Your hat posts seem to be along the lines of Froog’s Daily Llama series. Well, except that he only does an impressionistic sentence or two per each, and you discuss the hell out of it.

However, while I haven’t read all your posts tagged “hats,” I couldn’t find a single on the subject: why hats?

Maybe you can enlighten readers over there at some point in the upcoming quantity-light/quality-heavy weeks.

P.S. “Other Men’s Flowers” is a wonderful name for a blog!

I arrived at RAHM via a comment you made to our common friend Froog. Somewhat frightened by your draconian rules about commenting, I resolved to try, since our blogs have a few small things in common, though mine lacks the erudition and cogency of yours and yours cannot compete in facetiousness and feeble levity with mine. We differ in the way we write about hats, as you will see if you glance at some of the 45 posts I have in that category.

Strength to your elbow.

About your questions: check your email.

(For those of you who don’t recognize Neil’s name, he’s the genius behind what used to be called GeekCruises: three- to seven-day cruises on which tech-type people took courses in a variety of topics such as the Perl programming language, the Linux operating system, etc. (The Missus and I went on two GeekCruises in 2000 — and were married on the first.) GeekCruises has expanded, shedding its narrow focus, and is now known as InSight Cruises. To give you a sense of what sort of courses they’re talking about, exactly: when you request being added to their mailing list for future cruises, they ask what subjects you’re interested in: science; Macintosh; opera; chess; classical music, art, Shakespeare, history…)

I bought your XPath and XPointer book today. (I’m totally psyched to read it!) I bought it because I’ve decided to start building my website pages from XML files! In thinking about this task, I’ve concluded I need some consulting help and wondered if you’d be interested.

I look forward to speaking with you … even if you’re not interested!!

Best,

Neil

Sadly, no.

What seems to have made your hat unique (aside from its being yours, and the manner in which you found it, and the one in which you lost it) is the “fedora”(-like?) nature. I found a bunch of something called “bucket hats” with strings like that, likewise Stetson- and Indiana Jones-type models. But among fedora wearers, it seems the style is to be too cool to worry about losing it in the wind. Something like that.

That’s a GREAT story, btw. You don’t say whether the relationship between you and the young lady survived the hideous experience, but I did wonder if she ever knew how much she’d disrupted your psyche.

I’ve got one ball cap I wear sometimes, from the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, and I’ve still got the Indy-type hat shown in the picture up top. Another one something like the Indy one, a little lighter in weight. And that’s about it for headgear. Florida’s climate doesn’t seem to encourage it, unless you’re wearing it to keep the sun off the top of your head. (I spend as little time as possible outdoors, so for me that’s not an issue. :)

- Brian