Alex Baer: Just What You Needed: More Recipes for Dressing

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UnderpantsThe return to work -- Monday, after a long, holiday weekend:  This is such a grim, dour moment in life that there's only one known antidote.  And with that, we hereby Break Glass and Pull Switch In Case of Emergency -- and are rewarded with underpants news.

The good news:  There is actually some underwear news.  The not-so-good news:  There wasn't much.  News, that is -- although, now that you mention it, unmentionables are getting so tiny anymore that there's not much of them in that sense, either.

Well, to paraphrase a war criminal:  You go to work the Monday following a long holiday weekend with the underwear you have, not the underwear you wish you had.

Buck up, remain strong, everyone -- and we'll get through this return-to-employment crisis together, patriotically clad in 100% American underwear!

On that elastic note of a pep talk -- and before anyone gets his or her bloomers in a wad and flags us a penalty for delay in story -- a pair of Queen Victoria's linen bloomers were auctioned recently in the UK, bringing about $575, the BBC reports.  (It was just one item, yet they are called a pair -- perhaps because they are singular at the top, but plural at the bottom.)

It was part of a larger auction of royalty's odds and ends, a sort-of royal rummage sale, with bids coming in from all around the world.  Auctioneer James Grinter says the bloomers, 38 inches around at the waist, were sold to a collector.  (The BBC very wisely failed to follow-up with the collector and ask what else might be in the collection, how the hobby got started, and why on Earth anyone would pay that much money for used underthings.)

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