Online clothes shopping for fat men

When you weigh an ounce or two more than 20 stones (that's 280 pounds for our Western neighbours... or nearly 128 kilos for our Eastern ones), you eventually come around to the conclusion that the local Dunnes Stores just isn't going to have a good supply of summer clothing that covers your beer belly.

The "smallest" size I can wear these days in tops or teeshirts is XXXL. Now, either the news reports about the slobbering spread of obesity in the Western world isn't getting through to the store buyers, or there are a heck of a lot of slightly built, fit building workers still roaming about. I say this because any given day there is hardly room to manoeuvre around displays of S, M and L sizes in the Menswear departments.

It's like finding a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to see an XXXL label on a teeshirt in our local shopping centres. I almost knocked Herself over a couple of weeks ago on seeing two (count them!) at the bottom of a pile of polo shirts.

So I've turned to the Internet for summer clothes. Lately I visited a UK-based site, bigteeshirt.co.uk, where I purchased the above classy number. I'll be wearing it this June Bank Holiday weekend as I tend the barbeque and no doubt shall be the life and soul of the party in it for.... oh.... two whole minutes, maybe.

Apart from the printed tees, the site supplies various coloured styles and other clothes up to 13XL sizes. (I'd like to see a label that says XXXXXXXXXXXXXL....!)

The "Anorexia" tee is available at £12.99 (€16.54) with postage and packing extra. In all I chose 5 items: "Anorexia"; the Duke Spirit Linen Mix, the Espionage Cotton tee, and two Izod Cotton Polo Shirts. The whole came to £72.95 (€93.00) inclusive of postage and packing.

By the way, €93.00 would purchase fifteen and a half summer tee shirts of good quality in my local Dunnes Stores outlet. Money sent abroad because they don't cater for my size. Think on, Department Store owners!

Everything came through in good time and good order, with the slight exception of the Izod shirts. The Website also caters for the TALL man as well as the wide, and Herself has been looking askance at me in my brightly coloured cotton dresses. I show her the maker's label and say:

"This is the style in Pakistan!"

But she isn't persuaded. So the moral of the story is to read the Sizing charts provided on the site and do as much online examination of the product as possible before placing an order. I'll definitely be shopping there again.

One might well ask why it is I'm paying for UK Sterling-priced products given the weakness of the US Dollar against the Euro. Well, the US-based sites I visited seem not to be aware of the rest of the world as a potential market. "There is no postal rate for your area" one online ordering system told me. "You'll be contacted with the details of the additional cost once your order is placed."

"One pig in a poke, please!"

Or, if they do, they equate the distance travelled in the post to be roughly equivalent to a trip from Earth to Mars, making the postage and packing rates wildly expensive.

If anyone locates a reasonably-priced US site that sells tees to places outside the USA, please let me know.

E-Bay is another place I've looked, again with mixed results. One guy had an offer of six teeshirts from his online shop for £40 Sterling and wanted another £40 p&p to send it 100 miles to Ireland!

We're not getting thinner, only poorer, it seems. I'm off now to get the garden into order for Sunday's barbie.

Have a great weekend!

More Postcards from Second Life

St. Patrick's Weekend in Second Life

Yes, St Patrick's Weekend was celebrated in Second Life, not least in the various themed parties and meet ups in the clubs and bars there. Discover Ireland also arranged for a number of parades along the streets of "Dublin" as part of an effort to publicise the Real Life (RL) city. The theory behind this is that people might like SL Dublin and come searching for some RL kicks.

I find SL Dublin to be strange in the extreme. Walking (or flying) along College Green, one sees traffic-free streets and some familiar sights like Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland. Enter a doorway, however, and one finds oneself inside a typical SL boutique selling avatar clothing or jewellry. It's like being in a dream where the familiar is ever so distorted. In O'Connell Street, the widest thoroughfare in Europe, one finds the GPO a stone's throw from the river (I flew into the Liffey by accident and walked along the bottom -- a real first -- I've not done that in RL... yet....) and then the Northside stops abruptly before Henry Street. No Clearys, either, but there is a Millenium Spire. There are quite a few avatars hanging out in SL Dublin's bars and clubs and it is definitely worth a longer exploration some time.
On Sunday I joined the onlookers for the first parade in SL Dublin. It was fun for a number of unexpected reasons, primarily the technical problems of too many visitors filling up a Sim in one go and the comments from those whose avatars were experiencing difficulties. People were materialising without any hair, or couldn't see anything, or couldn't figure out if they were sitting in an unoccupied seat. Luckily, although there were some lags in the action, I didn't experience too many glitches. The arrival of SL floats whose construction was sponsored by various RL and SL interests was announced by a commere whose American origins meant some interesting pronunciations of the pre-prepared script: "Dally-mount Park" and "Chapel-eye-zod" for instance. "The Christchurch" was another small blooper.

I have to say I didn't stay to see the whole parade, but of those I saw the floats mostly appeared uniformly cubic in shape with various uninspiring (some downright mysterious) attachments forming their bodies. They zig-zagged in a kind of controlled chaos down the streets (and sometimes on the pavements) to the applause of the crowd. After a while, I let my camera wander over the spectators, who seemed much more interesting, if only because they come in far more varities of sizes, shapes and styles.
Of course, I eventually ended up in Toby's Juke Joint Blues club in Garden City, which is my favourite hang-out in SL so far. The party must have been good because my avatar was missing a boot next day. Bit like RL, I suppose.

But I think the parade showed great promise and I hope it continues to grow. Perhaps with a longer lead-in time next year the floats might show more of that Second Life magic. Ironically, I've seen creatures and costumes in the real Dublin parade that rival any fantasy creations roaming in the wider Second Life world. I hope someone finds a way to integrate that kind of creation into the 2009 SL parade. Good work, people! Looking forward to next year already.

Internet images free-for-all warnings

The Sunday Independent reports today that Internet users need to be careful of what they're posting in the images sections of personal blogs and social networking sites.

In a piece entitled, "Bloggers beware: that private picture could soon be very public", Niamh Horan tells the tale of a Dublin woman who posted a "risque" photo of herself in the "private" section of her profile, only to find it being used in a dating-site advert a few weeks later.

The message that everything Internet should be considered publicly-accessible obviously isn't being learned.

This week, I received an amusing email from my sister to say that her daughter, whose college project on "Family", was due this week, was watching a presentation prepared by another girl when a slide showing my mother, brother, sisters, me and the dog flashed up on screen!

"That's MY family!" my niece shouted out in surprise.

The photo, which has been several years on another personal Internet site, turned up in a Google trawl and was blithely added to the project.

The Indo goes on to say that Tuesday next is the fifth annual "Safer Internet Day".

[Photo of Webcam is from the Logitch Website. Buy their stuff to redeem me.]

Irish Blogs let-down

I run (or have run) a couple of sites in the past in which I know other browsers (the people, not the IE/Firefox thingies) have felt they've invested some time and energy in supporting. And I know what it's like to feel a need for change, modernisation, a revamp of the whole set-up.

I've also been a frequent visitor to an online site or service over which I've had no direct control but have enjoyed and made a part of my browsing day.

Irish Blogs.ie is one of those sites that has insinutated itself into that contented part of my online mind. It is usually the second or third stop on my browsing schedule. This blog is listed there and it shows up when I update. Love seeing the title and the first few lines of text among all the other, more popular blogs. And, of course, enjoying the read of interesting topics that comes up in the list by other bloggers.

Over the past few weeks, the Irish Blogs site has been radically altered and is no longer the plain but beloved destination it once was. Instead of a no-nonsense list of fairly-recently updated blog posts, the aggregator is now divided into "Popular" and "Latest" and "Other". It also doesn't appear to update towards the end of the week at all. And the "Popular" posts don't cater at all for the likes of me: a non-conformist, erratic who likes to pick and choose what he finds interesting, as opposed to being told what it is he should be reading.

I hope that the tenent of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" will sink in and some of these changes be reversed. I'm all for changing things about and I know one cannot please everyone. But this is just a bit too radical a change.

New recipes for spam, Part 1

I've decided that rather than deleting my unsolicited emails, I'm going to combine some of the titles and see if any of them can be unintentionally entertaining. Today, the great oracle of spam tells me:

• 5 inches in not enough download Photoshop CS3 Extended
• Impotence meds at best prices! Be leaner and slimmer by next week
• Why be an average guy any longer This Mothers Day give Mom music
• Best Russian brides end the obesity now
• Forget Vista, speed up your XP system we have a huge list of pharmacies
• Will it be the one on truly
• an athletic you by macrame is hazardous
• Home Depot Voucher Inside cheap OS Shirley

So I dropped me choccie bar... Big deal.

Thought I'd post something humorous about how God hates me cos I bit a chocolate bar this evening and hurt an already broken tooth (emphasis on how eating sweets is well known not to have an effect on tooth decay, of course). Then to add insult to dental injury, I dropped the rest of the chocolate bar on the floor.

In search of a suitable judgemental God image I could find nothing. Then I thought about a weeping image and found this website.

How peculiar.

Link: Weeping Gallery Dot Net