Fashion

Shalom Harlow in Thom Browne on Grand Staircase

Another jigsaw puzzle. I couldn't quite make out what this was until I put it together. Shalom Harlow is a fashion model and Thom Browne makes fancy clothes and this photo was taken in the Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris, France. 

Sometimes girls in high fashion clothes will catch my eye but more often, like in this case, I will wonder WTF were they thinking, especially those white splotches. She looks like she has been bombarded by some giant seagulls. No accounting for taste apparently.

A wider view of the same scene

Grand Palais, Paris, France

Flower Style

Jaques Germain Soufflot (1714 1781) - Charles-André van Loo

Those are some fancy threads there, Jaques baby. I don't think I've ever seen the like, at least not being worn by men. Jaques was an architect, most famous for the Panthéon in Paris. The building is impressive, likewise is the Google Maps 3D view.

The Panthéon

P.S. Never seen the like except for Hawaiian shirts worn by tough guys.

Pic of the Day

Man Fall From Tree - Geert de Taeye
204 piece jigsaw puzzle

The fashion world is a strange and wondrous place.

Fez

The Fez
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
When I was working on the SatisFAXion fax modem at Intel about a zillion years ago, Mustafa Ataturk was one of our code phrases. I never found out why. I remember hearing something about the Fez being banned in Turkey, but I didn't realize it was such a powerful symbol. Anyway, this video shows you that while the winds of change are constantly blowing, their direction is also always changing. Hmm, makes politics sound like the weather.

High Fashion

Tesla Is Now Selling $250 Bottles Of Tequila

Seems Elon has found another way to separate rich folks from their money. Some things I will never understand.

Suits

Wire-wrap Tool

Sorting through piles of old junk, dutiful daughter pulls out this wire-wrap tool. Wire-wrap is a technique to construct electrical circuits. It was fairly common in 1980's. It was quick and easy and didn't require soldering. I didn't use it much, but there was one instance that stood out.

Back around 1980, Intel Corporation started building RAM disks for IBM mainframe computers. They set up their production facility in Deer Valley, a suburb on the north edge of Phoenix, Arizona. I got a job there in 1985 supporting Intel's real-time operating system for their 8086 microprocessor.

1984 VAX Assembly

By 1985, the RAM disk business was dying and the RAM disk crew was casting around for something new and they hit on the idea of making an IBM channel to Ethernet adapter. One of their first installations was at a bank in San Francisco where it was going to bridge the gap between their mainframe and a DEC VAX machine. Connecting to the VAX meant installing an Ethernet card and that required installing a wire-wrap jumper between two pins (out of several hundred) on the card cage backplane.

I was elected to install that jumper, so I went out and bought a suit. This was my first trip out into the field. I wasn't in the habit of wearing suits, and since there seemed be a great deal resting on this installation, I thought it might be a good idea to show up looking like I was a professional, or serious, or something. I'd read an article about suits in Playboy, and so I thought I knew what I was doing. Probably bought it at J.C. Penny.

Flew out to San Francisco, spent some time in the computer room with a couple of other technical guys. The IBM mainframe was the size of a locomotive, or so it seemed. The bank's computer guy stopped the mainframe while we hooked up the channel adapter. Stopped it in it's tracks. After we had made the connections, he flipped the switch and the IBM system resumed execution on the next instruction. No shutting down and rebooting, just stop and then resume.

We're out in the hall and a bigwig comes by to say hello. He was a big guy, but what made him big was the suit. I had never seen such a suit. My own suit paled in comparison. I cannot tell you why I felt that way. I mean an impartial observer would have said you have some guys wearing suits. I think there must have been some subconscious social conditioning at work. It was just the weirdest experience.

Glen Urquhart Check Suit

Frank Sinatra

I'm reading along in Berlin Game and Giles Trent walks into the Kar Club wearing a Glen Urquhart check suit. 'Oh really',  I sneer with my little finger held in the air. Not really, I know beans about suits, had one once, wore it twice, but if you are going to be dropping names like that I'm going to look it up. My first impression was that it was from a particular tailor and was identifiable by the way it was cut, or fit, or something only someone who was in tune with that kind of crap would be able to identify. Turns out it's a name for particular style of fabric. I found a couple of web sites that go into stupefying detail about what it is and how it came to be, but it wasn't until I saw the photo of Frank (above) I snapped to what they were talking about. My dad wore suits that looked like that. Huh.

Boho

Kate Moss

Came across this image, or a similar one, while leafing through DuJour at the doctor's office the other day. Boho? What is this Boho? The Bohemian / Homeless look? Who says the elite don't care?