Monday, September 30, 2013

Wearing different colored socks

The main man of and behind the new movie Don Jon is on the talk show circuit promoting the film. We heard Joseph Gordon-Levitt on NPR and saw him on the Colbert Report, noticing two things.

The first was that some of his statements were word for word matches between the NPR interview and Colbert. A senior K-Landnews member was not happy with this, however, TheEditor only had a laconic: Politicians do it all the time, so what.

The second thing is more interesting: two different colored socks!

Not only did the camera person on Colbert zoom out, which they almost never do after an interview, but they zoomed in such a way as to clearly show the different colored socks.

The K-Landnews TheEditor is a frequent but irregular wearer of two different socks. This has happened so often in the past that the sock procurement strategy of TheEditor changed.

Buy socks of the same color only, and make sure the calf part is plain, no decorative stripes or patterns, not even of the same color.

It may be next to inconceivable that a person would go to such great lengths instead of doing the simple thing: match up your socks when they come out of the dryer.

This concept is logical and useful, even to a repeat wearer of different colored socks. The problem is, we don't seem to be able to do this. As of 2013, unfortunately, nobody has found a gene or an environmental affliction that would exculpate us, give us the cover of "illness" or "genetic condition".

It is perfectly acceptable to make fun of us, and at times we invent blatantly false excuses, such as, I am so tall and my eyesight is really bad. We suffer from the sockism* of others in silence, though we are in good company. A former head of the European Central Bank was the butt of sockism jokes after he was spotted wearing white socks, a matching pair, with a dark suit.

Two participants in a high level meeting which set rules and policies for several hundred million Europeans noticed the starkly white socks and joked about them in a subsequent email exchange, implying, of course, that it was not wise to entrust big decisions to a man who failed to match the color of his socks to his suit.

* Sockism: being made fun of or being bullied for wearing mismatched socks.

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