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that looping the umbilicus into a Windsor knot around the neck of a fetus might cause brain damage. Which would limit tie purchases later in life. 
    Tie enthusiasts, the Quislings of men's attire, point out that ties allow for some individuality in an otherwise regimented world of men's business attire. But really, now. It's not individuality ties provide, it's the illusion thereof, and a poor one at that. Wear your Jerry Garcia tie all you want, you still have to file the same reports as Ted, three cubicles down, wearing his $6 poly blend from Sears. A Bugs Bunny tie will not keep the gun-toting ex-co-worker who just shot his way through Accounting from seeing you as any less of an extension of The Man That Kept Him Down. A tie with Edvard Munch's "The Scream" silk-screened upon its narrow width will not stop you from your dark suspicions that The New Guy makes twice what you do, with half the experience. And anyway, you wouldn't wear a single one of those ties to a performance review, so what does that say. Tie enthusiasts also point out that ties accentuate a man's verticality. Well, if you want to accentuate your verticality, go on a freakin' diet, already.
    Men wear ties because so far as they know, men have always worn ties; it's what men do. If they knew that the tie got started as the passing fancy of the foppiest of the Great Kings of Europe, it probably wouldn't change a thing; the dress code is always dictated from above. Will they ever stop wearing them? Probably not. The best we can hope for is that ties don't start hampering neck movement again; and that if they do, we can somehow take out those tie wearers before they infect the rest of us. Their peripheral vision would be shot, you know. They would never see it coming.

Best Vision of Hell of the Millennium.
    It comes from Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived in the 15th and 16th Centuries (although assuredly, not through them both entirely). Other people wrote about Hell, lectured about Hell, or simply feared it as the inevitable end to their sinful ways. Bosch saw Hell, like Walker Evans saw the Depression, and then reported on what he saw. It wasn't a very cheerful report, but then, what would you expect. Hell's not a resort filled with Payday bars and happy kittens. Unless you're allergic to nuts and cat dander. In which case, that's exactly what it is.
    How did Bosch get this preview of Hell? It's not that hard to imagine. Sartre famously said that Hell is other people, and while he was probably directly referring to some annoying waiter at Deux Magots, the line has broader implications. People are flawed, and not in the Japanese sense of wabi , in which a slight imperfection merely accentuates the fundamental perfection of a thing. Wabi is the mole on Cindy Crawford's lip, the wheat bits in Lucky Charms, or the fact that Bill Gates' fortune is owned by him and not you. 
    No, we're talking about deep-seated incipient screw-upped-ness, the kind that puts you on the news as the helicopter gets a top down view of the police surrounding your home. For most of us, fortunately, it expresses itself in less virulent form, usually a furtive, opportunistic violation of one or more of the seven deadly sins when we think we won't get caught. Coupled with this is the dread knowledge that, not only do we know what we're doing is wrong, but we'll probably do again the next time everyone else's attention is back on the TV. We're all a country song waiting to happen. With that realization comes the grinding sound of Satan's backhoe scraping out space in our brain for another yet Hell franchise (six billion locations worldwide!). Hell is in all of us, not just the ones who use cell phones when they drive. All you have to do is look. 
    Bosch looked. A pessimist and a moralist (one can hardly be one without being the other), Bosch saw what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and then hit the paint.  His friends and neighbors were no doubt unhappy to learn they were