“S t y l e”
(a random pagemonkey rant)

Some things have style, Gentle Reader, and some things don’t. If you play along with me for a bit here, I’ll explain how I decide whether something has style or doesn’t.

I’ll warn you now, my concept of style differs from yours - to me, stylish things and people are not necessarily pretty but earn their rank from being pretty damn good. You’ve been warned, so read on.

 

Cats, most assuredly, have style.

Housecats, domesticated felines, are the ones I’m talking about in particular. Most of them, except perhaps those shivering, misbred, hairless calamites.

They have style because no matter what they do, there is something very cute and magnetic about them - even when they piss you off by ‘helping’ with editing videos, you find yourself smiling just a bit - it’s their nature.

And to be sure, all wild cats have style as well, even when you’re dinner.

 

Another thing which has genuine style is one of Denver’s programs to help raise money to help to the homeless.

A year or so ago, when donations and contributions first began to drop through the ring and swirl down the small part of the bowl, Denver’s city papas found a way to kill two birds with one stone.

A buttload of parking meters had finally become obsolete and were slated for scrapping. Instead, they were re-labeled with sensible come-on decals, and they now collect money from pedestrians in the downtown area.

Now, honestly, this program isn’t raking in more money than can be easily counted and will never replace any of the other funding sources, but the money it does bring in is almost completely free of any overhead and doesn’t intrude on the general strolling public’s right to walk unmolested. A parking meter itself isn’t the least bit stylish, this application certainly is.

Something else I consider stylish are 3 of my favorite tools - a pair of Sears Craftsman pruners and an oddball Stanley screwdriver with a long crosspoint blade and a “button” point inside its handle that holds the most common automotive Torx size as well as a #2 flat screwdriver blade.

In this instance, style is due to sheer quality. Although I think tools are pretty, I must admit that when I see a tool I think of what it can accomplish, not how it’s dressed.

The top pruner is a shear, which I’ve kept sharp enough to trim nose hairs - not that I use it for that - but the thing will cut anything cleanly, even if you have to hammer on the handles to cut through something tough. I’ve never been able to strip-out any of the screwdriver’s works, which I’m a master at. And the bottom pruner will cut anything that will fit in its maw - or you can use it as a pair of impromptu pliers without dulling or damaging it.

Another goodie which has true style is my old reliable Compaq computer, a 5000 series from too many years back to comfortably talk about, shown more clearly in the top image but seen here being part of a nice evening involving loud music and online gaming. She has about 35,000 hours on her power supply, motherboard, CPU chip and keyboard. She has always been eager to do my bidding, and competent in doing it.

I can imagine you, Gentle Reader, scratching your head at this point, wondering what jazzed me into making these outlandish statements.

It’s really very simple - I think we need to redefine the word “style,” and kill the old comparative cliche style over substance. You see, I think we should begin using the word “fashion” to describe many of the things we once used “style” to describe instead.

That’s because I’ve noticed a lot of things in life now are in fashion, but certainly don’t bear any of the hallmarks of style as I know it.

Or, in other words, many fashionable trends - and people - don’t have style.

Fashion is, by definition, subject to constant revision and change. Style isn’t, or at least not completey - some of its synonyms are sort, spirit, strain, technique, tenor, tone, trait, type, and variety.

True style never changes: James Bond, the Statue of Liberty, California’s Highway One making its absurd, ponderous trek down the Pacific coast. The ball dropping every New Year’s Eve in New York. Suits from Savile Row, cowboy boots from Texas, chile peppers from Hatch, New Mexico, crab from Alaska, lobster from Maine, caviar from Russia.

It’s fashionable right now for some to wish bad luck or failure on others - even a nationally syndicated radio niche-op-ed color personality has, with regards to our president, and hence, also has wished the rest of us failure and bad luck.

That doesn’t mean the radio jock has style. It’s the verbal equivalent of the fashion of wearing one’s pants around the thick part of one’s thighs, leaving one’s ass sticking out to shock or aggravate or embarass those unfortunate enough to see it.

Sitting around in a collective gang with one’s colleagues who are working diligently at their jobs as they write something which may become law, while making no constructive input, yet collecting approximately the same salary as those actually working do, and then, as a gang, objecting to what those who have been working have written is also not style, although it is currently fashionable, just as - again - the wearing of pants to expose the ass is, and the result is very much the same, an exposed ass.

I’m certainly biased on some of this - I earn my living peddling dicks and asses on the web. And that’s where they belong.

Dicks and asses are absolutely fine when they are marketed to people seeking dicks and asses.

They should not be sold to us in an off-label manner of prescription, to be taken as representatives of our will and wishes.

That’s become fashionable, but it lacks style.

~ pagemonkey