I went to visit Tai­lor today.

Excite­ment!

I decided to get a suit made. And some shirts. I had fun. I spent a *lot* of money. I sat there thumb­ing through hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent cloths for suits and shirts. I chose a light­weight medium gray with a deli­cious tex­ture for the suit, and four solid col­ors for the shirts. I’m not ready to grad­u­ate to stripy-​​ness yet.

Tai­lor is going to make the suit just how I want it. For one thing, it won’t have a breast pocket. Stu­pid, silly, point­less thing. So I got rid of it. Hooray! And I’ll finally get trousers that make me look as if I actu­ally have a bum, instead of just slump­ing like a wet sack. And the arm­holes will be nice and not so fab­u­lously deep, so I don’t look like a bat, flap­ping about point­lessly, when­ever I ges­tic­u­late from the shoul­der. If all goes accord­ing to plan, I won’t have to walk around with my elbows locked to my sides any more.

While get­ting mea­sured, I con­firmed that I am indeed abnor­mally tiny. My chest mea­sure came out to 35½”, which sim­ply can­not be had in an off-​​the-​​rack suit.

I got some shirts, too. All fairly stan­dard. I got one in British khaki, and I wanted another one in olive drab, but they only had olive drab in a linen, which is sim­ply unac­cept­able. I got a lovely blue that’s a tick darker than the typ­i­cal blue you see in stores, a lovely tex­tured gray (same tex­ture as the suit, actu­ally, only in a lighter shade), and one other thing that I can’t remember.

I didn’t go for French cuffs. I think they’re silly. And I also think they only work with white shirts, and I am white-​​averse. I do not own a white shirt, and I haven’t worn one in longer than I can remem­ber. I think maybe to prom. Eight years ago.

I for­went a breast pocket on the shirts, too. I am so tiny that I worry that breast pock­ets will only make me look smaller, because they’re cut on a stock pat­tern that doesn’t change size with the shirt. And I never use them, so why have them?

The only thing was, while I was look­ing at cloth while Tai­lor was deal­ing with other cus­tomers, the radio was on. On some Chris­t­ian sta­tion. Nor­mally, I can tol­er­ate by just tun­ing it out, but this was unlike any Chris­t­ian sta­tion I have ever heard. It was FM, but had a for­mat more like AM. It sounded like they were doing a live show like the “good old days” of radio the­atre. The for­mat was very “A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion.” A short story here, an adver­tise­ment there. I think it was a children’s show.

One seg­ment was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. Announcer Guy was inter­view­ing some shrimp. The first shrimp was a Pis­tol Shrimp, dis­cussing its inter­est­ing snap­ping mech­a­nism. He started by com­par­ing his snap­ping claw to a hand­gun. How he cocks it back, like the ham­mer on a gun. How he snaps it and it makes pow­er­ful shock wave. How it scares off ene­mies, or can help him catch food. It sounded sus­pi­ciously pro-​​gun.

Now I have no prob­lem with guns as such, but the cir­cum­lo­cu­tions made me uncom­fort­able. I mean, why is it nec­es­sary to hide a pro-​​gun mes­sage in a children’s story?

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The next shrimp to be inter­viewed was an Angler Shrimp (which I can­not find in the Wikipedia). That is, a shrimp with really long anten­nae that it uses to lure food like a fly-​​fisher. The shrimp described its unique adap­ta­tion (but not as such) and pointed out how he is unlike any other kind of shrimp in the ocean. Nat­u­rally, the obvi­ous con­clu­sion is that God had made him just the way he was.

Isn’t the intel­li­gence of the Great Designer glo­ri­ous? Some peo­ple think all the thou­sands of dif­fer­ent kinds of shrimp orig­i­nally came from a sin­gle pair of shrimp. But that’s unsci­en­tific. The Great Designer cre­ated all the kinds of shrimp sep­a­rately, and they will never repro­duce beyond their own kind.

No shit.

It was nau­se­at­ing. I had dif­fi­culty con­cen­trat­ing on the swatch books.

Tai­lor has never said any­thing even remotely reli­gious to me. I think he might have had the sta­tion on with­out pay­ing any atten­tion to it. He was in the other room with other cus­tomers most of the time. Next time I’m in there, if the radio is on that sta­tion again, I might ask to change it. He’s polite, runs a nice busi­ness with com­pet­i­tive prices, and makes great suits, so I’m not inclined to take my busi­ness else­where. I can­not ascribe to him a belief in cre­ation­ism, but even if I could, it doesn’t seem to affect his abil­ity to make a fine suit.