Voicemail decoding assistance required

Got a call from a blocked number while I was writing the last post. I get a lot of these, but this one left a weird voicemail. Could be an issue with the digital recording or something at the beginning, but still… weird.

Any clues? Feel free to listen online or to download the MP3.

Also, if you remix it into a song, I at least want a mention in the credits. 🙂

Ninja Edit: On the plus side, this is another reason why I love Google Voice. It took me under a minute from getting this weirdness to posting it on the blog. Seriously, Google Voice is awesome.

Fashion gone berserk

Okay, this is just ludicrous.

Too lazy to paint a house yourself?
Too lazy to paint a house yourself?

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?
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