Wednesday, July 9th, we're having a BBQ for Cordarounds customers, and you're invited to dine upon a giant, sizzling swine.

Yes, a savage, Viking-style sunset smorgasbord awaits you at 43 Fort Mason anytime from 6-9:30PM. Do let us know if you can make it, so we can plan the proper amount of pigatonnage to drop on our party patrons.

Please let us know if you plan on attending by writing info at cordarounds dot com.  

Thanks to Zannel, you could follow their adventure in half-hourly mini video bursts in the viewer below.  You can see 10 short stories in the following player.

Cordarounds is in every sense a global enterprise -- well, excluding the World Music sense. So while we're a humble, two-man business making clothing in San Francisco, the fact that we only sell online means that you, dear customer, must compete for our latest styles with the likes of fashion-conscious Belarusian mobsters, Papuan New Guinea tribesman and members of the Easter Island Elks Lodge, to name just a few.

Today we're embracing our World Wide Web identity by renaming our company ÇØRDÅRØÜÑDS, a name that's appropriately international, but one that we have no idea how to pronounce.

To celebrate, we're selling these attractive t-shirts for men and for women. We've also produced this particularly unhelpful ÇØRDÅRØÜÑDS pronunciation video.

So if you're in search of a conversational summer shirt, proceed immediately to our store. And if you happen to be good with languages, please help us crack the linguistic code of our new name, as we sincerely look forward to saying it ourselves.

Whenever someone snaps a shot of you wearing our pants, you become a Cordarounds Model Citizen. Since all of our models are rank amateurs, joining their ranks is just that simple.

Of course, many of our Model Citizens are also global citizens. This spring, we've received images of Cordarounds adventurers from Tajikistan to Texas, but none quite compare to the work of Timothy Wheaton, a man whose photographic and pant-wearing skills are legendary -- and now on display in this hilarious new book.

After Cordarounds agreed to send him on an all-expenses-paid paddleboat tour of Luxembourg, Tim generously decided to lend us a collection of his finest photos featuring himself, appropriately airborne, in our aerodynamic pants. And we're just pleased as punch to share them with you today.

Wait, what are those pants he's wearing? Legendary Discoballrounds -- perhaps our greatest creation to date, not to mention as rare and valuable as a Fabergé egg.

Upon closer inspection, the intrepid students discovered curious "Cord-a-locator" cards in the pockets as well as a shiny Sacajawea dollar coin -- proof that these were not just any airborne trousers, but authentic Cordarounds summer trousers, the very ones that took flight (see video) from the from San Francisco's Fort Mason on April 22nd.

While the original destination for these soaring pants was Niagara Falls , the jet stream conspired to carry our new summer cords toward more southerly climes, where the warmer weather demands an ultra-light trouser.

Click to view a slideshow of our summer line, with photos of Ms. McKey's class proudly posing with the pair of pants that will one day hang beside the Spirit of St. Louis in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

_________________________________________________________________________________

SHORTS RETURN FOR SUMMER!

Yes, shorts have returned to Cordarounds -- the very shorts that spawned the game of soccer. The game of skunk kicking too! Sounds like a fine tale to me -- a tale you can only find in the Cordarounds Thinktank, home of the Web's finest fashion fiction.

You can find these, and our incredible line of summer pants (selling out quickly!) in our online store.

On Tuesday , Earth Day, a vessel of hope took flight from San Francisco -- a pair of helium-borne trousers that rose into the firmament, and then traveled eastward upon the breath of angels.

And why? To prove an important point: That cords can be worn all summer long. They're not just any corduroy, of course, but Cordarounds' new ultra-lightweight, nano-wale trousers.

Weighing in at a scant .65 lbs, these feathery trousers need a mere 11 cubic
feet of helium to go airborne -- to the envy of common khakis, jeans, and other comparatively leaden summer pants, the helium buoyancy of which is detailed below.

Given this compelling data, as well as our pants' incredible thermodynamic properties, there's simply no reason to wear anything else this summer, even when
swimming or hot tubbin'.

For anyone who wears pants and dreams of flight, a veritable air squadron of light summer trousers lies on the tarmac that is our online store.

El Maestro: Precisely 90 degrees cooler than traditional seersucker pants.

Specs: Plain green 5 pocket horizontal seersucker pants with Evil Eye slit rear pockets.

Unlike vertical seersucker puckers, which whisk radiant heat from asphalt to crotch to form an uncomfortable and possibly incendiary column of superheated air, Lindland's horizontal ThermoSucka technolgy creates a 462-pucker barrier from heel to crotch (504 for longs!), safely insulating natures' most precious equipment from the ravages of summer swelter.

And with the seersucker puckers aligned horizontally, wearers will enjoy extreme aerodynamic advantages over vertically-oriented adversaries. You will become widely known as the Green Flash -- a rare, quick-as-a-wink phenomenon.

E-check, B-check: More Pucker for your Sucker.

Specs: Gingham check 5 pocket seersucker pants with Evil Eye slit rear pockets.

Not so fast! Test after test of the advanced aerodynamics of our horizontal seersucker trousers leads to behavior, perhaps, unbecoming of a seersucker wearer -- our customers moved a bit too fast.

While the pants perform marvelously, cutting the wind like samurai swords through sweltering tofu, the aerodynamic seersucker has the unintended consequence ofspeeding up their entire lives. Southern gentlemen spin yarns too quickly. Kentuckians shoot, not sip their mint Juleps. Grooms speed-read their vows. And a Nantucket yachtsman clocked a 9.8 second 100 when stumbling home from Stiffy McCorkle's Tavern.

We went back to the drawing board, and rather than commit the sin of making our seersucker vertical, our engineers came up with a clever solution: More Pucker for your Sucker.

To counteract the phenomenon known as The Quickening, our engineers created checkered seersucker, boosting our pants pucker by a full 1 mm to affect a parachute-like slowdown. While trapping heat on the way up, they billow slightly more to catch the wind as it races around the seersucker grooves.

Fashionable? Yes. Functional? But of course. Dangerously high speed? Only if you dare.

Southern Gentleman Approved: Our Trusty Khakis

Specs: Classic, sideflash horizonta seersucker pants with patch rear pockets.

A team of scientists from SuckerLab traveled to the famed leisure proving grounds of Worthington P. Chesterfield’s wide and gracious front porch to put our classic horizontal seersucker pants to the test -- the Southern Gentleman test.

Under rigorous analysis, they scored high marks in all manner of Southern Gentlemanly arts (see findings on right). And why shouldn't they? After all, these pants were sewn in San Francisco's South of Market district by ladies who hail from southern China. And you can acquire a pair for well south of $100. It doesn’t get much more Southern than that, does it? Until our pant scientists figure out how to fabricate them out of sweet tea, we don’t think so.

Our seersucker pants have been engineered specifically for casual use in hazy, lazy days of summer--on porches, on beaches, on stoops, preferably with an iced beverage in hand. In test after clinical test, our spring khakis are precisely 90 degrees cooler than tradition vertical seersucker. A fact not lost on Worthington himself, who declares, “ and I do declare…you’re far cooler in suckers whose puckers go‘round."

SAN FRANCISCO, April 16 — Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but a tourist recently discovered that you can leave your arm there as well. That is, when local fashionistas convince you to stick your arm into a dark and foreboding grotto – a grotto that happens to be occupied by a large and remorseless sea lion, whose insatiable appetite for human flesh is exceeded only by his remarkable capacity to accurately predict the onset of the summer fashion season!

Perpetually shrouded in a thick fog, San Franciscans have for years employed a most unusual method for figuring out if warm, summer weather is in the cards, a time-tested ritual that has drawn comparisons to Punxsutawney Phil, the famous weather-predicting groundhog. Each April, Bay Area designers dupe an unsuspecting visitor to reach into the bone-strewn lair of Frisco Frank, an impossibly ferocious sea lion, and attempt to feed him a crab. If the sea lion takes the crustacean, then chances are the summer swelter will be late. If, however, Frank rips the person’s arm off with his powerful jaws, then – rejoice! – white-pants weather is just around the corner. Indeed, the sight of a horrified tourist stumbling along Fisherman’s Wharf as his or her bloody stump flails in the cool morning breeze means it’s time to start buying the latest summer fashion – like Summerounds horizontal seersucker pants and shorts.

“Clearly, the long, hot summer is upon us,” said Cordarounds founder Chris Lindland, coolly observing Frisco Frank devour tourist Todd Murphy’s left arm. “Time for cold, refreshing beverages and cool, seersucker pants and shorts like these."

This year’s Summerounds come in new colors, with new linen liners and more pucker. They’re stylish and also surprisingly high-tech – reportedly at least 90 degrees cooler than traditional seersucker pants.

Historical note: Few doubt Frisco Frank’s powers of prognostication or sense of style. Legend has it that Levi Strauss, another notable San Francisco pant maker, would con hapless gold prospectors into feeding the sea lion with arms swathed in different fabrics. Frank’s extraordinary appetite for denim inspired Straus to design jeans, particularly in the color blue.

All positions will carry the "aero-” prefix, making even the most mundane endeavor significantly more important-sounding (Aeroaccountant -- now that's more than a job, that's an adventure!)  In addition, our salaries and comprehensive benefits package are among the best in the airborne pant-manufacturing industry.

Current job openings:

Aerochef: Duties will include overseeing the harpooning and gourmet preparation of geese and other migratory fowl.

Aeroconductor: Responsible for leading our in-house symphony orchestra in thunderous Wagnerian overtures whenever the Cordarounds Zeppelin appears on the horizon.

Aeroaristocrat: Pompous dandy, professional layabout, with blood bluer than
the stratosphere. Manages compulsory cocktail hour(s).

Aerostrongman:  Will do the business’ "heavy lifting," both literally and figuratively -- mostly literally.  Minimum three years of handlebar-mustache growth required.

AeroC++ Engineer, Level 5: Conceptual understanding of software design process, with focus on database and data analytics. Knowlege of Perl and formation.  Wing-walking experience encouraged.

AeroAquanaut:  Did we mention our Olympic-sized swimming pool?

We're as new to Zeppelineering as you are.  So if you have skills that would make you uniquely suited for our airship, or know of a position the Zeppelin can't do without, please add it to the comments section by clicking below.

COUNTY KERRY, Ireland (Feb. 5, 2008) -- Angry, naked and cold, several hundred sheep gathered today in the Beaufort town square to protest the recent loss of their resplendent ebony wool, a situation organizers have called nothing less than a total fleecing of their basic ovine rights. Amid a chorus of bleating and chattering teeth, the so-called "Frozen Flock" claimed that overwhelming demand for Cordarounds authentic black sheep crewneck sweaters has robbed them of their fine black coats, leaving them, quite literally, out in the cold during the icy Irish winter.

"Bah! We thought these sweaters would finally give us the respect we deserved," said mighty Orion, King of all Black Sheep. "But Cordarounds keeps taking our wool, month after freezing month. Bah!"

Bah, indeed. Since Cordarounds released its black sheep sweaters last November, the San Francisco-based online clothier has experienced insatiable demand for the finely woven figures of speech, forcing the company to deprive Orion and the rest of his friends of their highly coveted coverings. And with the fourth production run of sweaters, there's sure to be more wool on the backs of Cordarounds customers than Kerry's entire population of black sheep, making for some very unhappy ungulates.

"The other farm animals now shun us more than ever," said Orion, nude and shivering. "If we black sheep are ever to graze the paddock in peace again, the shearing simply must cease!"

And it will. This is the last batch of black sheep sweaters Cordarounds will offer until next autumn. They're available now at Cordarounds.com. But with only 70 in stock, customers need to act fast. Before the sheep do.

That is, until researchers at the Cordarounds Livermore Laboratory invented the Tactile Soft-o-meter, a device that can detect and compare the density of softrons, the subatomic units of softness. And while this has proven a Nobel worthy discovery, our scientists could not simply rest on their laurels.

Using this newfound knowledge, they set out to line the pockets of our world famous reversible smoking jackets. And so comfy was the fabric they developed, so rich and impossibly supple, that test subjects had to have their hands removed from the coat pockets with the Jaws of Life. Success!

But what to name this miracle material? Again and again, the Soft-o-meter produced a result that had our marketing department in a nervous titter. But we're scientists dammit, not salesmen, and if the Soft-meter says this fabric measures "Vagisoft" within a standard deviation of one softron, so it shall be named!

This week, we celebrate our scientific breakthrough with an irresistible, limited edition Valentiens gift -- the Vagisoft blanket. Now, for the low price of $50, you can envelop yourself in Vagisoft and experience the in-pocket paradise that lies within each and every Cordarounds reversible smoking jacket.

Are these blankets wonderful gifts for friends, family and loved ones? Yes.

Sorry, Miss Snotblossom. While our army of elves is furiously shipping last-minute Christmas pants and jackets through Friday, we regret to report that our sweaters are on backorder.

So popular are our Black Sheep sweaters, we had to arrange an emergency airlift from the County Kerry auxiliary air force (seen below), which promised to ship them by January 2, if they can find the keys to their biplane in time.



Meanwhile, we have a novel gift idea -- both for customers with sweaters on back order as well as Miss Snotblossom and everyone else thinking about a last minute gift purchase: the Blacksheep IOU.

Simply print out this PDF -- with its very special message from noble Orion, King of all Sheep -- adorn it with a festive ribbon, and place it under the tree. The black sheep of your family will be thrilled to receive his or her very own figure of speech, even if it requires a couple week's wait.

And for all those who find themselves on Christmas Eve without a gift to give and would rather not face the indignity of a last-minute mall excursion, you are welcome to use it, too. No need to pay immediately, just whenever you or they are ready to receive it.

The result: SUCCESS.  The Piper was even covered by the local news and Wired.  Click to watch the clips below, then read below to learn how we put it all together.

As you've discovered by now, these are 6 of the top episodes from the Piper's mighty Vlog.  Everything's hosted on Zannel, a company that lets you instantly broadcast video from phones to the Internet for folks to view online or on mobile phones.

Huge credit is due to Bill Bowles from mynameisbill.com who filmed and quickly edited these segments for broadcast.  Check out his 5 month, round the world story if you demand hours of uplifting entertainment.

Now we know that an live, 9-5 story is fun to watch at work.  All we have to figure out narratives that won't turn us into alcoholics.