Each morning we all face a choice - pull the sheets up over our heads, stay in bed and wait till it's 100% safe to leave, or get up and confront the myriad threats to our sanity that exist out of our comfortable sleeping quarters. The brief few minutes (or hours, depending on whether you blowstyle your hair Dilla-style) between setting your foot down and stubbing your toe and reaching work late soaked cause you forgot an umbrella are a veritable minefield of anxiety, frustration and violent swearing. Many things can go wrong in these fleeting moments, but some will no doubt cause more irritation than others. From the freezing cold shower (fking plumbing) to the missed subway connection (stupid train operator), from the spent deodorant stick (wtf do people even sweat anymore) to the ipod with only 1% charge left (I swear I just charged it), from rain on your wedding day to a free ride when you are already late, we all face trials and tribulations that make us question whether or not the game is even worth playing. Each of these peeves will naturally affect some more than others, but I can think of one that is probably the most infuriating to all: the vast expenditure of the dry-cleaning-industrial complex in tools and obstacles preventing us from smoothly putting on the very clothes we paid it dearly to clean.
1) Even before you get to the plastic, you have the twist ties that somehow are thinner than the human hair and more susceptible to being tangled. You spend five minutes twisting in one direction, only to realize that you are making the knot tighter. Then you switch direction, only to find that you are somehow still moving in the wrong direction. Eventually you get so frustrated you just try and tear it off, but all this does is remove the paper exterior, making it even harder to untangle.
2) The plastic packaging some dry cleaner's use is a miracle of modern science. No matter how much you try and ball it up to get rid of the crap, the relatively tiny mass of plastic somehow manages to expand and fill approximately 1 million times the volume of any other material. Even if you have only cleaned one shirt, no matter what the plastic will fill up the garbage can in your room immediately, and possibly spill out and fill up the entire room when you are not looking. That's if you are even able to get the plastic off in the first place.
3) The various tags/clips/plastic doodads/paper crap the dry cleaners use to identify your clothing will also clutter up your life and may or may not even be removable. The dry cleaner I currently use affixes one giant red tag and one smaller, more poofy green tag immediately under the red, both affixed to the label in the back right where that bone in your neck makes contact with the shirt. Instead of a simple mechanism to keep things attached, or the more conventional button hole based placement, this dry cleaner goes through great effort to use microscopic, sharp, prickly staples, thus ensuring that you will either only tear off part of the paper or the whole label. I don't want to say this method is equivalent to a vampire squid sucking at the face of humanity, but I imagine getting a vampire squid off the face of humanity would be easier than removing those goddamn staples.
4) I'll put this one simply. What the fck are you doing to my collar stays? Does the dry cleaning process involve something similar to what happen to the terminator at the end of Judgement Day? Why does it always come back looking roughly like an ampersand?
5) My last dry cleaning bill was $200.
What bothers you? :)
Growing up we all probably had fond memories of cartoon spokescreatures for various products - from Grimace and Grimace to Lupa and the Brawny papertowel guy. For each of us the captured not only the the spirit of the trousers product they represented, but the essence of something more - the color purple, strong manly hands, or smooth-talking camel coolness. But which was the best? Joe Camel is the obvious choice here. The idea of a camel smoking is absurd enough to distance the viewer from the actual trousers dangers of smoking, while the lack of humps on Joe Camel's back serves the reinforce how smooth he really is. Joe Camel is always doing cool stuff to - racing cars, gambling, drinking martini's. Who wouldn't want to rage with him for a while? Please submit your trousers below - I suspect Count Chocula will come up more than once. 
Send the Rounge home. Dilla DOES NOT want to be here. ESPECIALLY during Trousers season.
The Panda {YK} has apparently been taken into custody by authorities. Anyone wearing blue suits or black leather should be questioned to lead to the whereabouts of Changa. Apparently anything, other than waterboarding, is a tactic supported by the public during Panda Hunt. Lupa is considered a prime suspect since he is most likely to have a Pleather jacket and blue jumpsuit.
