Open Challenge to Sir John Varvatos and Sir Ryan McGinley

Rapscallions,

Imagine the year is 1611 in Charlestowne and your nearby pig sty emits
foul odours which drift and wash over my humble home.

Imagine the year is 1626 and you have played a nasty trick to trade a
great northern port property the size of one man's giant
Knickerbockers in exchange for some crappy Wampum.

Imagine the year is 1732 at home in Olde Towne Alexandria and you refused to dance the Virginia Reel at my fête.

Imagine the year is 1826, in rural Georgia and you have plucked a
peach from my Peach tree without permission.

Imagine it is 1850 Missouri and you have looked at my daughter with
and eye full of longing.

It is the same thing today in 2008 to take a honorable and genteel 'staching of a french fry in Boston by one lovely, unfamous girl of the Commonwealth of Virginia and to snatch the Conceit, imitate the 'stache, poorly I might add, by a couple of hipsters, or models, or hipster models, and then have a silly, woolgathering, Lower East Side boy barista-cum-MOMA famed artiste make the Dagguerotype it to sell $500 sweaters. It is despicable. You, sirs, are Scoundrels and Thieves who do not dare walk among the goodliest of us who 'stache privately, pennilessly, and without the rewards of Profit. These dishonorable 'stachings must have an end!

There can be no rapprochement with Rascals who sling injury such as
this! PorkMoustache is a forum of Integrity, Virtues, Talent, and
Patriotism. This gold-lined potato lip hair cannot stand!

Sirs, we challenge you to a Duel. Neither politics nor fashion can
absolve Gentlemen and Ladies from the necessity of a rigid adherence
to the laws of honor and the rules of decorum. Meet on the Bannerman
island by the old Castle ruins at dusk. And, you greasy cowards, do
not dare to wear silk shirts!

'stache #60 - the maple bacon lollipop moustache

Maple bacon lollipop moustache. Could there be a more magical 4-word combination? (Answer: quite probably. I dare you to submit it.)

San Francisco had only recently been a small Mexican village when, on a misty summer morning in 1848, a colorfully garbed prophet named John Sutter ventured into the Mission shouting hoarsely that he possessed the long sought recipe for gold. Local residents gasped in awe at the alchemic mixture of bacon and candy swirled in a sucker atop the stranger’s lips. At once chewy, savory, and saccharine, this treacly delight is a dangerously delicious lip morsel. Indeed, it proved so for Sutter, who was promptly stampeded by a mob rioting to sample his sweet stache. Word traveled fast, and before you know it, there was a full-on gold rush and the West was won.

The bacon lollipop ‘stache is generally worn by bartenders and Californians. Kiddies, beware this tempting porcine candy on the mouths of strangers!

'stache #59 - the corndog moustache

Lennon and McCartney. Peanut butter and Chocolate. Penniless drunks and fortified wine. Throughout history, two seemingly separate but independently splendid single items have joined together to make better, stronger and occasionally timeless newly combined entities. (The aforementioned pairs joining to become The Beatles, Reese's Cups and New York Times Op/Ed Columnist Bill Kristol, respectively.)

Such was not the case, with the corndog, however.

Born of proud parentage (the corn moustache being responsible for much U.S. westward migration and the hot dog 'stache being a proud reminder of World War II on the homefront) the corndog moustache is — how do you say? — totally nasty.

Rarely seen outside of midwestern carnivals, the corndog 'stache embodies the worst of our great country, namely, food on sticks, processed corn, and low quality meat tubeage. I mean, you could wear it, but, I don’t know, it’s kind of gross.

(In the above picture, we note that while one PorkMoustache friend wears the corndog 'stache with a blend of disdain and irony at the Indiana State Fair, another PorkMoustache friend at Coney Island's Nathan's does not.)

Jimmy Carter and Warm Ham - A Historical Porkmoustache Interlude

It is among our nation's greatest moments when the rabble majority
vote to elect a peanut farmer from small town Georgia to preside.
That was the case in 1976 and the living was good, until 1977,
when one of many gasoline crises befell the nation. Gas prices crept
up to a startling $0.85/gallon and sometimes average Americans had to wait in the gas station queue for over an hour. Wintertime household electric bills were sometimes in the tens of dollars. It was devastating!

The future looked bleak and heat was hard to come by. American
children made fires from their Lincoln Logs. Teens burned the
flag…although that seemed to be in protest of something, rather than
to keep warm. And mothers and fathers looked to each other with
furrowed brow, anxious for some financial reprieve, or at least a
little hope.


Luckily, Jimmy Carter, fearless leader and meaty innovator that he
was, found a solution. Or at least he is credited with the heroics of
the day, but we all know that behind every great man (before the men
of the Nineties) was a great woman. One afternoon in the White House
where the thermostat was kept at a chilly 62 degrees, as Rosalynn
sipped her Coca-Cola she noticed her usually rugged husband looking a bit under the weather, sniffling beneath his favorite pulled pork
barbeque moustache. It was then that she realized the problematic
pulled pork was just too light a lip hair. The man needed a warmer
moustache! As a good Southern woman, she did not badger the man into growing one, but simply planted the seed of the idea so that he might think he thought of the idea himself. And her little plan worked.

Later that week, after growing out a handsome, thick pork moustache,
President Carter addressed the nation, "With my fellow Americans in
turning down the thermostat, I will grow Smithfield ham moustache to keep warm."

'stache #58 - the fish skin moustache

Essentially the Japanese equivalent to the hardtack moustache, the
fish skin moustache came out during hard times. It was a sad wartime
'stache typical of men on the front lines, and even those at home, in
solidarity, pushing broom. However, on or about July 10, 1973 "to
slap skin" or "to slap me some skin, brother" became popular catch
phrases of the American youth and the fish skin moustache found its
niche among the sugar snap pea 'staches, avocado 'staches, and
vegemite 'staches of the Seventies cool kids.

The fish skin moustache may be worn in winter months, as it is preserved well.

'stache #57 - the kohlrabi moustache

Though spotted throughout all the Swiss-German territory in the latter half of the 20th century, the kohl rabi moustache was the violet light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel that was East Germany. The cabbage variant’s flexible bend, sensuous curves, and bright purple hue meant that it stood out sharply from the distinctive Stalinist architecture and the black-and-white attitudes of the citizenry. So when the stout, swollen German ladies of East Berlin started to get the itch for a little loving, it is said that they laid the hardy winter cultivars across their upper lips in what can only be described as a mating ritual. This bedroom secret was quite unknown outside East Germany, so President Kennedy’s ignorance of the root’s sultry uses should be forgiven and his brazen statement “Ich bin ein kohlrabi” should be understood as a well-intentioned symbol of hope rather than a nasty innuendo. There are still some snapshots of the great American leader standing startled giving this speech with a bit of this purple root on his lip which he thought he was wearing in solidarity.

The kohlrabi moustache, which sometimes goes by the name, the Purple Danube, and its ‘staching, known as “paddling the Purple Danube” may be worn in tender, private moments.

'stache #56 - the beef tendon moustache

While American adolescents of the early 20th century restricted themselves to simple ‘staches like green pepper moustaches, musselmoustaches, lime moustaches, and only dreamt of one day resting an entire roast chicken under their sensory-deprived snouts, around the globe Samoan teens wildly threw marinated and sautéed beef tendon atop their mouths, or so reported the young anthropologist Margaret Mead in her 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa. Typical of most Americans, Mead left home for college in the big city and the world’s truths announced themselves to her so that she, like all other bright 18-years-olds, found herself the sudden owner of all life’s answers. In Samoa, she found the youth’s sexual development uninhibited by the shackles of Christianity and monogamy and manifest in this cartilage lip ornament. Franz Boas, a deeply sentimental wearer of a great many moustaches himself, found no reason to correct his ambitious and newly liberated student. Of course, this was long before 'problematizing' texts was popular in the classroom.

The Beef Tendon Moustache, not unlike Margaret Mead’s dubious contribution to anthropology, is controversial, unstructured, and messy. This beef tendon for ‘staching came from a dingy midtown Szechuan restaurant known for its (nonsexual) spice.

'stache #55 - the mustard moustache

It was the 1980s. In lower Manhattan on Wall Street, the yuppie elite was just barely developing under the nose for haute couture. Brokers and analysts, stressed by time pressures heretofore unknown to the American people, desired a moustache they could grow "on the run." Said to be double inspired from both the many hot dog/pretzel carts in lower Manhattan and the popularity of neon colors, the bright hue of the yellow mustardstache quickly became a work-appropriate way to stay in fashion. Equally as becoming on women as men, many professionally ambitious females of the financial sector ‘stached the yellow sauce as an outward symbol of closing the gap with their male colleagues on issues such as organizational seniority, shares in Fire Island/Hamptons summer houses, and disposable income. (The mustardstache was at once so startling and so empowering wore by women, it proved to be far more successful in breaking the glass ceiling than Kennedy’s 1963 Equal Pay Act.) It can still be seen today on women at the highest levels of management in the public and private sectors who came of age professionally during the Eighties.

In the 1990s, the mustardstache fell into disuse when classic yellow was thought to be a bit too proletariat, but it is classic. Moreover, it is excellent when dining on meat....a little flick of the tongue to flavor the meat with the salty spice of the mustard...heaven!