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Wide Shot

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NASA released this nice infra-red photo yesterday, showing us all of the Andromeda Galaxy with colors assigned to indicate relative temperature. For some reason, blue represents the warmer parts and red, the cooler ones.

andromeda

Trying to challenge our expectations, NASA? That’s quite a risk to take when you consider we are situated at a moment in time just before the dawn of commercial spaceflight for the well-heeled tourist. Revelers who save up an entire lifetime for one amazing interstellar trip will not take kindly to their disappointing arrival at the exotic destination. Remember when planning your Andromeda getaway that the most comfortable beaches will be found at the center.

Not that we have to go out of our way to get there, since Andromeda is scheduled to merge with our Milky Way Galaxy in about 4 billion years.

But never you mind, I like Andromeda just fine. It’s pretty to look at.

In fact, the jaunty angle at which the NASA stylists framed this makes me think of the Fascinators that were so predominant during the most recent British Royal Wedding.

Kate_Hat_Galaxy2

The right hat can put an exclamation point on a crisply stylish look. But does wearing an entire galaxy on your head qualify as overstatement? We’ve all known people with their heads in the clouds and others with stars in their eyes, but what does it mean when you have clouds of stars in your hair?

Describe your favorite headgear.

79 thoughts on “Wide Shot”

  1. Headgear ahhh be of my favorite topics. Justo last might I was commenting on my discovery the a Hamburg has turned out to be one of the hats that once on my head works very well. I tend to reach for a fedora from the bogart era a Stetson stratoliner or playboy or an open road in either its lbj form or its Johnny depp crown, a good pork pie is always good for a smile as it tops the noggin but a hamburg is turning out to be an old standby . Panama hats from equador and milan in the spring and summer and felt in the fall and winter. The right hat will make you feel like the center of the universe is wrapped around your ears and in a way it is. Aren’t we all at the center of our own universe? You may as well enjoy it with a hat that feels right.

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        2. Yesterday I posted about a picture I had taken of my wife and daughter. I felt bad about not being able to share the image, so I sent it out via email to as many people as I thought might care to see it. If I missed you and you’d like to see it, write me. mnstorytelr (at) comcast.net

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        7. thats my question. i have my own blog on word press but have not figured out how to put tunes or pictures on it. any words of wisdom?

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        8. If you have one of the freebie wordpress sites, you can probably only upload photos. You need to upgrade to upload videos or music – though you can link to them without actually uploading pretty easily. There should be an “add media” button above the tools for editing the text of a post – click on that and follow the instructions on the pop-up window to upload images.

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  2. Good morning. I can’t bring myself to wear any of those stylish hats that tim mentioned above. I did buy a beret that I thought I might wear sometime, but I have never found the right time to wear it.

    I always wear a hat when I am outside and it is usually the kind farmers wear which is frequently referred to as a seed cap. The bill on these caps is good for keeping the sun out of my eyes which lets me get by without using sun glasses. I don’t like wearing sun glasses.

    I should wear a hat with a brim on all sides to protect me from the sun. I don’t wear hats with wide brims because the wind tends to catch them and blow them off my head. I have an insulted cap with a bill and ear flaps that I like to use in the winter.

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  3. I look bad when not wearing a hat and look worse when wearing one, so my hat collection is slight. The only hat I ever enjoyed much was the fluorescent orange hunting cap I wore for decades (the style being called–I think–a “Jones” hat). That was mostly a safety measure, although it was instructive to see how naked and vulnerable I felt when not wearing the hat. With the hat I could turn my head downward a bit and go ploughing through honeysuckle or ragweed or other head-high cover types that would mess up my face if I didn’t have the hat to deflect the brush.

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    1. Maybe I should try a Jones hat. They have a short brim on the back that might help protect my neck, but it looks like the wind wouldn’t catch that brim and blow the hat off my head. They aren’t as stylish as the ones tim favors. However, there might be some of them that have enough style to look okay for most occasions. I wouldn’t get one with the fluorescent orange color.

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      1. The number of wind gusts that will mess with you vs the pleasure of having a head companion make it near moot. On many older fedoras there is a wind trolley the never gets used. It a string that attaches to the hat below the bow on the hatband. There is a small bottom that works with a slip knot motion fits over the button on your jacket or shirt and if the wind blows the hat off the wind trolley keeps you from doing that funny looking run down the road while bending over only to have the gust send you another 3 steps down the road only to bend over and have the wind blow it again. I don’t like stomping my hats to keep them from blowing but I have done it when I neglected to implement wind trolley technology. You can also buy the hat in exactly the right size instead of ball parking it with a seed cap

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        1. I like the idea of have a string to catch a hat if it is blown off, tim. I think a string with clips on both ends with one clip attached to the hat and the other clip on a shirt collar would work for me. I would have to give a string like that a try before using it regularly. I might not like having a string like that to deal with if I actually tried it or I might do okay with it.

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  4. I have my whole life had an aversion to tight things, which has grown very problematic the last 2-3 years. It’s another of those fun fm issues. Right now I am trying to find socks larger than my large feet. I seldom wear a hat (or gloves) which are tight enough to make me aware of them. Baseball caps are pretty much it: light, loose and a bit sloppy or I will not wear them, and a good bill I can pull down to hide me eyes from overhead lights and the sun, light being another fm issue. Thus people noticed my caps. Since I am, as I am told anyway by “she whom you must let manipulate you” hard to buy for, buying old Clyde a cap is a cool idea. I must have had about 200 of them in my life, most of which got ruined by sweat when wearing them to do hard work. Today I have about 40, some of which are kept as momentoes and hardly worn. I don’t do much sweat-inducing work anymore, so they last longer now.
    I have one from almost every high-tech company for which my son has worked. One says on it “Wizard Works.” That one gets lots of stares or a word or two of negative comment from the Fundies.

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    1. I have a small collection of various baseball or seed caps. There are a few in my collection that have advertising on them. Most of mine are plain ones without advertising because I don’t like most of the ones I have seen that have ads on them and also don’t like most of those with logos or some kinds of picture.

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  5. My Stormy Kromer 🙂 It’s my go-to winter hat! Keeps off the sun and you can pull the ear cover down if the wind is cold. Mine is basic black, but I would love to get one of the new “girly” hats as well 🙂

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    2. If you loosen the strings on the front the ear flaps slide down in a fashion statement instead of the semi clunky folding down if you leave the strings tight

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  6. I can’t ever find a hat that fits right, and I look pretty silly in most hats I try on. When I was in Jr. High School I wore a floppy brimmed cloth hat almost all the time for some reason I still can’t fathom. Husband likes fedoras and looks good in them and wears his quite often. I wonder what it would be like to be able to go to a hat maker and get a custom made hat? We have a great book called Crowns, which features photos of extraordinary hats worn by some African-American women. They wear their hats with an air I could never hope to emulate.

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    1. I’ve seen a book on Sunday church hats black ladies are famous for , like my fair lady at the races
      If you are curious, ladies hats on eBay are very reasonable price wise. Instead of going to a custom hatmaker see what’s already done

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      1. My husband says I can’t find a hat that fits because i am a square headed Dutchwoman. I used to have one of those pointy Dutch women’s hats and I guess it looked pretty nice on me.

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  7. Morning–
    It’s all seed caps for me. But I do have the ‘dress up’ hat and the ‘everyday’ hats. And of course the seed caps I wear for farming are completely different. And I have to make sure I don’t wear the ‘Meyer Seed’ cap when I get Pioneer Seed. And to wear the John Deere hat when I go to John Deere. It’s a complicate dance!

    There is a black cowboy hat down in costumes that I really do like the look of, but it makes me look SO different that I’m not sure if it’s a ‘good’ different or ‘bad’ different.
    I did wear it to our family Christmas party this year, along with a white hooded sweatshirt, because the theme was ‘snowmen’ so I wore the black hat and went as the Bad Snowman.
    Plus then I could do the Charles Durning hat trick.

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  8. Dale: What, are you baiting me here?
    Ok, I have two main hats that I wear. A linen/mesh white one in the summer and a crushable wool felt one in winter. My hats get called ‘cowboy,’ ‘fedora,’ or ‘Indy’ style. Actually, they’re ‘outback’ style. Most folks think of an Australian outback style as having the side part of the brim folded up and snapped to the side of the crown, which is what throws them off. Fedoras are nice (and I have a nice smoky blue one) but the crown is taller and the brim is, typically, narrower. I prefer a lower crown because it doesn’t catch the wind and blow off your head as easily. I also prefer a wider brim because it keeps sun, rain, snow, etc. out of your eyes/face more effectively. I like to contour the brim. I like it to have a little snap down in the front (but not too extreme), have it rise up along the sides, and then glide down in the back. I got my summer hat from a local place that specializes in U/V resistant clothing called Coolibar. My winter hat is a ‘K-Hats’ brand I got off of eBay. Thankfully, I’m one of those people that can wear a hat well. Never underestimate the power of a good hat.

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  9. We’ve been neglecting the tradition in the last couple of years, but my poetry performance group used to all wear hats for our readings (and sometimes gloves) since we were the Lady Poetesses from Hell, and proper ladies wear hats. One of our members owns a fantastic fish hat, made of silver lame with light-up eyes (it’s an art piece, titled “Salmon Enchanted Evening”), which has been worn by Jane Yolen when she was our guest performer.

    I own a burgundy felt cloche (my only women’s hat because they usually don’t come big enough for my head), a black beret, and two porkpie-like hats, evocatively named “Jazz” and “The Reporter” by the shop. All of mine came from The Sacred Feather on State Street in Madison, WI. Wonderful shop, if you can get to it, but they really, really need to redesign their website–it’s very 90s. My favorite hat when I was doing the Goth thing was a narrow-brimmed black velvet cloche. I lost it, probably at a restaurant, and I’ve never found another like it. These days “Jazz” is my favorite, makes me feel all hipster even if I can’t fit into narrow jeans anymore.

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    1. Every year a friend organizes an outing to a Tea (last couple of years we have gone to Avalon Tea Shop in White Bear Lake). My friend is a collector of anything that can be collected and that includes ladies’ vintage hats. Those who are invited to the Tea can bring their own hats if they have them but my friend is happy to supply loaners. She says she has found a number of great hats at Arc Value Village.

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  10. A new Baboon business: Chateau de Babouin.
    Chapeaus for Mademoiselles et Hommes
    Chapeaus for Chats et Chiens
    Oh, we, all of you, I mean, have the talent for this one.

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    1. I think of a seed cap as a baseball cap with a seed logo but I have seen it used generically. Tony Hillerman calls “seed caps” “gimme caps.” I just read an Australian book and they called them baseball caps. The rest of the slang in the book was very foreign and dense.

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      1. Right you are, Clyde. I’ve also heard them called “feed caps”, depending on which supply company was giving them away as a promotion. My crazy Norweigan bachelor farmer uncle wore one all the time, and once complained about us taking him out to a restaurant so fancy he had to take his cap off. It was an Embers.

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      1. Mys sisters group goes strong without her (she is off organizing other things). M y wife and I have a couple of tea houses we like to visit in the middle of week days. We often see Red Hat groups.

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  13. Nobody has mentioned straw hats. I like them for gardening except they do have wide brims and the wind will do the same to them that it does to other wide brimmed hats.

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    1. if you want to tell what the charachter on stage or tv or to a point in real life . check the hat. i used to do it with watcheds and shoes. you can tell everything you need to know by the little clues. hats on a stage or tv show tell you almost exactly who the charachter is without a line needing to be spoken. bonanza has hoss little joe adam and ben all teeling you who they are with ther hat. if theire is a guest he /she will announce the essence of their charachter long befre the mouth opens. black hats for bad guys? stupid but true. caps on worker bees in the old movies vs fedoras for the higher ups? always. the way they wear the fedora and the way the crown is creased tells a lot. pristine or moth eaten dirty and comfy or clean and crisp. hats are great.

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      1. A little off your topic, tim, but I was remembering how my adoptive father always, but always, wore a hat when he went outside–usually a cloth trilby-type thing, often plaid or houndstooth. I am terribly amused by young hipsters going around wearing the exact same hats as my WWII era arch-conservative dad used to. They’re trying hard, but I suspect those hats are in fact irony-proof. The boys don’t look any better in them than poor old Dad did.

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    2. I have a lovely straw hat with a wide enough brim to keep the sun off my nose – but not so wide as to catch the wind. A bit of terry-cloth inside the crown keeps it comfy. Love that hat.

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  14. Cowboy hats are very common out here. Most are pretty traditional Malborough man hats, but some look like the one Hopalong Cassidy wore.

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    2. hopalong wore a gus like tom mix with the hat keeping full height instead of having it form to a teardrop on top like a feroda or the two railroad creases like lbj

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  20. I used to wear a big black Russian fur hat – rabbit fur, super warm, flaps came down over the ears when I needed ’em. It was, as I recall, even a Soviet-era hat from the USSR. I wear it less now that I’m not waiting for a bus to take me to work – and it’s far too warm for wearing when I’m out sledding or skating (at least most of the time). I should probably rummage around in my front closet and find it – I might need it tomorrow.

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  21. This song has nothing to do with hats. The video, however, is full of them. I found it while searching for Put on your Old Gray Bonnet.

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