April 12, 2005 - Ed Sorting Hat

The world, as we all know, is a continuous cycle of life and death, winter and summer, laughing and crying, planting and harvesting, sleeping and waking, etc., etc., etc. And of course, we also spend a lot of time getting our clothes dirty and washing them again.

Ed is not sure where it all started. He leans toward the notion that it was a subversive plot to make us use more detergent. But, it is a commonly accepted procedure to sort laundry into multiple piles before washing. The white pile is presumably separated from the rest of the laundry for bleaching purposes. The dark pile is presumably separated from the rest of the laundry to keep the colors from running. It is segregation without the schools and the children.

There is also a strong contingency of laundry-doers who set the water temperature according to the color content of the load. Hot is for whites. Cold is for colors. A lot of you say, “Duh”, but we must go through this exercise for the large load of laundry-novices out there who have never been within spitting distance of the spin cycle.

The reason Ed became interested in laundry colors this week is that he has been frustrated with the dedicated staff’s inability to distinguish colors in some our recent surveys. For instance, it was difficult to distinguish between subtle shades of hair colors, door colors, and sunglass lens colors. Ed thought that if you could reduce the world of fashion to the world of laundry, life might become simpler.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com put on our clean, freshly washed, dark gray t-shirts and went to State Street, the center of sidewalk activity in our little town. Two staffers, each armed with two clickers, walked the walk to get the skinny on which laundry pile was the most prevalent. Every time we passed a fellow pedestrian, we made a quick Laundromat decision as to which pile that person’s top article of clothing would go into if we were doing their wash – white, light, dark, or bright.

As, it turned out, most Santa Barbara pedestrians, in anticipation of the final Star Wars movie (May 19th), have followed Anakin Skywalker over to the dark side. Whites, relegated to the role of unassuming undergarments, were the least visible to the dedicated staff. And, as you all know, even the saggy-bottom boxer revolution, which has brought underpants into direct sunlight, has been more of a boon for dark plaids and other colorful designs than it has for its pure white counterparts.

Admittedly, there were some close calls in our pile determinations, but we're pretty confident that everything was, as they say … sorted out in the wash. Our final tally was as follows:

Darks     49.0%
Lights    20.4%
Brights   18.8%
Whites    11.8%

The winner of yesterday’s contest was Deester, with a guess of Dark and 47.9%. Deester wins a 2005 Santa Barbara Axxess Card good for piles of good stuff.

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