"As the days passed, Ms. Cassell grew increasingly thirsty, later telling a friend that her tongue felt like 'a lizard'..."

"... and that her lips were constantly chapped. She knew she could survive for a while without food, but only a few days without water. There was a shallow creek near her car, but even if she opened the door and stretched out her hand, she was about three feet short of the water. So she again got creative: She took her favorite sweater and unfurled it into the water, letting the pink fabric soak up the water before pulling it back and wringing it into her mouth. Her mother later dubbed it her 'fishing pole' for liquid. Days into the ordeal, Ms. Cassell accepted that she might lose her legs, her husband said. But she refused to lose her grip on reality. 'She said she’d empty out her purse and put everything back, then empty out her purse and put everything back in, just to keep her mind going,' Mr. Cassell said. All the while, she wore her voice hoarse as she screamed at passing cars...."

From "'I Thought I Was Going to Die Here': 6 Days Trapped in a Car, Just Out of Sight/Brieonna Cassell crashed into a ditch, shattering bones and getting pinned inside. Just yards away from a road, she was determined to survive until help arrived" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Ms. Tilevitz, the sex therapist, said that a certain confidence can be gained by wearing generously sized sweaters."

"'There is a sexiness women can feel internally when they wear something that allows them to disappear from anyone else,' she said, comparing the garments to a security blanket. At a time when women in America have lost rights to their bodily autonomy, sweaters that 'obfuscate the body' can also serve as a sort of armor, said Kat Henning, 37, a senior footwear designer.... 'You feel a little under attack and being swaddled in a beautiful knit that completely covers you, not being available as a sex object, makes women feel better,' said Ms. Henning, whose has knits from Lauren Manoogian and Wol Hide, a brand in Philadelphia. Kelsey Keith, 40, a creative director in Berkeley, Calif., ... described their appeal this way: 'It’s about dressing on your own terms. The male gaze is not even a consideration.'"

From "Hefty Sweaters for Heavy Times/Thick, woolly and oversize knitwear has for some become a form of soft armor" (NYT).

Sweaters! This time, they're political.

Last time around, the political knitwear was the pussy hat, and you had to go to a big protest. This time, the knitwear is much larger, and you don't have to go anyplace... other than deeply inside it.

Additional reading: "Goodbye, 'Resistance.' The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over. Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?" (NYT).

Is Obama helping Kamala by vocalizing about vomit on his sweater?

I'm reading "Obama raps lyrics to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ at Detroit rally/'Love me some Eminem,' Obama said after rapping lyrics to the hit song 'Lose Yourself; during a rally in Detroit as Michigan begins early voting" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can watch the video).

“I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous,” Obama said as he took to the stage to promote Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. “But I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem.... I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting,” Obama rapped as the crowd cheered. “Love, love me some Eminem,” he added.

I'm not sure who he hopes to influence with that, but what do I know? I'm only an undecided voter in Wisconsin. I'm not awed by celebrities, and everyone acknowledges that Kamala is the candidate with the most celebrities. Does it augment or diminish her? 

But I just want to say that I do not like the picture of mom's spaghetti vomited onto Obama's sweater. I can barely picture Obama wearing a sweater — as opposed to a beautifully ironed shirt with a casually unbuttoned collar and rolled up sleeves. 

And I don't like thinking about spaghetti-vomit on that sweater. I get Eminem's lyric about his pathetic self, who's not only vomiting onto his bad clothes but stuck eating his mother's home-cooked food. I saw the movie "8 Mile" when it came out. I understand the context of the lyrics

But Obama is not so in thrall to Eminem that the thought of encountering Eminem would physically overwhelm him. Obama was President and had to go head-to-head with Putin and Xi, and he's supposed to be vouching for Kamala, who's asking to do the same, so I don't want to hear about his getting weak-kneed over a pop star.

And most of all, I don't like "mom's spaghetti" as a marker of wretchedness. Many of us are bereft of a mother — including you, Barack Obama. To have mom's spaghetti, even upchucked, would be to experience one's mother alive in the world again.  

"Unlike sheep, people feed themselves, wash their own hair and pay to be shorn at barbershops and salons."

"All Kollar has to do is collect it. But all the processing that comes afterward is expensive, especially because Human Material Loop is a start-up producing fabrics in small batches.... For the human-hair textile industry to take off, it would have to collect massive amounts of hair, which can be a logistical challenge.... 'If you look in the garbage can of a hair salon, it’s 95 percent hair,' said Lisa Gautier, who founded Matter of Trust in 1998. 'All we have to do is get that 5 percent of debris out of there. It’s really very doable.'... [A]rchaeologists have found mummies with human hair wigs that are thousands of years old. 'Imagine a sweater you can buy that will last 9,000 years,' she said. 'The products we will produce will outlast humanity.'"

From "Would you wear a sweater made from human hair? Entrepreneurs are looking for ways to recycle human hair, including weaving clippings swept off the floor of salons and barbershops into clothes" (WaPo).

My sweaters tend to wear out at the elbows. Mummies don't lean on their elbows. And mummies don't utilize laundry services. Cleaning takes a toll on one's sweaters. But a hair sweater — not to be confused with a hair shirt — might be nice. I have a yak hair sweater that I like a lot. Not counting on it lasting 9,000 years though.

"When [Barbara] Walters asked her where she’d be had she not changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg, she replied 'I would have been a Tupperware lady.'"

"It seems that Caryn Johnson saw value in appearing to be Jewish.... So, is it racist to pretend to be Jewish if one isn’t? Is it ‘cultural appropriation’?... Perhaps Whoopi does have some distant shred of Jewish heritage buried far back in her family tree.... Minorities are often granted licence to joke about their own... If Whoopi had been better connected to her putative Judaism, she might have thought twice about her festive jumper design aimed at Jews, depicting a ‘Jewish’ octopus wearing a kippah. Most Goldbergs I’ve met know that Jewish Octopuses are usually associated with Nazi era antisemitism. Not Whoopi. When it comes to racism, it’s not only Jews Whoopi has angered. When she was dating the comedian Ted Danson in 1993, he nearly ended his career by appearing in blackface in a sketch at the Friars Club comedy event, which was reported to have included jokes about how he got her to clean his parents’ house, contained numerous full occurrences of the “N word” and ended with him eating from a tray of watermelon. The gags didn’t go down well with the 3,000 strong audience.... She’s said to have come out on stage to challenge the audience, saying: 'N*****, n*****, n*****, whitey, whitey, whitey! It takes a lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3000 [people]. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!'"

Writes Jonathan Sacerdoti in "Will the real Whoopi Goldberg please stand up? Is Caryn Johnson really Jewish? And would it make any difference if she was?" (The Jewish Chronicle).

***

You can see a photo of that "festive jumper" in this 2016 Haaretz article, "Will Jews Buy a Sweater Featuring an Octopus Menorah? Whoopi Goldberg Thinks So Goldberg's 'Christmas sweaters with a twist' seek to include her Jewish friends in the holidays, but use a cute version of an animal often used in anti-Semitic tropes."

Here, at the Holocaust Encyclopedia, you can see the well-known Nazi era cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus that is destroying the entire world. 

***

Goldberg said "I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!" in 1993, but in recent years she's been entrenched in a long-running group project on network daytime TV that supports and mildly challenges nice American ladies who want to think well of themselves. I'd love to see her quit the show and get back to the woman-alone-on-stage shows that first made her famous. 

Maybe she's too comfortable with "The View," but "The View" wasn't sufficiently comfortable with her. Comfort is overrated, and it deserves a particularly low rating in comedy. It's the enemy of comedy. Goldberg could build a one-woman show around this incident, and that's what I'd like to see. Take the time to look at the problem from multiple angles and bring us somewhere surprising. That's what Dave Chappelle does with his very independent shows.

"For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, 'Cosby Show' sweaters, suburban dad sweaters."

"I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate. The most memorable of these was bright red, with a gold crest on its breast, like the sigil of the kind of hoity-toity prep school I did not attend, and drooped so hugely on me I looked like a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. My girlfriend charitably suggested that I 'loomed large' in my mother’s mind.... My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies. When Mom gave me a gray-and-white snowflake-pattern sweater one Christmas, I took it across the country with me to Seattle, where I staged photographs of myself wearing it with friends.... Later that afternoon, we returned the sweater to Macy’s.... A few years ago, I finally wore a sweater that Mom gave me 10 years earlier to visit her in the memory care unit at her retirement home. Although she no longer remembered the sweater, she did go out of her way to admire it, and I got to tell her that it was from her...."

From "The Unbearable Sadness of Your Parents’ Bad Holiday Gifts" by Tim Kreider (NYT).

1. "All mothers live in palaces built of lies" — Ironically, that's a lie that the son is telling himself. The mother in his mind lives in a palace made of lies he's telling himself about what must be in her mind. 

2. He doesn't even have his lie-palace built straight. He won't commit to whether his mother wanted him to look unlovable ("sexless") or lovable ("hoping... to attract a mate") or go too deeply into whether he's thinking of the interior of his mother's mind or his own. 

3. Maybe his mother was playfully participating in the Ugly Christmas Sweater meme and waiting for him to overcome his politeness and call her out. He's a humorist. Did he not get some/any of his humor from her? 

4. Do sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers? I won't say all sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers, but the ones who begin sentences with "All mothers..." certainly do — unless they're just kidding.

5. I learned a new word: "sigil."

"Hot man confused about how to put on sweater..."

Hot man confused about how to put on sweater is my favorite genre of fine art. pic.twitter.com/LBDnUyh0zH

— R. Eric Thomas (@oureric) May 8, 2020

Male TikTok versus Female TikTok.

It pains me to stereotype, but compare this...



... to this...

I think this is a sign that everything's going to be all right.

The Guardian, on its front page, features an article titled "The 10 greatest cardigans." And "cardigans" isn't some special British word for something more important than a sweater that buttons down the front. This is actually an article identifying and ranking the great button-down sweaters in history. #7 is that thick, nubby thing Jeff Bridges wore in "The Big Lebowski." #4 is that even rattier thing Kurt Cobain wore in Nirvana's MTV "Unplugged" performance. #1 is the J. Crew "symbol of Michelle Obama’s mastery of soft-power semiotics" that FLOTUS wore on her first visit to London when she met the Prime Minister's wife. Michelle Obama also wore a cardigan to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, but apparently the soft-power semiotics she deployed for the Prime Minister's wife had more greatness about it.

It would be better simply to own an apron...

... but if you, cooking an egg, should happen to drip melted butter on your cashmere sweater, blot the excess with a clean cloth, sprinkle baking soda on the spot, wait 5 minutes, and vacuum it off. I did some premature mourning before Googling for a spot-cleaning tip — which totally worked — and I need to remember not all the cleaning tips but that the cleaning tips are all there on the internet, so don't waste time crying over spilt milk or butter. Go straight to Google.

And why do I cook in a cashmere sweater without even wearing an apron? I don't think I've worn an apron in more than a quarter century. I think I'll buy one. Here (in case you want one too). Do you wear an apron when you cook? I suspect that few people do, because my Amazon search was bringing up — along with the staunchly utilitarian sort of thing I wanted — aprons for "cosplay."

"You know what I love to do?... I love to go to Target with Amelia and just spend the day there."

"We just wander around in there, look at the patio furniture, the pajama section. It’s like six hours of tuning out." Six hours?!! "Well, not just at Target. We go to BJ’s; we each have things we like to eat there. Then I get the socks I like at Macy’s.... It’s just a few hours, six hours that I don’t have to think about Mitch McConnell. That’s all I need."

Says Elizabeth Warren, "scissoring the bottom off a cheap sweater at her kitchen island," according to "Leader of the Persistence Elizabeth Warren’s full-body fight to defeat Trump" by Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine. Amelia is Warren's daughter, born when Warren, who is 69, was 22. The sweater is one of "a bunch of gauzy open-front cardigans to put over her uniform of black pants and a black tank top," that, we're told, "cost about $13 each" and are too long, which she is dealing with by cutting them and allowing the unhemmed bottom to roll up.

Open Secrets put Elizabeth Warren's net worth at $7,820,514 in 2015, but we're told she likes to spend her spare time poking around for 6 hours at Target and she wears $13 sweaters that she has to hack into the shape she wants.

Well, buying cheap clothing is priceless political theater. I challenge Elizabeth Warren to step away from the Rebecca Traister puff pieces — too much luxury! — and go full Scott Walker:



But Scott Walker actually is poor. (Last I looked.)

"Clog life is not lived off the grid but grid-adjacent. It’s a fuzzy, fancy realm, littered with alpaca sweaters, Rachel Cusk novels, and trees that grow indoors, in charmingly primitive ceramic pots."

That's a little too close to where I live, except that I have no idea who Rachel Cusk is. I do have 5 10-foot tall avocado trees charmingly growing indoors, planted and tended to by the charmingly primitive ex-potter who shares my fuzzy realm. I wear sweaters. I've got enough clogs that I'd have to go count them to tell you the actual number, and I've been collecting them since right about when Dansko was founded (1990) and I first saw them in a CP Shades store, which... don't get me started on CP Shades.

The quote in the post headline is from "The Life-Changing Magic of Clogs" by Lauren Mechling (from January, in The New Yorker), which I'm reading because it's linked in "What’s the Next Status Clog?" (at NY Magazine)("Writer Lauren Mechling deserves credit for both coining the term clogerati, and confirming No. 6 as the current clog that confers status on its owner").

Okay, I looked up Rachel Cusk. I see there is a New Yorker article about her from last year, proving that though I subscribe to The New Yorker — it's the only! magazine I subscribe to — I don't even notice some of the articles:

In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets....

Don't you always feel like detaining a cat and telling it your pungent secrets?

“Consider the pizza,” [Cusk] writes. “It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface.”...

On certain birthdays, she told me, “I would get a call from my mom reminding me of the torment she had gone through on that date.” Cusk’s birth, in an understaffed hospital during a blizzard, was long and difficult. Cusk suggested that her father blamed her for the trauma his wife had suffered, because he always seemed angry with her. When she reached puberty, she began to feel that her developing body was “disgusting.” “I always felt repellent,” Cusk said. “That has come out in my work, unfortunately, as disgust for the repellent qualities of other people.”...

Her mother’s prudishness and conformity were, by Cusk’s account, stifling not only to the young Rachel. On the morning after she and Scamell-Katz were married—in “a fantastic party on the beach,” she said—“I met my father in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t realize there were men like that,’ he said of Siemon and his friends, who had been dancing wildly around a bonfire in knee-high boots. And he wished he could have been like them, boots and all. Because his own wildness had been domesticated by my mother.”

Men in boots and women in clogs. Get to know them. Eat smiling pizza, and tell secrets to cats.

Sam Barsky, the guy who who photographs himself posing in front of something while wearing a sweater he's knitted with a picture of that thing knitted into it.

Such a perfect project for Instagram.

Just one of many examples:

My Shenandoah National Park (Skyline Drive) sweater. My wife and I have an annual tradition of going to this park just 2 hours from our home. #sambarsky #sambarskysweaters #sambarskyknitter #knit #knitting #knitter #sweater #shenandoahnationalpark #shenandoah #shenandoahpark #skylinedrive #skyline #nationalpark #nationalparks #virginia #frontroyal #frontroyalva #frontroyalvirginia #darkhollow #darkhollowfalls #blueridgemountains

A post shared by Sam Barsky (@sambarskyknitter) on Mar 20, 2018 at 3:20pm PDT

I got there via "It’s Sweater Weather Forever/Samuel Barsky has gained a measure of fame online for posting photographs of himself in front of famous landmarks with his handmade sweaters" (NYT).

Mr. Barsky, a Baltimore native, said he started knitting in 1999 when he dropped out of nursing school at his local community college. Then, he was shopping at a flea market in Lutherville, Md., where he saw three women selling yarn. He asked if they would teach him how to knit.... At first he created nature scenes. But then he became taken with famous landmarks. “If I know my plans in advance I’ll knit a sweater and take it there,” he said.

What to wear after the election.

A clothes company that (with reason) considers me one of its best customers sends this:



Is that how they think we're feeling? Graphically, the photo is excellent. Riveting, really. But come on, the posture and the fashion seem to say no, nothing, I want nothing.

ADDED: The brand is Theory. Here's my description, from 2007, of discovering this brand:

Yesterday, my sister and I were traipsing through the Village and Soho. She wanted earrings and mementos. I balked at going into one store that had big sales signs in the window and -- I took one step up toward the doorway -- looked completely chaotic inside. I'd linger in the place next door until she was done with the chaos. The place that suited me was called Theory. I prefer Theory to chaos. She rummaged through the chaotic sale store and bought nothing. Not meaning to buy anything, I found two ideal black sweaters at Theory. I resist chaos but am a pushover for a rational pullover and a Cartesian cardigan.

AND: Isn't the man in the photograph wearing what Hillary wore during the election season? A long angled-out coat and black don't-even-look-at-my-legs pants. The woman in the photograph is wearing the light color on the bottom, forming a strong upward-pointing triangle over her crotch, a reversal of the downward-pointing triangle of female genitalia.

"Should you become Internet Famous, follow this checklist."

"It should ensure that, once people start using your character and likeness purely for their own personal enjoyment, they won't discover you're an actual human with flaws and systematically purge you of your job, friends, spouse, and newfound revenue streams."

Extrapolating life lessons from the story of the rise and fall of Ken Bone — the man in the red sweater at the town hall debate.

Maybe look at it from the other side: Let's not impose sudden fame on random citizens. It's cruel.

"It’s a sign of the times, unfortunately, that when there was an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party at the company, some of the sweaters there were from our current assortment."

Said the chief executive of Gap, quoted in a WaPo article titled "Why are sales suffering at so many women’s stores? They made bad clothes./Consumers have started spending again, but that doesn't mean they'll buy just anything."

Better than "just anything" is a low standard. But as I always like to say: Better than nothing is a high standard. When shopping for clothes, nothing is always a good choice. The store has to beat nothing.

"And take careful note of the American man’s v-neck sweater. That’s the uniform of a man who is owned by a woman."

That's Scott Adams hating on the v-neck sweater in a blog post titled "The Humiliation of the American Male in 2016." He uses a Cascade TV ad to illustrate his point that "the humiliation of American men is now institutionalized in the media" — and he sees that as a big undercurrent in the rise of Donald Trump. I guess "Make America Great Again" translates, psychically, to Restore My Manhood and consequently — according to Adams — there's going to be a massive turnout of men sweeping thrusting Trump to victory.

But what's so awful about the v-neck sweater? I was struck by Adams's certitude about the unmanliness of the v-neck. How could the shape of the neck matter? Is he reading the letter "V" and thinking of the prominently feminine V words, vagina and vulva? But there are masculine V words: virility, valiant, vigor (JFK's word), vitality, victory.

You may remember that on Christmas eve in 2014, I was puzzled by something a saleslady in Austin, Texas said to me as I was looking for a sweater to give to one of my sons (both are men in their 30s).

She pulls one out that she thinks might be suitable, but then says in a somewhat apologetic tone: "It has a V-neck."

ME: Is there something wrong with V-neck sweaters? People have some kind of problem with V-necks? What's that about?

SHE: Well, my husband doesn't like them. But he's black.

ME (resisting the urge to say "Black people don't like V-neck sweaters?"): V-neck sweaters... are... square?

I blogged that really not knowing what the problem was with V-neck sweaters. Did the commenters help? Well, Jason said "Get back home, Loretta," refers to Loretta Martin, the character in the Beatles' "Get Back" who "thought she was a woman but she was another man." But it wasn't Loretta who was "wearing her high-heel shoes and her low-neck sweater," it was her mother, who was waiting for her back home where she once belonged.

And lemondog said "Uh... oh... V-neck," linking here:



Wow! He's got his hand in the position seen in picture of John Calvin I put up in yesterday's post about the Café Fellatio (where I was hoping you'd read that hand gesture in phallic terms?).



Anyway, I was very interested in getting a solution to this v-neck mystery from Scott Adams. The v-neck, in his view, is aggressively, horrifically emasculating:

How many of the married men reading this blog have received those same sweaters as “gifts” from women? Personally, I’ve received about 25 over the years. None from men. I received three of those sweaters so far this year. I throw them away. Nice try.

Ah! But wait! Wait, Scott Adams: You need to get your mind around this painting of Donald Trump that hangs in his Mar-a-Lago estate:

Sarah Palin's sweater — "a mini-black cardigan studded with what resembled needle-thin, glistening stalactites."

Yeah, endorsing Donald Trump, Sarah Palin did choose to wear what looked like a sweater full of needles!

Robin Givhan points — ouch — it out:

... the cardigan shimmered glamorously under the lights.... she picked at the wounds... The fashion industry may have long argued that spangles are not just for the cocktail hour and beyond, but that philosophy has made little headway in the world of campaign politics. So to see a politician — someone who is ostensibly not the star of the rally but a supporting player — dressed in such a bold manner, was to see someone who has come to steal the spotlight rather than share it.

Oh! The needles were out for Donald Trump? I would have thought they were armor against all her attackers. All the little pricks. The needle dicks.

Palin’s cardigan was not ugly — not exactly, not terribly — but it was distracting... Instead of listening to her, one tended to just look at her. 

That never happened to me, but I had YouTube playing on my iPhone which was lying on the counter as I did one thing and another, including taking a bath. Isn't that how you do video of political speeches? Also, I'm not a fashion critic, except when the spirit moves me.

The cardigan was flashy. It was proudly outside the realm of vetted political attire. It wasn’t safe and it wasn’t decorous. It was vaguely gaudy, with a hint of kitsch. And for a political affair it was inappropriate — which in the politically disruptive universe of Palin, made it perfect.

I agree! It was perfect. A sweater full of needles. What a message! Be the metaphor. But Givhan should have woven in Palin's use of clothing metaphor. In her million-pricks cardigan, she said:

[H]e’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debate on his sleeve, where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issue until he brought ‘em up. In fact, they’ve been wearing a, this, political correctness kind of like a suicide vest. 

So get out of that suit of opinions that's killing you and slip into something softly knitted on your side with thousands of needles sticking out at everyone else. You can do it, and it will look way cuter than that political correctness outfit you'd thought was de rigueur these past 20 seasons.

ADDED: Clothes as armor was a Jackie Kennedy idea:

This was a woman who, upon learning that her husband had won the presidential election, confessed: "I feel as though I had just turned into a piece of public property. It's really frightening to lose your anonymity at 31." And who, a few weeks later, in a letter to Oleg Cassini, the designer charged with furnishing her official wardrobe, was pleading: "PROTECT ME, as I seem so mercilessly exposed and don't know how to cope with it."

The solution was a closet full of body armor... [T]he result was a tour de force of optical illusion: These were clothes that recognized Jackie's central position on the national stage without ceding an iota of her privacy. These clothes were Parisian in inspiration and unfailingly Modernist in cut, but their starchy fabrics and formless shapes were designed to guarantee not front-page coverage in WWD... but protection from the insatiable hordes.

Robin Givhan analyzes the "studiously unattractive sweater" Bill Cosby wore to his arraignment.

"With its sober color and vaguely lopsided fit, it had the look of a sick-bed sweater. You could practically smell the Bengay...."

[H]is salt-and-pepper hooded sweater with the sort of toggle closures that might be found on a child’s coat... managed to telegraph the dual message of grandfatherly trust and warmth, as well as impish innocence. What the sweater most vehemently did not imply was money and power, which Cosby has in abundance....

The Cosby promenade delivered a... pungent and cynical statement. It suggested that Cosby — a man who last year completed a rigorous national comedy tour in the face of mounting scandal — is doddering and fragile and incapable of moving through the world unassisted.

Givhan's critique is justified, and yet, Cosby's dressing to maximize his advantage is also entirely justified. The question is whether that sweater was his best choice. If it's obvious he's trying to seem like a pathetic old man when, in fact, he is not, then the sweater undercuts his credibility. Maybe he should have dialed his I'm-a-pathetic-old-man look back a notch. But he is 78, and the old-man routine seems pretty plausible.  He is old, even as the charge against him is old.

Givhan's column is titled "Did Bill Cosby’s grandpa sweater make you feel bad for him? Why this con didn’t work." But I don't understand why it didn't work, or even why it shouldn't work. Or why it's a "con." Givhan lists some actors who are in their 70s — Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, etc. — and implies that they dress spiffily. She says that Cosby could have worn "a shirt and tie or a business suit." But look at the pictures of Cosby from that "rigorous national comedy tour" last year. He was wearing a big, baggy gray sweatsuit. The "studiously unattractive sweater" was a significant step up in nattiness from his concert outfit. So I think it's less of a con than the suit and tie that unfamous criminal defendants wear to their arraignments all the time.

PolitFact fact-checks Scott Walker's claim that he bought a sweater for $1 at Kohl's.

PolitFact justifies paying attention to this trivia on 2 grounds: 1. It's hearing from readers who are saying it's impossible to believe, and 2. It's relevant to Walker's "major theme... that he is just an average guy."

It turns out that Walker made the claim about a "Chaps Twisted Button Mock Sweater" that could be found at Kohl's marked down from $70 to $7, and Walker said he'd used his "Kohl’s Cash," which is some kind of bonus system for regular customers: "Thus, he could have easily gotten one for $1 out-of-pocket. We rate the claim True."