A guide to hat wear, part one

“A trilby, a hat that somehow combines the douchiest parts of both a fedora and a porkpie.”

So proclaims Jon Stewart on his 6-5-14 Daily Show. Okay, for those of you who are confused, here’s a classic fedora, associated with the movie portrayals of hardboiled detectives Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe:


Here’s a pork pie, with the association to 1940s bebop jazz musicians:


And here’s a British trilby:


A tad goofy, no? The above hat, popularized by Frank Sinatra and often done in garish colors or patterns, is indeed a sad hybrid of the worst of the fedora and the porkpie. It was often considered a “rich man’s hat,” worn to the races. Trilbies are worn by hipsters, and people with more sense should NOT wear them.

I was able to purchase a finer, much more styling hat that combines the better aspects of fedora and porkpie while my wife and I vacationed in Paris last year. Céline Robert created this fashionable chapeaux. The French word feutre refers to a felt hat that translates to trilby in British English, and fedora in American English respectively.


In the long run, how one wears the hat is more important than the minor differences between the hats one wears; fedora, pork pie, or trilby. However, I do have to draw the line at mountain hats…

Speaking of denial…

…What goes around rightwing and comes around leftwing. We’re all familiar with rightwing climate/science denial, depicted humorously by Ruben Bolling in this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon:

Here’s some leftwing anti-vaccination/science denial, as explored by comedian Samantha Bee in the segment “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy” on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show:

At the end of this video clip, the suggestion is made that those on the Left who deny science by refusing to get their children vaccinated against mumps, measles, whooping cough, polio, etc., are mainly the ones who will suffer as their children get horribly sick, become permanently crippled, and perhaps die in a worst case scenario. Their idiocy will be visited upon their children, and while that may be unfortunate, the rest of us can smugly let these dumbfucks suffer. Not so with those on the Right who deny science by denying the human causes of climate change, thereby blocking action to reverse global warming and thus threatening the survival of the entire human race.

Big difference in the consequences of rightwing vs leftwing science denial.