who is fighting?

Zeph’s pop culture quiz #62 In the spectacles of a gentleman—who is sporting a quite ↵distinctive tie knot, by the way—two people fighting are reflected. Who are they?     Simply leave a comment with your educated guess—you can ask for additional hints, too. [Leaving a comment is easy; just click the ‘Leave a reply’ at the end of the post and fill in the form. If it’s the first time you post a comment, it will be held for moderation. But I am constantly checking, and once I’ve approved a comment, your next ones won’t be held, but published … Continue reading

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the congo dandies

  Description by RT Documentaries: ““La Sape” is a unique movement based in Congo that unites fashion-conscious men who are ready to splurge money they don’t really have on designer clothes. Dressing in stark contrast with their surroundings, these elegant ambiance-makers become true local celebrities… but this fame comes at a price. The Republic of the Congo in Central Africa can’t boast of high standards of living. Yet, there are men here who are prepared to spend a fortune on designer suits. They call themselves “sapeurs” – members of the “La Sape” movement. “La Sape” comes from French and stands … Continue reading

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the lovecraft tie

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which … Continue reading

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tri knot

  The above was uploaded to YouTube by McGreyling on 22 September 2010 and shows how to tie a before unknown inverse tie knot. Like Edeity’s knot, Henry Hu’s Hen Tie, and Lord Whimsy’s Merovingian it is of size 11. In the video McGreyling doesn’t stick to the convention of having the tie’s wide blade hanging to the right (from the wearer’s point of view). So, for sequencing I mirrored the movements in the video. In Fink-Mao notation McGreyling’s knot reads like this:     Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Li Co TRi Lo TCi [ET]     In … Continue reading

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inverse in time

Due to public demand I created the category ↵sartorial and the tag ↵dandyism. For starters I hauled over five according entries from ↑ye ole xirdalium. In detail and with background information, pictures, sequences, diagrams, and movies you now can read the, more or less, full story of the inverse tie knots (in chronological order): ↵merovingian ties, ↵more merovingian ties, ↵the eldredge, ↵eldredge variant, and finally ↵eldredge reloaded.     This comes in time with ‘↑In Time‘ (Niccol 2011) still in the cinemas—at least over here in Europe. I thought I had spotted it while seeing the movie ↵just recently. So … Continue reading

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eldredge reloaded

  With the video Jeffrey “cwtrain” Eldredge uploaded to YouTube yesterday, the story of the inverse tie-knots finally seems to have come to an end. In the video Jeffrey demonstrates exactly ↵the sequence I had come up with on 19 October 2008. This knotting-sequence I had christened ‘Eldredge Variant,’ because all I did was adding two through-the-loop moves to Jeffrey’s original sequence, thereby making it into a knot. Since then I regularly wear the knot in public and even made inverse tie-knots the core topic of my Habilitationsvortrag ‘↑There is no Merovingian! Tie-knots, Neo-Dandyism and Cyberculture,’ presented on 03 February … Continue reading

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eldredge variant

To my eyes ↵the ‘Eldredge’ is an absolute beauty, but the solution Jeffrey Eldredge chose for the final move does not exactly leave us with a ‘knot’ in the technical sense of the term. He simply tucks what is left of the narrow end of the tie away under the collar and the loop the tie forms around the neck. That way we depend on the pressure the loop around the neck exerts on the collar for the whole structure not to come apart. To improve this situation I added two ‘through-the-loop’ movements to Jeffrey’s invention. Translated to Fink-Mao notation, … Continue reading

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the eldredge

It is uncanny, the development is still unfolding. After I learned about the inverse tie knots, invented by edeity, and clearly transcending Fink & Mao’s 85 ways, I made some calculations—of course by means of the formulas devised by Fink & Mao, and spent a thought or two on the matter. The original ‘Edeity’ knot and the ‘Hen Tie’ are of size 11, comprising 4 center moves. Formula (15) (Fink & Mao 2000: 115) teaches us, that there are 80 knots within this class. Edeity’s ingenious idea to wind the narrow end around the tie’s wide blade, instead of the … Continue reading

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more merovingian ties

After having published ↵merovingian ties—beyond the 85 knots of Fink and Mao, I started to contact some of the involved protagonists. ↑Lord Whimsy was the first to answer and confirmed a suspicion of mine. To my question on how he discovered the knot, Whimsy answered: ‘If memory serves, I found a few sources online (I believe it was a pdf file somewhere). After some failed attempts of my own, I finally figured it out.’ So, it seems that Whimsy got hold of the same tutorial by edeity, ↑published at zgeek, with which Henry Hu started out. Like Henry, Whimsy, too, … Continue reading

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