Hope you are enjoying the long weekend!

Hi and hello – it’s Merlin from Thaidye – today with a little report about the traditional yard and garage sale frenzy we experience here in our little mountain cummunity – the home of the Thaidye coporate head quarter (I like to say that ‘coporate head quarter’ thingy because that makes our little tie-dye enterprize look so important.) 

Every year, on the long memorial weekend, the natives of our little community get into a frenzy – garages and storage spaces are emtied into the drive way. And the amazing situation is that the surrounding communities know about it!

Where you normally see the occasional car driving through a residsential street, now you have a traffic jam of predetors on the prowl for loot – the crap-hound is on the loose.

Sometimes you find some really good deal. On our first experience of this frenzy two years ago, for example, we found an 18 speed mountain bike for our son, Zen, for 15 bucks. Another 30 or 40 to fix minor things and he was all set, so that he never had to ask his parents to drive him somewhere again. (That, by the way, was withful thinking only.)

This year it was different for our son – he wanted to participate in the frenzy in an active role. He collected things, he could let go, over the last few month, got up really early on the first day of the frenzy and was ready for the crap-hounds.

It did not quite work as well as hoped for but at the end of the second day he off-loaded some of his ‘stuff’ and is some 20 bucks richer.

One interesting and comforting lesson we all learned: I encouraged him to believe in the honesty of potential customers and he set up a self service yard sale. The problem was that he was absolutely itching to go around and find good deals also, so he could not remain in his own yard all the time to watch his ‘stuff.’ Obviously he first wanted to hire me to sit and be his sales person while he was on the prowl.

I was not too eager to do that so we came up with the solution that he made a sign with the prices and a note to go up to the door and pay when they found something – and that worked great!

The next morning our son had to solve another problem – his dad – me – had worked very late and was still sleeping when the frenzy started and Zen also wanted to prowl – in other words, dad was not available to accept any payments. So Zen came up with the idea to just have a big box with a slot where buyers could leave their money for stuff they wanted.

And it worked! When hunger finally drove me out of bed, there was money in the box – not much, but enough to convince us, people in general are cool and honest.

Pity that Gigi missed the frenzy but she is at a show up in central California, at the Strawberry Festival in Arroyo Grande (Booth# A 31) – so skilful, how I weaved in this bit of information, yes? But should you be up there and plan to go only to see her, check with me first please. As I write this, late at night between Saturday and Sunday, it is not quite clear if she will still be there on Sunday. Normally at shows of more than one day, the participants just close up the booth and security is provided to watch. But in Arroyo Grande the city made everybody tear down and put up the display again in the morning. Gigi might not want to do this – it’s too tough.

So I thought that instead I will offer free shipping to everybody in the area up there. But hold on, that would not be fair to everybody who is not in Central CA – - – OK, free shipping for everybody for this long weekend  <grin>.

Peace-Up and Cheers,

Merlin
Thaidye.com

PS: to get free shipping this weekend please use the rebate code prs88708 on checkout.

PPS: I really have to go to bed now, so excuse any spelling errors still in this email – - good night!

Congratulations,

just in case you missed it – the world was supposed to end yesterday. Looks like that did not work out quite as planned. Or maybe it did happen and I just have not noticed yet. A bit like in the movie Ghost where the character played by Patrick Swayze first runs after his attacker before he notices that is is actually dead.

Anyways, let’s assume that everything is all right, so Gigi really is at the Strawberry Festival in Oxnard, CA this weekend.

Hey, you have to admit that this was pretty smart how I wove that bit of information in there, huh?

Here is another piece of information that is essential for living a fulfilled live: The pound key (#) on the keyboard is called an octothorpe – Well, now you know why they call it a pound key!  Can you imagine going through the prompts the next time you go to pay your phone bill and the voice on the other end tells you to hit the octothorpe key?

OK, I admit that might not be such an essential piece of information. But it’s my sneaky attempt to first give you some information before I ask you for something in return.

I want to ask about our one and only accessory – no, not the tie-dye motor-cycle – but our necklaces. When Gigi is out there at shows, these things sometimes fly off the neck of her dummy/dress form in front of her booth – but at the web site there is hardly any interest for them.

So, I wonder, are they too well hidden to be found or are they just not right? If you could let me honestly know, that would help me out quite a bit.

Let me tell you a little story of my first encounter with the idea of dressing appropriately. It has not directly to do with sushi but let me get back to that later – first a bit of background.

Those were the seventies and I was just at the age where you question everybody and everything. One of the things that was questioned was the necessity of a haircut, in other words, I had long, very long hair, and the other one was the type of clothing that my parents would have approved of, in other words, I wore the non-conformist uniform, blue jeans and a t-shirt. OK, OK, so I probably was a hippie.

It was the last year of high school, in Germany that would be grade 13, and we went on a field trip to the (then divided) Berlin. It sure was an interesting experience. First crossing the border into East Germany. East German border patrol entering the train and asking everybody “Papers pleease,” intimidating all of us despite our intention not to be intimidated by this type of GeStaPo. Then a few hours of travel through ‘enemy’ territory and finally another border crossing into the island of capitalism within the eastern block – West Berlin! A city that had money pumped in by the west to create a real eye sore within it’s surrounding communist empire. We loved it!

After settling in at the youth hostel on ‘Kurt Schuhmacher Square’ we started to explore the city. A whole week to see museums, visit East Berlin on a one day visa (Berliners called the fee for the visa ‘admission’) and experiencing everything this city had to offer.

And now I finally come to the point of this story. One of these experiences was a visit at a Japanese restaurant. Japanese presence in Germany was very thin at that time. To my knowledge there were only two Japanese restaurants in all of Germany, one in Düsseldorf, and the other one in Berlin. A few of us decided to spend a bigger part of our allowance on a Japanese meal.

We were in for a treat. With the presence of Japanese culture so rare, the few places that represented Japan in Germany were very authentic. Entering this restaurant at the Europa Center in the very center of West Berlin was like entering a different world. Fortunately the personnel did speak German but beside that we were in Japan. The waitresses even wore traditional kimonos.

Right there my lesson started. Entering this new world in our non-conformist uniforms of jeans and t-shirts made me feel uncomfortable. At that time I was able to suppress that feeling but just the fact that I still remember this after many decades shows you the intensity of the lesson and how much effort it took to suppress the discomfort of not fitting in.

I have to say that the staff of this restaurant was very accommodating. No remark, not even a disapproving glance at this bunch of misfits. We were treated with the utmost hospitality and this was the place where I was taught how to handle chop sticks properly for the rest of my life.

The lesson that I learned was to honor a host by adhering to his culture as much as possible. Just to forget for a moment my own point of view, however rebellious and righteous it might be. All will feel more comfortable. That does not need to mean that I have to forget the reason for my rebellion, but from this level of comfort the assessment who the target of the rebellion should be can be done with a much clearer view.

After this I certainly still wore my non-conformist uniform most of the time, but I was able to don shirt and tie when it was appropriate.

I wish I could say that we had sushi that night at the Japanese restaurant because then the title of this post would match the content – but I can’t. We had sukiyaki, which impressed us all so much that we had a cook-out at one of our friends’ house a few weeks later to try it ourselves. But I claim my writers latitude of twisting things around a bit to make them fit. In this case I feel that ‘suhi’ in the title works better than ‘sukiyaki.’ We could as well have had suhsi, but I did not even know what that was at the time and I am sure that I was in good company with the vast majority of my fellow Germans, all lacking this education and knowledge.

Now you might wonder what’s the point of all of this. After all I am the master of mudmee tie-dye now, so, how does ThaiDye’s wearable art fit into all this? Easy, if you go to the opera, don’t wear our clothes, but for everything else – you’ll be fine!

Kidding!

PS: Should you have any doubt that my story is true, you gotta watch this little slide show of vintage photos of our trip to Berlin. There are, unfortunately, no photos of our visit to the Japanese restaurant, but the pictures from the ice rink are just feet away. At that time the ‘Europa Center’ had this ice rink at the ground level and the Japanese restaurant was on the next level up. And who is yours truly? Did I mention that I had pretty long hair?

Happy Week after Easter – Merlin tuning in with nothing to say…

no, really! There are no announcements where Gigi is this weekend – still in Thailand, no new items added to the site, no snow here at the Thaidye Corporate headquarters…

But maybe I can tell about some great photos we already received from some of you for our customer gallery. Here is a really cool one that was taken when Andrea was stuck in a tent during a snow storm…

Is this a cool picture, or What? Speaking of pictures – and  Andrea – you should check out her web site – she creates amazing animal portraits.

Peace-Up and Cheers,
Merlin
Thaidye.com

PS: A bit timid to tell you this but some of you might enjoy the story. Prompted by some scenes in the latest Doctor Who episode we watched today, I revisited an old flying story I had written many years ago. Today I re-published it on my private blog. It’s a bit long so don’t go there if you are in a rush – otherwise let me know what you think: I was there before Doctor Who.

As technology takes big steps ahead, old tech sometimes bites the dust, but if you have something that depends on that old technology, then you better make sure you do something in order not to permanently lose that something.

In the case at hand this is the Mini DV tape. Some 10+ years ago that was the medium of choice when capturing moving pictures. We also had a whole bunch of those tapes and I started to get worried that I might not have access to those videos once my old MiniDV  camcorder would die.

So, I started to pull all this video footage over to the computer and edited it into something more palatable than these hours of (often boring) long shots.

I want to share this little clip here with you. I don’t know if you will like it as much as I do – I’m in it after all – but you might get a kick out of it. It’s way before Thaidye was even started so nobody – neither the baby nor I – wear tie-dye, but you probably guessed already that the baby later became the model you see on some of the Thaidye web site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As I have your attention already I would like to ask you a favor. I try to establish a base for Thaidye on Facebook. In order to be able to give the pages there a nicer name I need a few more visitors to ‘Like’ the initial presence I established there.

So, if you are on Facebook, could you please go to the Unique Mudmee Tie-Dye Clothing page and click the ‘Like‘ button to the right side of the title? I would really appreciate that.

Here a few pictures I took this morning after getting up…

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://www.thaitiedye.com/2011/02/19/snow-at-the-thaidye-corporate-headquarters/feed/ 0 http://www.thaitiedye.com/2010/05/12/the-future-of-shopping-for-cloths/ http://www.thaitiedye.com/2010/05/12/the-future-of-shopping-for-cloths/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 07:10:01 +0000 Merlin http://www.thaitiedye.com/?p=91 Continue reading →]]> Shopping for clothes online has this one very big disadvantage – you can’t try it on and look at yourself in the mirror!

Getting a feel for the fabric is another point that still needs to be overcome; but with close-up images and a good description, maybe comparing it to other fabrics the customer likely will know, that does not appear to be the biggest problem.

Now comes a little video from Cisco – the networking equipment company – that puts big hope in the heart of all online clothing stores:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thaidye, the sponsor of this blog, so far did not have much trouble with returns but they still dream of a plugin for the web browser that turns on the web cam of the shopper’s computer after the shopper clicks ‘Preview’, and a friendly voice asks her to stand up, stand back three feet and just shows on screen how that wrap dress would look on her.

Combine that with the computer connected to the big-screen TV and we are nearly there.

I would have expected something more in the area of natural fibers and recycled cloths but to just leave out a bigger part of the cloths in order to protect the environment?

Or is this supposed to be a hint that global warming is now really coming and we better protect the environment by not producing all that clothing that we will not need anyways?

OK – I guess it’s just the attempt to ride on a fashionable term – after all – it’s fashion week.

Well worth listening to…

Click here to view the embedded video.

These are ideas we strive to follow here at ThaiDye.com. When, for example, we design and sell our jackets we tackle the challenges staying foolish and don’t listen to reason. I mean, who wants to bring back the 60s and 70s? – We do – and we love it and we want everybody to know about our tie-dyes.

He was a person that had no shame to break the rules and a quote by him I like a lot and might frame and put on the wall, is:

“Nothing is impossible for a person who refuses to listen to reason!”

And he is certainly right. Whenever there was some big change in my life there was a ‘letting go’ of all the customs and rules that we normally consider unchangable.

I know, this all has nothing to do with clothing and Tie-Dye – - – but I thought I share it anyways.