For Truth, Justice and all that is Pre-Shrunk and Cottony!
Men’s Underwear Sales, Greenspan’s Economic Metric, Reveal Crisis
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was known for using quirky, proletariat metrics to judge the temperature of the economy. The most famous of these, as recounted by NPR’s Robert Krulwich in January 2008, were the sales of men’s underwear. If the economic scales dipped even the slightest, Greenspan reasoned, it was as sure a sign as any that people were truly feeling the pinch.
“If you look at sales of male underpants it’s just pretty much a flat line, it hardly ever changes,” Krulwich recounted after the publishing of Greenspan’s book, “The Age Of Turbulence.” “But on those few occasions where it dips that means that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants. And [Greenspan] said ‘that is almost always a prescient, forward impression that here comes trouble.'”
James illustrates the BVD-o-Meter:
I hope the above photo qualifies under Rule #5, but it also brings to mind a question:
Why are young men waxing their chests?
You look at any ads showing bare-chested men nowadays and there’s not one singe chest follicle on display. All have been pulled out to a state of pectoral shiny baldness.
Is there some kind of contest going on?
More importantly, WHY THE HEY ARE YOU GUYS PUTTING YOURSELVES THROUGH THIS???
Are women now thinking that these pre-adolescent-looking lampiño chests are attractive? What happened to real men?
Men, liberate your chest hair! Free yourselves from the shackles of waxing, plucking and shaving. Save the wax for your cars!
UPDATE
Ada emails Tom Selleck in his Magnum PI days, hirsute and gorgeous:
UPDATE, Friday 10 April
Follow-up post with further Rule #5 blogging.
that’s a lovely shade of green he’s wearing. :cough:
No guy should wax his chest!
Not even Wolverine. 🙂
Whoo hoo! Yowsa on the Rule 5 action, Fausta!
I have always thought that it was because they were *unable* to grow hair on their chests. Not that there is anything wrong with that…
I didn’t consider that option, TP.
Or it could be while married watching the reaction when she discovered that a lot of those chest hairs do not stay firmly attached to the chest but spread all over her 600 thread sheets.
Who’s “she”, Pat?
Ex! Who was also irate when she discovered that when she asked me to clean the tray under the refrigerator, I answered, “There’s a tray under the refrigerator?”
Young men are waxing their chests because gay guys set fashion. There is a lag, but that’s the reality.
Smooth skin is more photogenic, gay guys want to look at photogenic guys, the fashion becomes to look photogenic and the straights eventually adopt it.