Semper ubi sub ubi

[dr_tectonic]

From now on, Martin Luther King day may be "Pants Day" on my calendar.

Since I had run out of pants (having only about four pairs that actually fit, two of which developed really, um, unfortunate holes in the last week or so), today I went out shopping and bought new pants. I found four pairs of jeans, as well as a nice pair of cargo pants that fit really well that I unfortunately couldn't buy because they had extra-roomy rear pockets that could probably hold, literally, a stack of 3 or 4 CDs and sadly made them look really dorky from behind. (I also sat in my car outside of Subway for about an hour and worked on my Space Bugs board game, but that's another story.)

But, more importantly! I found underwear that fits!

I have also been gradually running out of underwear. When I went to buy some recently, I discovered a dilemma. My waist is much too big to wear size Medium undies comfortably -- I have about a 38-inch waist at the moment, cuz I'm all fat from winter and lazy. However, if I get size Large, the waistband is comfortable but the butt is all droopy and way too big. Like, handfuls of loose material hang down behind, and this is not comfy in the least. So neither of the size options was working for me.

"Jeez," I'm thinking, "they really need to have two sizes on underwear: waist size and ass size." And today, while I was in the store, I suddenly realized: they do!

It's just that it's in code! Now, I don't know about you, but there's only one place on my body to put a waistband: below the gut and at the top of the buns. Girls seem to have more options, but for guys I think there's really only one spot for your belt. So I'm lookin' at the underwear selection and the whole "low-rise" thing was puzzling me. And that's when it hit me: you can't pull your underwear higher if your butt is using up all the fabric!

Thus, the code is broken! "Normal" means "fat ass". "Mid rise" means "round ass". "Low rise" means "normal ass". (At first I was going to say mid=normal and low=small, but there is no way that my butt is small.) "Bikini" means "flat ass" or "cowboy butt", I assume. Logic tells me that this is likely only true for the larger waist sizes (do smaller underwear sizes really fit the average guy so poorly?), but I really don't care because my new underwear fit! Hooray!

And if that's TMI, you have only yourself to blame for looking behind the cut.

I haven't posted much in my own journal lately, but there's been lots of discussion over in stowellian's. And I'm going to start up a crash course in evolution on cushing312 soon (hopefully tomorrow). Ghostwalk Saturday was good. Doing lots of nothing yesterday was also. As for today: paaaaaaaants!

Comments

[saintpookie.livejournal.com]

And that, my friend, is why I stick to boxers. No worries about extra fabric, you're supposed to have extra fabric. You're wearing loose shorts, not body hugging cloth.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying reading the textbook for my colleague's evolution course, which is creatively called Evolutionary Analysis. Very much worth checking out; I can send you the full reference if you like.

What bears repeating (frankly, ad nauseum) is that there is almost no life science without evolution. 95% of the biology papers in a journal like Nature make use of some analytic technique that, fundamentally, depends on evolutionary ideas. They make hypotheses that turn out to be true.

We would not be able to do such useful things as attempt to cure diseases, design HIV vaccines, or characterize the way that yeasts duplicate without the insights from evolution.

The unfortunate place where there is some clash is that contemporary evolutionary theory is largely about population structure, mutation and natural selection, and speciation.

The theory (and science) is a lot less advanced in discussing the origins of life, though there, as well, there's a lot of very nice science that's been done.

But the two communities are largely separate, because what comes out of the origins-of-life science is not especially urgent to most of the day-to-day questions in contemporary biology.

So this makes even people like me (who basically do evolution for a living) a lot less aware of the origins-of-life research. I can talk until the cows come home about population genetics, phylogenetics, and the essentiality of evolution to contemporary molecular biology, though.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Oh, and on underwear:

I haven't found what you say to be true for those of us with 32-ish inch waists. One of my pairs of boxer-briefs has some inexplicable pile of random fabric that is also thin enough that it always bunches up. But then, my odd-shaped part is my thighs, which are large from all of the walking I do. Dunno.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Nah, that's not TMI. I have a similar problem in that "rise" is VERY misused when it comes to women's clothes. The traditional definition is the measurement from the small of your back to your bellybutton through your crotch. However, when you see something for women's "low-rise" jeans, they actually MEAN "low-waist" because all they've done is remove that top inch or two of fabric. (A true low-rise would actually be proportioned differently.)

I'm low-rise. My jeans are not, because six inches of extra fabric around the waist is not appealing.

[detailbear.livejournal.com]

two of which developed really, um, unfortunate holes in the last week or so

Voice of experience: Save the worst pair. "Unfortunate holes" can make really interesting play-wear for certain "conjugal" situations. *veg*