A few thoughts after accompanying a friend on a clothes shopping run.

• Doing a search for "plus size clothing" "store locator" can get you a quick list of chain stores to try, although some of them may be a little far away.


• Just because Ashley Stewart bills itself "for the plus-size urban woman" doesn't mean you shouldn't be willing to go to Roxbury or Mattapan to check it out.


• Torrid has its own sizes for tops, but not for many other items.


• Going to Lane Bryant last can often help your budget.


• It's not that your body is the wrong shape, it's that the clothes are cut wrong for it.


• Weekdays out of shopping season are an excellent time to go clothes shopping.

There's probably more but it's all that occurs to me just now. As always, this was fun.

Edit: This is probably also a good place to add a link to Lee Lee's Valise, though it was also a bit far for this particular expedition.

Good hint for other politicians as well.

Charles Calomiris, writing in Foreign Policy:

"Here's a hint for Europe's politicians: If the math says one thing and the law says something different, it will be the law that ends up changing."

Quoted by Edward Hugh in A Fistful of Euros, who adds:

I don’t think of Calomiris as a prophet (or even as a Cassandra), I don’t even think of him as an especially insightful economist when it comes to the macro problems of the real economy, but I do think he has one exceptionally strong merit: he can do the math, and as he says, if it gets down to a battle between legal details and arithmetic, arithmetic will always win.)

From Pixels Don't Breathe.

From the Epicurean Dealmaker:

One fine, convenient day, close your laptop, shut down your monitor, mute your smartphone and slip it into a pocket, and go visit an art museum. Once inside, skip the bookstore, shun the gift shop, and eschew any special exhibitions of Blockbuster Anything or Super Duper Famous Artist retrospectives. Instead, find the painting galleries in the permanent collection and wander around until you find a nice piece that particularly interests you—preferably one with a bench commodiously arranged before it—and sit down. Just exactly what kind, vintage, or style of painting is entirely up to you.

The point is to experience an object in real time—in the flesh, as it were—unmediated by the lacquered page of a book or the reflections on a computer screen. An object which has been created out of canvas, and wood, and paint, and whatever else the artist chose to incorporate for the express purpose of being looked at in itself, as an object: here and now.

Given how much of my personal and professional life is conducted or mediated through the sterile arrangement and rearrangement of glowing pixels on a screen, I find an occasional such exercise to be a refreshing and even reinvigorating way to reconnect with the physical world. You could accomplish the same thing by contemplating a tangerine, or your belly button, I suppose, but I personally tend to find fine art more intrinsically interesting. Plus, there's the advantage that staring for 20 minutes at a painting in a museum will garner you fewer incredulous stares (although not none) than doing the same thing with a piece of fruit in a farmer's market.

I am sure I could draw parallels between my little exercise and others you could perform to pierce the electronic veil before your eyes and reconnect with the world-as-it-is, but I will leave that project for you to contemplate.