Menswear, Soccer, Guitar.

[voxsart]

Steve McQueen Just Saw Your Self-Anointed #Dapper Hashtag.

Guess what he thinks.

[si7]

(via The flux capacitor delay pedal! - 4114 Custom Guitar Effects)

[toomanyactivities]

Can’t not own this

[lhiver-froid]

A beautiful Fender strat

[catastrofe]

you can get mad, but you’ll never be able to get as mad as Van Gaal

[illustratedexample]

Nobody has ever been owned as hard as Alexi Lalas owned Landon Donovan here.

[pedalspedalspedals]

YO

[guitar-porn]

Zerberus Triton.

“This is a Triton guitar that I have built for a customer in Vienna (Austria). Serial number #005. Due to some health problems it took me almost 2 Years to build that masterpiece by hand. I still don´t employ CNC mills that spit out almost finished bodies every minute and so I built that guitar the old fashioned way by my two hands. 

Some specs: Bookmatched, thick quilted Maple top on a German flamed Maple body. Notice the Red Makoré pinstripe between top and back. Both lumber are pretty lightweight and so the whole guitar is pretty light and has nice attack and also a nice sustain with a wonderful warm tone. I have used Black Ebony from Cameroon for the fretboard. Often Ebony from Madagascar is used for fretboards but I prefer that kind of deep Black Cameroon Ebony. For the inlays I have used various pieces of tinted Abalone. The neck is set deep into the body. It is made of layers of Black Wenge, Purpleheart and flamed Maple. The neck has illuminated side dots that can be switched Red/Off/Green. The guy who ordered that guitar loves birds-eye-Maple and so I made the covers on the back out of Birdseye-Maple. Pickups: Kammerstein Quadrail humbuckers (my favorite). A Wilkinson VS100 tremolo made by Gotoh in Japan (also my favorite vibrato system). The neck has a 648mm scale and a 14´radius. Both humbuckers can be split into single-coils by push-pull-potentiometers. 

The guitar sounds amazing and thanks to the controls and the coil-split, it is very versatile. Beside all the specs and facts about lumber and hardware - I am overly happy that I have finished that beauty. Carving the top and shaping all the contours was such a hell of a work. The next guitar that will be finished is a Red Dragon for a customer in Shanghai - but after that I will finish a hand full of guitars that are not explicit customers orders very soon.” - Frank, of Zerberus Guitars.

Give these good people some love, the guitars are works of art.

Got a guitar, bass, pedal or amp you want to share? You can send it in to GuitarPorn here!

[deebeeus]

Eric Clapton’s 1964 ES-335, played with Cream, and his Frenken-Strat “Blackie”.  Not replicas…these are the real thing.  Both purchased in 2004 by Guitar Center, with proceeds going to the Crossroads Center.

[theworldsgame]

FIFA Corruption Round-up

For the newbies: If you’re brand new to soccer/football (welcome!), John Oliver broadly explains the issues with FIFA in this video. For bookworms, Foreign Policy also posted an analysis of everything wrong with FIFA “president” Sepp Blatter’s organization.

The basics

Arrests: Sepp Blatter was not arrested, but 14 FIFA executives/officials were, including current FIFA VP and CONCAFAF president Jeffrey Webb, and others from CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, and TTFF (Trinidad & Tobago). Profiles of each official are here.

Charges: racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering, bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, etc. Full list via the U.S. DoJ. Charges are likely to be brought against sports marketing executives who paid bribes/kickbacks to FIFA as well (via the New York Times)

To get a sense of the complexity of the kickbacks, check out these images from the U.S. Attorney’s Office

Broader implications

FIFA is “fully cooperating” with the investigation; interpret that as you wish. Official statement from FIFA here.

FIFA is staying true to its FIFA self and is not delaying the presidential election, scheduled for Friday

Note this investigation is completely separate from Switzerland’s investigation into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding processes

World Cup sponsors respond (or don’t) to the arrests

For live updates

The Guardian (UK) is has live updates here

TL;DR: holy shit, corruption

[putthison]

It’s Not Really on Sale: Stuff at JC Penney

A federal judge certified a class-action lawsuit this week against JC Penney, who’s being accused of artificially inflating prices on apparel and accessories in order to trick shoppers into thinking they’re getting good deals when things go on sale. 

Mall fashion watchers may recall that JCP made a valiant attempt at ditching this strategy a few years ago, hiring a top retail exec from Apple, handing menswear over to Nick Wooster and attempting to go with an “great design, everyday low prices” strategy. It bombed spectacularly, and they were back to discounting in short order.

Reuters has the story on the lawsuit:

The JC Penney complaint accused the retailer of running a “massive, years-long, pervasive campaign” to deceive shoppers about its pricing for private-label brands and outside brands, such as Liz Claiborne, sold exclusively by the retailer.

Lead plaintiff Cynthia Spann said she discovered this after buying three blouses for $17.99 each, a 40 percent discount from the “original” $30 price, only to learn the price was never above $17.99 in the prior three months.

[…]

The Federal Trade Commission has said retailers are supposed to sell items at original prices for a “reasonable length of time” before marking them down, if they wish later to provide the original prices to consumers who compare prices.

Watch out, J. Crew.

[airows]

[putthison]

From our friends over at StyleForum, a five-step system for getting rid of stubborn stains in shirts using vinegar and Oxiclean.  This isn’t infallible, but you’d be amazed at the results.  I often will take a flier on a great thrift shirt with ring-around-the-collar, and give this a shot.  Usually I end up with a shirt that’s clean as a whistle.

How to Clean Shirts

Soak shirt in a solution made from one gallon hot water (as hot as it will come out of the faucet) and one cup of vinegar. Let the shirt soak for 30 mins to 2 hours.

Rinse shirts, and squeeze out excess water. Empty bucket and rinse. In a cup, prepare a concentrated Oxy-Clean solution. Make sure to use the Oxy-Clean granules that come in the tub. Make the solution about 10 parts HOT water to one part O-C. Usually this amounts to two scoops of O-C (using the provided scoop) per 4-6 ounces of water. You want this to be very concentrated.

Apply the strong solution generously to the stained areas. Place the shirts in a bucket (so that the solution doesn’t flow away, or dry) with the stained areas towards the bottom of the bucket so they stay nice and covered in the solution. Allow to soak overnight. It can also help to use an old toothbrush and scrub the stained areas every hour or so, if you’ve got the time.

In the morning, remove the shirts from bucket. Fill the bucket with a gallon of hot water, and two scoops of the Oxy-Clean (basically, follow the recipe on the package for a general cleaning solution) and mix well. Place the shirts in the bucket, and soak for 2-24 hours. This just helps to remove any trace of stain. You might want to stir the shirts around with your hands after you put them in the bucket with the weaker solution just to remove some of the stronger solution that is still on the shirts.

Remove, and wash/rinse in the regular cycle on your washing machine.

Note: I find that this normally removes sweat/dirt stains from the armpit, neck, and cuff with ease. For really strong stains, you might have to repeat the process a few times.

[deebeeus]

1964/5 Fender Stratocaster - on sale at Folkway Music in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

http://www.folkwaymusic.com/vintage-instruments/electric-guitars-amps/1964-5-fender-strat-0215/

[voxsart]

Athlete And Justice Of The Supreme Court.

Byron White and the suited button-down, 1947.

[putthison]

Wearing a Suit Makes You Think Differently

The Atlantic has an article today about how wearing a suit not only changes how the world perceives you, but how you perceive the world. An excerpt:

A new study looks specifically at how formal attire changes people’s thought processes. “Putting on formal clothes makes us feel powerful, and that changes the basic way we see the world,” says Abraham Rutchick, an author of the study and a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge. Rutchick and his co-authors found that wearing clothing that’s more formal than usual makes people think more broadly and holistically, rather than narrowly and about fine-grained details. In psychological parlance, wearing a suit encourages people to use abstract processing more readily than concrete processing.

Research on the effects of clothing on cognition remains in its early stages. Another similar study showed that when subjects wore a white coat that they believed belonged to a doctor, they became more attentive, an effect that didn’t hold when they believed the garment was a painter’s. But clothing’s psychological effects have been specified for only a couple of the ways the brain makes sense of stimuli.

That said, at work, when some have to wear suits, there are some specific implications when attire flicks on abstract processing. “If you get a stinging piece of critical feedback at work, if you think about it with a concrete processing style, it’s more likely to negatively impact your self-esteem,” says Michael Slepian, another one of the paper’s authors and a professor of management at Columbia Business School. Slepian added that thinking about money with an abstract processing style might lead one to skip impulsive purchases in favor of smarter, long-term savings behaviors.

BRB, going to up the effects by only wearing white tie and tails from now on. 

You can read the rest here. 

(via IQ Fashion)

[voxsart]

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em.

John F. Kennedy.

[voxsart]

1964.

Sean Connery.