Colored Spectacles

I broke my Randolph Engineering sunglasses this morning, and that’s not a good thing. They were pretty nice, issued to the military since the early 80s. Solid, timelessly stylish and one of those icons known only to a relative few. Unless you've been around the military, you've likely not heard of them. Randolph doesn't advertise. They don't need to. They have a government contract that keeps them pretty happy. They’re like Ray Bans for people who don’t want to be seen sporting the Ray Ban logo. (Even if it is a timeless and fairly cool logo.)

I’ve never owned a pair of Ray Bans on principle, but I went to their barely functioning website (at least it hates Firefox) and was amused by this take on the whole “mirror image” thing every web designer has been over-employing for the last four years. Generally, the designer will flip the duplicated image vertically, draw back the opacity and then fade the reflection away at the bottom. At Ray Ban, they instead flip it horizontally and place it right under the original. Odd.

ANYWAY…Didn’t mean to diss you, Ray Ban. Send me a crate of every style and color of sunglasses you offer and I will wear a different pair every day and blog about them. I will surrender my blog to Ray Ban for as long as it takes me to wear all of your glasses, reviewing each pair and finally selecting the ones that I like. The leftover pairs will be given to homeless men on the streets of Orlando, along with Never Hide^® t-shirts. I’ll take their pictures and we can do some sort of crazy viral thing that makes Ray Ban look concerned for homeless people who need sunglasses.