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Tonight I wrote an article about the history of GI (Government Issue) eyeglasses, horn-rimmed glasses, and geek glasses. I've never written a "fashion" article before. Since I like geeketry (I is one, by the way), I found the research interesting and the article great fun to write.

It made me wonder (once again) about fashion. And then I saw this photo in my Flickr photo file. It's a photo from the Women's Rights National Park in Seneca Falls, NY (click the link to read my post on my blog New York Traveler.net).

As a historian and travel blogger, I've addressed the issues of women's fashion before, albeit as a sidenote. For example, I researched and wrote about the Chinese practice of foot binding. And I've long lamented the corset and bustle in women's history.

Why do (mostly) women contort and maltreat their bodies like they do? Today we don't have foot binding or corsets, but there are the fashionable starvation diets and the hideous streetwalker clothing. What drives this?

When I think of fashion out of control, I always think of 18th century France. They led the way in some of the silliest fashions known to mankind. I mean, who would think this was attractive and something that you'd want to do??

SO I don't know exactly what drives people to do such extremes. Then again, I empathize more with the geeks, the social misfits, the countercultural kooks. Yeah, sure, I get a cheap auto insurance rate and don't eat my peas like anyone else... but gee-- I can't imagine EVER wanting to wear 10-foot-high hair or starving myself just so I can look like anyone else. Yet I do recognize the peer pressure to conform to the social group of choice. But I'd much rather be a slave to duct-taped geek glasses than corsets or poofy wigs. That's just me, I guess.

What do you think about fashion? Do you think fashion has more or less sway over us in our modern age?

Time Out Chicago magazine visits the earliest producer of maple syrup in the U.S. - Burton's Maplewood Farm in Medora, Indiana.

Maple syrup season ("the sugar season") begins in Medora, Indiana, earlier than anywhere else in the world. "What we're looking for is cold [below freezing] nights and warm [above freezing] days." Those nights can begin as early as the third week in January.

Taps are attached to the 700 trees on the farm ("sugarbush"). Taps are entered only an inch and a half into the tree, since sap runs only in the trees' cambium layer, between the bark and the hardwood.

Each bucket will collect 10 gallons of sap in one season.

The sap is nothing like maple syrup—it's thin and clear as water, and only vaguely sweet (2% sugar). Ir is fed into the Volcano 2000—the evaporating machine - reducing the sap to 1/40 of its density — it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup.

References:
Making maple syrup - Eating - Time Out Chicago Kids.