Desperately cute, but painfully small with a waist of 23”. Perfect for you if you actually make clothing. Or even better if you want to but cannot. After all, the novelty print is about the unattainable. But best of all, it looks like those tape measures are drawn to scale. You could measure anything in it. If you’re wearing nice knickers, you could even whip it off and use it as a tape measure in a pinch. It’s a MacGyver of skirts. Now I am having fantasies of other functional skirts. I posted sometime back about diagram skirts printed with blueprints for bombs (oh, that would so be in the spy movie version of my life), but how about oh, I dunno, how about the choking victim poster?

Current bid is a mere $16.99. This would be so cute on you. Just look at those adorable green and orange dress forms (wouldn’t it be great if those were functional somehow too?). I’d play up the yellow and wear it with pale amber jewelry and my lemon-colored loafers. You might want to accentuate its green design elements.

I was totally serious about the ItoEn haiku contest. I'm addicted to their teas, even the lemongrass one that reminds me of dusting furniture with Pledge.

Winning poems are published both in the anthology, and on various tea canisters and bottles. The official rules state that you can choose any subject matter. That you can dispense with the 17 syllable structure. That you need no seasonal reference or other haiku staples. Sounds free-form, no? But a statistical analysis of the winning poems on the website shows that all include nature, animals, seasonal references and/or something about grandparents. As for grandparents, I can only hum a few bars of "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves." Besides Petunia the pit bull, the only creatures I interact with are rats, cockroaches, squirrels, and sadly sometimes waterbugs. My grand vistas are of brick walls and trash strewn lots. None of these slices of my life would make an appropriate poem for beverage packaging. I decided to write inappropriate haiku.

It is much too cold
in my tenement kitchen
even for roaches.

Blood on the sidewalk.
They all say they’ve seen nothing.
Neighbors and sirens.

Not beverage friendly, right? You wouldn't buy a plastic bottle of green tea with that printed on the label. Okay, so here's my 8 o'clock number:

Waxing moon languid,
I awake on blood-stained sheets:
Menarche.

Well, then, perhaps I should edit an anthology of Menstrual Haiku. Please send me some bloody haiku, okay? Winning poems will be printed out and affixed with scotch tape to the menstrual product of your choosing. I mean, why is menstruation still such a taboo?

Oy, bubbeleh, wear your mittens if you have the misfortune to live in the cold-type hemisphere.