pink shoelaces
A polka dot vest and man, oh, man
Give me tan shoes with pink shoelaces
And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

And a big Panama with a purple hat band!!

Personal Online Shoe Boutique Even For The Weird

Sometimes, its hard to search for shoes because the internet and some shoe sites tend to organize their wares in a very literal way. You can search for the parts, such as color and heel style. What if you are wanting to search for the sum of the parts? Most of the search features won’t look at the heel and straps and decide something is a gladiator sandal. You will be sifting through rows and pages and rows and pages for something that meets your subjective criteria.

While they haven’t expanded to men’s shoes yet, there is an easier answer for ladies shoes. MustHaveShoes is set up in a most interesting way. The front page does not assault you with color and widgets. It is just a search box with lists of popular searches. However, when you type in to the search box, your own custom shoe boutique emerges, with a banner that relates thematically to what you have chosen, plus photos of all the applicable shoes that you can arrange in several different ways. I have searched peeptoe pump, European, yellow cork wedge and I have found many styles exactly tailored to what I searched for. Just for the heck of it, I typed “weird” in the box just to see how subjective it could be.

I was a little surprised that my “just for the heck of it” search came up with results.   There are only limited sizes available.   Wouldn’t it be funny if these were an undiscovered style and by Monday they were all snapped up by readers for some reason?   I have not seen anything like them, that’s for sure. Of course, I am sure that the system searches a number of tags and is not really passing its own judgment on footwear, whether it is weird, sexy, cute, or busy.  Yes, you will find results for all of those adjectives too.

My cousin was talking with her boyfriend when they first met, saying that she thinks flowers are so impractical.  Why don’t people send people something useful, like shoes, instead?  Wouldn’t you know that when she arrived at work one day, a delivery came.  It was a shoebox that read, “Hope you enjoy your flowers,” with a pair of shoes, of course, inside.  By the way, the two of them have been married for over twelve years now.