Glove love, seeing red and dark arts

Dear Rachel,

I like to refresh my work gloves every year. They all get holes in the fingers, and I ain’t interested in getting stuff inside my gloves. My wife thinks I live exorbitantly. She’s used the same gardening gloves since approx. 1972, before she was even born. Apparently gloves to her are customary but not functioning. Tell me, am I right to want fresh mitts before tackling the untamed outdoors each spring? 

– Glovin’ It

Dear 10-Finger Moneybags,

I dream of such luxuries as a new pair of gloves each year. Heck, I dream of such luxuries as a new pair of socks every three or four years. If I ever receive a pair, say for my birthday, I cherish them and think of them as “my new socks” until my foot slides straight through and they become “my new ankle warmers.” If you can swing the new gloves, my man, you do you.

– Yours in Glove Envy, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I’m curious why green means go and red means stop. These seem totally arbitrary. Who decided? When? Was it because of traffic lights, or was there some other use of colors to tell people when to stay put and when to move?

– Stoppen Gogh

Dear Otis Redding Reen,

You forgot about yellow lights, which are definitely a modern invention indicating one should accelerate with all urgency. But clearly the origin of green = go and red = stop is the classic kids’ game Red Light Green Light, where you yell “GREEN LIGHT!” to make all your friends run at you and “RED LIGHT!” to try freezing them in ridiculous poses they can’t hold so that you can send them back to the starting line and laugh at them. How this game became so boring in modern traffic etiquette is beyond me. 

– Not Easy Being Red, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I have a photograph framed on my wall. Not one I took, but one you could actually call “art.” I know it’s art because it’s dark and moody and wasn’t shot on an iPhone. It’s a photo of a person, and you can’t see the person below the waist. Until the sun slanted through my window the other evening, hit the photo and showed me that the legs were there in the dark all along! It felt like having secret art, like I was in “The Da Vinci Code” or some crap like that. Now I wonder if you think there’s a market out there for other secret art so I can sell this piece and get rich.

– An Idea With Legs

Dear Art Mogul,

Of course there’s a market for secret art, but you have to learn the handshakes and the passcodes, and that’s just too much to ask. Plus, real snobs wear those white kid gloves, and after years of appraising art by swiping dust off the frames and rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, you wear holes in the kid gloves (which are not cheap!) and that negates any profits you might see.

– Appraisingly, Rachel