38: Message T-shirts

The natural travel companion of the wacky hat is the message t-shirt. This is the tee that communicates something stupid (or, in gnome terms, "funny") to the onlooker. I suspect this is a gnomish sartorial prank perpetrated on unwary humans. You should know what you're getting into with a person who wears such things, although I do like this spin on the classic gnome "I'm With Stupid" tee shirt...

Yes, you certainly are, you damned gnome.

35: Lederhosen

Gnomes wear lederhosen. It is most definitely a gnome-influenced garment, intended to make humans look ridiculous. Not much more need be said about that. Lederhosen. *shaking head*

25: Moustache Wax

Now, gnomes are known for their jaunty beards, so you might wonder why moustache wax might be classified among gnomish products, yes?

But, gentle reader, if you've been paying attention at all to this blog and its vital message, you must immediately divine the insidious and invidious nature of moustache wax as yet another example of a gnomish sentiment inflicted on humanity to make us look ridiculous. I'm not sure who first got the idea, whether it was a gnome playing a prank on a Victorian man on a slow day, or whether some Victorian saw a gnome with a dolled-up moustache and, in a fit of whimsy, slapped beeswax to his face and became the sartorial toast of London for a fortnight.

Not sure who to blame, precisely, except the obvious target: gnomes. If anybody is going to wax their moustaches, it's the damned gnomes.

I bring this up especially since hipsters out there have taken to wearing beards for a number of years, now, and so it's only a matter of time (and I'm sure they're doing it as I type this, and the hippest of them have "been doing it for years") before the moustache wax meme returns in spades.

I won't give any of those twits any press by showing their moustachioed creations, so I'll simply use the venerable Rollie Fingers as an exemplar of this gnomish product and facial hair trend, and because Rollie Fingers was doing this long before any of the hipsters today did it, looked far cooler doing it, and that likely will bother them.

3: "Funny" (Ugly) Hats

Few things are more gnomish than ugly hats. You know them when you see them. They can't simply be ugly; they have to be willfully, self-consciously "wacky" and "funny" and "weird" to really be gnomish hats. The stereotypical "gnomish cone" hat isn't enough these days. The real gnome-about-town swings for the rafters in their headwear.

The ultimate gnomish hat is the "Cat In the Hat" hat. Any person actually sporting one of these at a public event is a fucking gnome. Anybody even owning one of these is a gnome, and you should be immediately on guard about this person you only thought you knew.

Not to malign the anarchic spirit of the Cat in the Hat himself -- the coy menace he represents in that Seuss book is bold enough on its own, and has never been properly rendered outside of Seuss's writing. But the drive to wear such a hat is emblematic of gnomish impulses.

The runner-up to this hat is the beer helmet, which weds the gnomish tendency toward pointless whimsy with irritating contraptions (to be dealt with later).

Anybody wearing a beer helmet is a damned gnome. No two ways about it. And one might say "What's wrong with that?" The answer is, simply: EVERYTHING. It is a beer helmet. Human beings should not wear beer helmets.

Snowboarders are particularly susceptible to gnomish headgear, for reasons as yet unexplored. Maybe it's part of the devil-may-care culture endemic to snowboarding? I don't know.

In the case of this picture below, the girl is most definitely the gnome, here -- can't you see her smug smile, there? "Look what I did?!" She even looks like a gnome (the eyes are a dead giveaway, although I blocked them out, here). No doubt she crafted those wacky, wacky hats in a fit of contrived wackiness that plagues gnomes everywhere...