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.
