In the course of human history (as opposed to the history of weasels, or doorknobs, or cabbages, or whatever the viable alternatives may happen to be), man has developed many a devilish contrivance intended to spread suffering and misery amongst mankind. Most terrible of all these things are those which are developed ostensibly for helping people, because then you can just go and inflict them on everybody, and say it’s for their own good. Examples of this sort of course include the metric system, light beer, those necklaces made out of candy, Janet Reno. One well intended piece of deviltry, however, which oft is omitted from the lists in that most detestable of garments, the Polo Shirt. What, you say, you thought that polo shirts were supposed to give casual professionals a tolerably nice garment of median fanciness and thus make their lives easier? That’s what people used to say about communism too, you know. No, the polo shirt is in fact the single most evil garment ever conceived of, in no small measure because it seems so very innocuous to those unschooled in its dark powers. Happily though, if you do but read on, I shall enlighten you, gentle reader, as to the manifold perils of the polo shirt, which not without good reason is called “El Queso del Diablo”.
First, polo shirts are made from some magical material woven from the souls of the damned (cotton) which somehow possesses the capacity to make you equally uncomfortable whether it be hot or cold. In the wintertime, a polo shirt will suck the very warmth from your body, like a herd of vampiric death gerbils (The Vampiric Death Gerbils, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band). Perhaps this might lead you to believe that in the summer, a polo shirt would cool you off, but your hopes would soon be shattered like a poorly-made El Salvadorian bootleg G.I. Joe action figure being flung from the top of a moderately tall armoire. No, in the summer, a polo shirt might just as well be made out of duct tape, for all the heat it allows to escape.
Next, polo shirts are coated with some kind of weird space-age Teflon substitute, which has the effect of making them incredibly slippery whenever you’re not paying attention. “Why do such a thing?” you may well ask. The answer is simple, so that no matter what you try to do, if you so much as move a muscle, your entire shirt comes untucked and you look like a slubberdegulion or some sort of a street muffin (neither of which, mind you, is a thing you want to be perceived as in a professional environment). Adding to this most unfortunate effect, all polo shirts are about three inches shorter than shorts made to fit humans (it being now supposed that they were first designed to punish a diminutive race of troggles at an office supply warehouse in central
From whence did they come from though? I suspect that someone, perceiving polo to be a namby-pamby rich boy sport, designed these shirts that polo players might suffer more, thus making their sport more interesting, rather than just soccer on horses. The polo players (Is there a better word for that? Like polonists? Or poloroids?), being a tad hung over that day (having just spent the night partying at the official “Every Single Polo Player In The World Annual Boxing Day Gala”) didn’t really question it at the time, and by the time they’d sobered up and realized that they’d somehow adopted the fiery Hell-shirt as their official uniform, it was too late.
Recent Biblical research with the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the book of Genesis may have originally been intended to contain one more verse concerning man’s banishment from
So there it is, the horrible, sordid, poorly ventilated truth of the whole affair. Rise up my brethren, take your fate into your own hands, and never buy a polo shirt unless you absolutely have to! And even then, you might be better off just making a shirt out of duct tape, at least then it would look cool.
