Art Deco Menswear Style. . .

A reproduction of a 1934 poster advertising a menswear collection for the Viennese department store Jawo.

Kind of quiet here at Totleigh-in-the-Wold what with the recent rains, no teaching duties, no one bothering me about anything having to do with other work commitments (they're all away for the summer), and a recent jaunt to the dental surgeon's chair to begin the lengthy process necessary for an eventual dental implant. Ugh.

The one high point of the procedure was that I got to practice my German with the doctor, whose father is German, so he spent a large part of his formative years there. You just never know when these languages will come in handy. If you'll pardon the flagrant self-promotion, my Norwegian, Swedish, and German have come in handy at the oddest moments over the years, often far beyond the regions where those languages are actually spoken! It certainly adds an interesting, and at times very useful, dimension to life.

Returning to the point at hand, I haven't felt up to much since Thursday for obvious reasons, so there has been plenty of idle time to tool around online, which meant that I eventually happened upon the illustrations shared today. Kind of cool, don't you think?

-- Heinz-Ulrich

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Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

The Power of Ideas. . .

T he end is nigh! The autumn semester/term approaches. And while we still have almost two months of summer left according to the calendar, "Summer is over and gone," as the crickets sang in Charlotte's Web . At least for those of us who head back to the classroom in less than a month. In advance of a meeting with my program director late Monday morning, I spent about 40 minutes total during the weekend to jot down several ideas about planned workshops and related activities for the coming 2024-2025 academic year. At an opportune moment, I mentioned "I have a few ideas," and opened my leather portfolio. My director was highly receptive to almost everything I suggested, and we had a very productive planning session for just over 90 minutes. Just about everything I sketched out on Sunday aligns with his own ideas. It's nice when meetings go that well, and two related things occur to me in hindsight. One, it pays to exercise forethought, take, and de

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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