May 9, 2014: Lost Sock Memorial Day
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Nice eagle.
I believe there is an alternate universe where everyone is asking “where do all the extra socks come from?”
Does this imply that men died with their boots off?
I assume that this is a yankee cultural joke ?? 😉
Nah, Don it’s completely serious. 🙂
The only problem is that it has gotten too commercial in the past few years. It used to be solely about remembering the lost socks and now commercialism has appeared:
https://www.facebook.com/SockDreamsShop/posts/470489613031803
Is nothing sacred anymore?
You guys may just be too young to remember, but this was in the news about thirty years ago.
I remember very clearly reading in Scientific American, as I rode BART from San Francisco over to the East Bay, that congress had funded a study, at Stanford I believe, and after much research into the possibility that 1) socks were ultimately soluble soluble in water, detergent acting as a catalyst, 2) socks, more likely, were cannibalistic, with the wash cycle removing the less pleasant aspects of the process, or 3)any one of several others processes, which I don’t recall, all with ambiguous results. They had concluded the study justifying several follow-on grants and studies. Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, I believe pursued the idea that radiating socks, each with a different isotope would allow them to specifically determine which sock had disappeared, and which other socks had absorbed the missing sock’s isotope, proving of course the cannibalistic nature of socks. Again the study was inconclusive. The final multi-year mega-million dollar study, secured by Harvard, definitively proved, at least to the satisfaction of academia, that contrary to common belief, socks did not exactly disappear in the wash, but as the larval stage, simply moulted into coat hangers.
What is the cutoff point for keeping a survivor in the sock drawer? May mismatched survivors be paired if you’re not going to leave the house that day? I have questions.
“What is the cutoff point for keeping a survivor in the sock drawer?”
One month. Then they are to be allowed to mourn in the rag drawer.
“May mismatched survivors be paired if you’re not going to leave the house that day?”
Only if the color is similar. I am afraid that socks do have a very strict color line. Patterns on the other hand are of no consequence to them.
Jerry Seinfeld built his comedy scheme on the lost sock in the dryer. I do remember putting my arm into a sleeve and there encountering “the lost sock”. However it is now fashionable to wear two different socks and have two pair (of two different socks) In fact, the weirder, the better.
.
With old age and color blindness, navy blue, black and brown all look the same. Someone once suggested that socks be bound together before putting into the wash, but then that would take all the fun out of it.