Faithful readers of this blog (Luke), and I guess anyone who knows me, will know that I have a weakness for preppy clothes. Which is why I recently decided to buy a pair of suede bucks like the kind I used to wear in high school. It was a prep school, yes, and we had to wear uniforms: blazers and khaki or grey slacks, with a shirt and tie every day. As for footwear, what I wore most of the time were Bass Bucks, a suede "Oxford" type shoe -- it came in tan and green (I always went with tan) -- with an orange sole that had the consistency of a pencil eraser and wore down at about the same rate. They no longer make this shoe anymore in the same way. G.H Bass & Co. still in fact makes Bucks, but they are now called Pasadena Bucks and the soles are made of some kind of much more durable material; this was probably a smart decision, business-wise, but the fact is it's a different shoe now. Apparently you can only buy original style Bass Bucks used on Ebay. I will buy a lot
"The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup." Coffee culture has evolved a lot since I've been on the earth. I came of coffee-drinking age in the early 90s, right during the Starbucks Era. Perhaps more influential than actual Starbucks coffee, which I didn't even drink because we didn't have one in our town, was coffee shop culture itself, which blossomed in the 90s -- I have to think -- directly because of Starbucks. There have surely been books written about this... Fast-forward to this bizarre and still-as-yet-hopeful Year of Our Lord 2021 in which Starbucks is now passe and coffee shop culture is over, not just because of COVID but because of laptops, smartphones, and the fact that people don't talk to strangers in public places anymore. Coffee shop culture is also dead because, even at your average grocery store chain (to say nothing of Whole Foods, or Fresh Market) you can find a selection of coffees and teas of such depth and variety as to par