`Cause every girl crazy `bout a sharp dressed man

I stepped out of my front door yesterday morning to find, hanging on the laundry room door (at a right angle to the main door, and just a few feet off -- I'm not sure why exactly there are two doors, except that it may be to make it easier for maids and delivery people to enter and exit without going through the living room) handle, on a coat hanger, was a yellow shirt. It's not mine, although it does look like one I could wear, in that the style consists of a single color, yellow. I get nervous with shirts that have fancy things like more than two colors in them. What makes it not something I could wear are that it's too small for me (a mere medium) and that it's an actual brand-name shirt (Crocodile), whereas I tend to wear genuine K-mart shirts that I get at four-for-US$10.

Well, what to do? Since there wasn't any identification on it, I supposed the shirt was put on by someone nearby who probably hung it on the door handle to leave it for a few moments, and who then forgot about it. So I left the shirt where it was, on the assumption that whoever forgot it would go looking and retrace his or her steps, or would just wander back on the floor and see it.

When I got back yesterday afternoon, someone had moved it from hanging on the laundry door handle to the front door handle.

I put it back on the laundry door handle, and left it there today, but nobody took it. I suppose tomorrow I'll have to concede defeat and take it down to the lost-and-found office. I hate to leave stuff there since it seems to go forever unclaimed (how does someone lose an inkjet printer?), but at least I'll be free of any direct responsibility for the shirt thereafter.

Trivia: ``E Pluribus Unum'' first appeared on US coinage in ``Horse head copper'' coins, valued at 1/15th of a shilling, issued by New Jersey in 1786-88. Source: New Jersey Firsts, Harry Armstrong, Tom Wilk.

Currently Reading: The Computer Connection, Alfred Bester. I know nobody's read a 1970s Bester novel and lived to tell the tale, as it were, what's life without risk? Features so far include an introductory essay by Harlan Ellison that is, atypically, cranky and angry at the reader for not having read this book earlier; and a casual mention in the text of what sure sound like PowerPoint presentations. (Actual content's squeezed out for animated dancing cows and the like that make the report more peppy.)