Does My Butt Make My Butt Look Big?

The Gang of Unashamed Dorks caught flashing secret gang signs!

Lately here and there I've been musing about all the changes that have occurred in the world during my lifetime. Some good, some bad, and some make me fly into a rant of incoherent rage.

And thus today I bring you Pet Peeve # 235. Elasticized Bed Sheets.

Long, Long ago, someone invented the fitted bottom sheet. And it was Good.

Probably a woman because it was a brilliant idea. It saved time and energy that were better put to use elsewhere like watching soap operas and gabbing with the neighbors over the back fence. The corners of the sheets were mitered and sewn, thus creating a nifty corner that fitted perfectly on corners of the mattress. The top and bottom of the sheet were elasticized and that made it easy to tell the top and bottom from the sides of the sheet and also helped to tuck it into the cramped space of the headboard and foot board.

But those days are long gone. Some fool who has never made a bed in his life, probably doesn't own a bed or know what a sheet is for because his Mother always did it for him, who now spends his adult years living in travel hotels where they have maid service as he flies over to China or Taiwan to check on the progress of his other stupid inventions being manufactured over there by peasants and displaced rice farmers who work for pennies a week and still squat over a smouldering pile of dried yak patties to cook their meager daily meal and don't own a bed either because they still sleep on bamboo rafts that float on the Yangtze where sheets would be useless because they would draw damp right away and make for miserable sleeping, probably thought up this newest folly.

The Elasticized Bottom Bed Sheet. You know what I mean. Instead of the nicely folded corners and the elastic at the top and bottom of the sheet, they now make them to have elastic that runs the entire circumference of the sheet. Which? makes it? impossible? to tell which are the sides and which are the top and bottom.

So instead of just popping the sheet on in no time, you have to attach one corner, stretch and pray that you've got the long ways going the long ways on the bed. But of course you haven't. So you have to pop that corner and spin the sheet but somehow, no matter how careful, you end up with the short side of the sheet again still trying to stretch it to fit the other end of the mattress.

All that elastic does NOT make the bottom sheet stay one whit more taut than if it was the old, un-elasticized way of bed-making. In fact it kind of makes the sheet bunch up and bulk around the edges.

And when you pull those things from the dryer? They are wadded into an elasticized ball and I defy ANYONE to figure out a way to fold them other than leaving them in the wadded ball and shoving them in the bottom of the linen closet somewhere.

It's this modern age, people. It's got to be stopped. Just because we have the technology to create an endless supply of elastic, does not mean we have the right to inflict it on our fitted bottom sheets.

What's next? Elasticized dish towels? Elasticized oven mitts?

Gone are the days of effortless bed making. We've entered an era of unnecessary complications dreamed up by people who think they have to improve things all the time.

It's the simplest of joys and amusements that make life so worth savoring.