Gino Pompeii

Bridging the gap between Mod and Disco is this handmade Italian tie from Gino Pompeii (an arm of the neckwear giant Randa/Wemco). I actually got it out to wear with a black and yellow ensemble about a year ago, only to discover when I got it out of the stygian murk of the bedroom that it was not black, as I had thought, but navy. Then there was the problem of the disconnected keeper, which I have now happily solved. So here it is in all its near-primary-color glory, with appropriately-hued shirt and pants. The vaguely Pantonesque pattern is of woven polyester; Terytal polyester, to be exact, a polyester so rare that a Google search turns up only one entry, and that's a translation of a Russian article about surgery!

On a different note altogether, you know what make great computer screen backgrounds? Contemporary rugs! Check out all the cool rugs at addarug.com; find a rug you like, look at the largest available picture of it, save it, rotate it, then set it as your wallpaper in stretched mode. You could even use your browser to set it as wallpaper, but I like to fill the screen while keeping some semblance of the original dimensions. Rug photos have the advantage of having more texture and softer edges than most graphics of electronic origin.