Nothing to see here

Okay, this is just ludicrous.

That’s right kiddies, JCrew sells pre-paint stained jeans. For those people too lazy to paint a house, now you can look like you’ve actually been working too, but without all that pain in the ass “labor”.

I understood the patched jeans fad. The scuffed torn thing, I got. The wrong size thing was weird to me, and god help me I even understand stone-washed. But this is simply too far out there for me. Not because of the look, although they look terrible, but because of the price.

Those jeans cost $285.

That’s right. Take one $60-$80 pair of jeans, add $1 worth of white paint, and charge $285 for it.

Note the salesmanship tactics they use in the description. Emphasis is mine:

A hand-crafted collector’s item in authentic selvedge cotton denim from one of Japan’s oldest and most renowned mills. We spend hours on each pair to create a unique jean for the most discerning denim connoisseur, so we have only a handful available—and no two are quite alike. Each one is made with denim woven on the original 100-year-old narrow looms. Each pair is stonewashed, hand-distressed, hand-splattered with paint and hand-finished, giving it the kind of character only individual attention can impart. Button fly. Traditional five-pocket styling, with reinforced back pockets. Import. Machine wash. Catalog/jcrew.com only.

My questions about this copy are two-fold:

1. Who the hell considers themselves to be a “discerning denim connoisseur”?
2. I wonder if this sort of sales pitch really obscures the fact that you’re paying damn near $300 for a pair of pre-ruined jeans?

I just found out that George Carlin died from heart failure yesterday. He was 71.

So you might have noticed the pictures I posted this weekend. Well, actually, you didn’t until this morning because my blog was broken and so the “live” pictures got sort of stuck between Flickr and the site.

Still, I sent a few from the weekend to try to get into the whole picture blogging thing again. It’s always a lot of fun to snap some shots, and since I got Flickr posting them to the blog instantly, I figured I’d give it a shot this weekend while I was at the Publympics. Paul emailed us all asking for judges, and I volunteered. Hey, free beer and lots of pain? Sign me up!

One thing I did learn was that if I’m going to be outside in the heat all day drinking, then wearing sunblock is not optional. The other thing I learned is that it is actually possible for a human being to sweat beer like in one of those Gatorade commercials. Beer. Is it in you?

On the whole, a good time. I don’t recall who won, but quite frankly, everybody won. By the end, I don’t even think there were enough teams still around to do the tricycle races, and so I left just before that point. When they busted out the yards and started chugging (not on the list of events, BTW), then I figured that it was all over bar the puking.

Heavy college deja-vu.