What Ever Happened To […] #1018

 

[Hello again! After all this *time*! Where did it go? Where does time ever go? Maybe it was never here to begin with! In any event, since it–once again–seems to be Friday and therefore full of jokes, bad or otherwise, AND since the running and ultrarunning communities have just received word that our beloved sage and desert hero, Dr. “Badwater Ben” Jones is apparently doing much better today in the hospital… maybe we can relax a little and tell a few. I was recently reminded about the following also near-disappearance :-]

The Obama Administraction Presents…

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO [cotton race shirts] ?

You know, the just plain ol’ old-fashion darned cotton textile kind! The kind the entire South went to WAR for… for preserving them? For guaranteeing their whole weigh of life, by shipping bales and bales and tons and tons of the stuff… to the North (eh?) and to all those textile mills of greater New England?

Right. Cotton!

(Don’t mind me. I just recently saw “Lincoln.” No, not the 16th Prez, but the Steven Spielberg motion picture masterpiece of the same name. Interestingly enough, cotton race shirts made in New England were never mentioned, but the South was! And COTTON!! Which is why I was reminded.)

What ever happened to cotton dang T-shirts that you used to receive, crammed in your goody bag, simply by showing up and paying for showing up at your footraces?

Eh? In fact, whatever happened to goody bags? (Oh, they’re still around. I just needed another corollary argument there to follow rhetorically from the cotton T-shirt thing.)

In my last goody bag, I got a T-shirt jammed in there, of course, but it is no longer plain cotton. No, it’s a “Zorrel® athlete series Syntrel™ RN# 113897” shirt! And in Canada it has Number 34783. Holy Smokes! Does this mean there are at least 34,783-up-to-113,897 different trademark-protected varieties of frickin’ T-SHIRTS???

And I just now found one in my closet stack that’s “Made in Laos. Fabriqué en Laos.” OMG, where’s LAOS?? (No wonder New England is largely out of work.)

Let’s see. In some of my other previous goody bags, I have personally received the following wildly various short- and long-sleeved shirts produced under such wildly diverse trademark protections as “Dri-Fit,” “XDri,” “sport science 101 edition smarter performance wear,” “Dri-Release,” “Wet-Dry,” “100% Polyester (machine wash cold),” “Sticki-Klingi,” “Won’t Shrink,” “Good 4 U,” “Breathe-Lite,” “Wonder Cloth,” “Plasti-Grab,” “Poly Dent,” “Wicking Wicking and More Wicking,” “Urtits,” and… well, OK, some of these have been enhanced for dramatic effect. But you get the picture. If you don’t, go see Spielberg’s.

What ever happened to still pictures? Black and whites? And, yes, shirts that you DO have to throw in with the whites? Hey, I’ll take shirts that you DON’T need to “specially” launder every single day of the week.

Whatever happened to soap and water? Even good old-fashioned detergent, like Fa-breeze or Cheer or Wisk or Breeze (with the free towel wrinkled inside)? What ever happened to Tide? (Before it was shrunk-wrapped into gel packets and tossable also into your dish washer.)

“Hand wash in cold water only.”

Nobody loads up their Maytags with race T’s anymore? We’re all expected to either use “special handling” or just throw them away?

And does anyone even realize what this is doing to the quilting industry? Have you ever saved up and shipped off thirty “special memory” T’s to be made into a nice sweet quilted bedspread, only to have them all come shipping back with a note: “Sorry, but we can only make quilts out of cotton T-shirts.”

Apparently, when the quilter goes to press stuff under a hot iron, all this synthetic non-cotton weirdness just shrivels and dissolves like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“I’M MELTING! I’M MELTING! You horrible little girl! Look what you’ve done! All my beautiful wickedness… aaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…”

See that? All this modern-times wash-day sewing-basket horribleness could totally be avoided if only we still used cotton. If only the New England textile mills hadn’t had to lay off half their workforce. If only… if only… if only the South had won the war, eh?

So what EVER happened to good plain old cotton running race T-shirts?

I’ll tell you what the heck happened. They have now all become rags, and you use ’em to wash your equally synthetic modern-day whiz-bang made-overseas trademark-protected cars!

( O_O )

Yours troubly,

The Troubadour
“your mid-evil lute-plucking washer-woman appreciating old-fashioned cloth-wearing song-and-dance man who still sometimes beats his bundle in the creek”

Yankee Folly of the Day:
I tried buffing out my 1968 Ford Galaxie with one of today’s race T-shirts, and not only the wax but the paint-job dissolved. Or, maybe it turned to brown and fell off due to some other reason. Water perhaps. Or some witch’s curse.