On the left: what every well-dressed high-school debate champ is wearing this year. (Trust me on this one. Trust me.) This item provided maximum efficiency, which a debater would admire – the vestal area and the sleeve-component had been pre-assembled into one coherent unit. It also felt like wearing someone else’s molted skin, but that was a hazard with synthetics.

In a just world where good taste prevailed, Captain Kirk would beam into the studio and slap those sideburns off his face.

The other outfit appears to be based on a fundraising progress indicator. If we read 100 more pages an hour for the next nine days, the red bars will reach all the way to his shoulder! C’mon, we can do it! We’ve got Spirit yes we do!  Speaking of which:  If you’re wondering about the . . . bulge in the blue guy’s lower area, look at the other leg. He has two of them. Either that’s the way the pants fit, or he was performing some profile enhancement a la Spinal Tap’s bassist, and he figured he would double his chances to impress the girls.

If you’re also wondering whether the belts are highly polished or made out of plastic, I refer you to the year we are discussing. It’s 1973. Of course the belts were plastic.  They cracked after a few months, but you still had to wear them. Times were hard; we expected to run out of petrochemicals by 1997, so we had to make things last.