Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

By Professor Popinjay
Suggested by Deggsy O’Brien

First Published Sept 6, 2018

—–Many of us take socks for granted. Our moms buy them for us and stock our drawers while we’re not looking. I’m 35, emancipated and married and to this day I have never gone to the store and purchased socks. I suspect my mother continues her vigil. Oddly enough I have a strange idiosyncrasy regarding socks. Whenever I am working diligently on a large complicated project, I inadvertently end up with one sock on and one off. I’m too distracted with what I am doing at the time to know why this happens though I suspect goblins are to blame.
—–Some have attributed the wearing of odd socks to creativity. And yet Albert Einstein quit wearing socks in his youth, having sworn them off, irritated as he was by the holes made by his big toe. Incidentally, Einstein could climb straight up a redwood with ease thanks to his prodrudent toenails.
—–Others have attributed the wearing of odd socks to just being a lazy, color blind degenerate who dresses in the dark and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything. Personally, I believe being creative and flippant go hand in hand but that’s just my opinion based on experience and lack of ambition. However, according to a survey I totally did not make up as doing so would’ve required effort, 13 percent of people in Newcastle would not do business with anyone wearing odd socks and regarded such offenders as “silly” people. Of course Newcastle is known to all as the Matchy-Matchy Capital of the world so what else would you expect?
—–On a less staunch note, because chromosomes look kind of like socks, the wearing of odd socks is gradually becoming a means to spread awareness of Down Syndrome Patients. I was fairly aware of them to begin with but still, that’s pretty cool.

—–The oldest socks were found in Egypt in an old abandoned gym locker belonging to Imhotep Jr. dating possibly as far back as year 250. Some secular skeptics believe these to be the true source of the ten Egyptian plagues as recorded in the book of Exodus. At the very least, perhaps these abominable foot-coverings were why the Hebrew people were so keen on getting out of there.
—–A “soccus” in Latin referred to a kind of loose shoe or slipper and was popularized by a go-go dancing Goldie Hawn who oft uttered the phrase “Soccus it to me” the meaning of which is lost to antiquity. By the 1600’s “to sock” meant to sew a corpse into a shroud, a practice instigated by plague doktors to prevent people from staring at buboes all day because, as we all know, It’s hard to get any work done when you’ve buboes to stare at.
—–The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only Shakespearean play to mentions socks. I’m sure we all thank our lucky stars for that!
—–Another survey revealed that 676 million socks are lost in the UK every year. How all these lost socks end up in the UK is beyond me but they better be sending them back soon. My mom paid good money!
—–Supposedly a family of four will lose up to sixty socks per year. I don’t know who that family is but they should be more careful. That’s a lot of socks to lose. I wonder if they lose them all at once or gradually. Do they come home on a specific day each year and find that 15 socks belonging to each family member just spontaneously combusted? Or perhaps the Sultan of Brunei steals them? I think it’s awfully suspicious that the world’s largest sock collection is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, which is spread over three storeys of his mansion and has a staff of thirty. To be of the Sultan’s Royal Sock Polishing Patrol is a Brunei citizen’s foremost desire.
—–Whatever happens to those lost socks, thankfully a district of Datang in the city of Zhuji in Zhejiang Province, China, has become known as Sock City and is responsible for a third of the world’s socks supply. It would be more but remember they’re trying to keep up with a sock thieving United Kingdom and Sultan of Brunei so cut them some slack! The Russian military WAS doing their part. Until 2013, they all just wrapped their feet in foot cloths. And here I thought they marched like that to show off how comfy their boots were. Turns out they’re stomping out the wrinkles. That would be a great band name by the way.