Shrinking Shirts

It never ceases to amaze me (though it's not hard to amaze me at the best of times) that there are so many searches on the Net for Shrinking Shirts. It's a phrase that comes up time and again on my keywords on HitTail, but it also appears daily in a Google alert I have for the topic.

You can even find video clips on You Tube on the subject. Here's a very earnest gent telling you how to stop your shirts from shrinking (and what to do about grime on your collars and cuffs).



One of the more delightful alerts I received in the last couple of days relates to a guy on Yahoo Answers asking about the problem. He asks:

I just bought a few cheap flannel shirts that fit me perfictly, but when i washed one of them it shrunk so much i could not where it anymore. I have wear them more as a light jacket, so they doen't get very dirty. Could i just throw them in the drier and skip the washing machine to semi-clean them? This would not shrink the shirt would it?

I've left his spelling as it was in the post, by the way. Fortunately he gets some very sensible answers - more so than the last person I came across on the Net who was asking something similar.

So what has all this to do with my creative work? Hmm, nothing really. It's just one of those things that interests me. And Artists Should Always Be On the Lookout for Interesting Things.

Round and round they go

When I came across the name, Whirlpool Dryers, I thought it must be a machine that had a new way of drying clothes. Nope. It’s the old tumble dryer that we know so well, the one that throws the clothes round and round until every inch of dampness has gone, and they come out smelling good and fresh. Just as if they’d been on the line all day in a good breeze – and a bit of sunshine.

So Whirlpool, as I discover, is a brand name, like General Electric. Look for Whirlpool Dryers on the Net and you’ll find a big range of them. One place that I tried checking them out on was Krillion.com. They started up as recently as February this year, and they’re getting heaps of searches every day. They don’t just give you all the alternatives for Whirlpool Dryers, of course: any home appliance, from fridges (why is there a ‘d’ in fridge when there isn’t in refrigerator?) to stoves, from washing machines to dishwashers. (Apparently a bloke at the workplace I was recently at bought a dishwasher for the first time ever. He spent the first two nights watching it do its work!)

And in July they’re going to be adding other items: flat panel tvs, garden items, barbeques and you name it. The search engine seems to hone in on San Francisco for some reason, but I’m sure there’s a way of finding the appliances you want rather closer to home.