"Moisture wicking" is bullshit

I know. This is just another crusty Yankee rant. It seems timely with all this heat outside. I just hate polyester, and this is one of the lines they use for advertising.

By the way, my rants with profanity generate 3x the traffic that the health and rehab articles do. Not saying that’s wrong, just the way it is. Slowly over time, while I’m sharing the rehab articles, they start to catch up. I try to alternate nonsense rants with useful rehab information. There is a reader poll at the end.

But speaking of Yankee, and since we’re talking about quality, let’s talk about LL Bean.

This is not an advertisement for them. I don’t want to wear The Bean logo. It’s screams that I’m a white collar professional yuppie, which I am. I want to pretend that I’m some rugged lumberjack, and have oil stained shirts on my weekend.

But The Bean really does have some of the best built quality gear I have ever seen. A few years ago I finally threw away some leather hiking boots and some flannel shirts. They were still good, just very dirty and tore up. I partially threw them out due to embarassment, like my old cassette tapes. Im just too cheap and thrifty to throw them away.

All their stuff is like that. A little pricey, but lasts forever.

Photo by Moonstarious Project on Unsplash

A few years back, I read that The Bean had to change their return policy, because some jerks were returning gear for defects after 20 years. Give me a break. I’d be more embarrassed to return it, than to throw it out. It’s not the companies fault that something wore out after 20 years. It cost you half of what it costs now, when you bought it back then.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Have some self respect. The Bean has since had to revise their policy to one year.

Back to polyester, or plastic. This is not a rant against plastics or oil production. I just don’t want to wear it. Cotton is King, just for how cool it feels. I don’t even want to think about wool right now, but that’s the cold weather go to. I have some blankets that I thought were wool, and my wife laughed at me, informing me that they were polyester.

But my biggest gripe about polyester is the smell. I don’t think there is any moisture wicking going on. It just traps the sweat in a way that really makes it smell far worse than cotton.

On average it’s much cheaper to make, and there are all sorts of marketing campaigns to try and get us to buy polyester instead of cotton.

Reader poll

I’m trying this new, slightly grey background, to reduce eye strain (more yuppie complaining, “I have a blister on my typing pinky!”). Please help me set the background color. My wife says I’m color blind, so who knows what I’m seeing.