Here's where I sound even more like a cranky old man.
People my age should keep their opinions to themselves when it comes to high school and college clothing styles, but I can't help weighing in on Hollister stuff.
About every fifth kid you see at the mall here is wearing something emblazoned with the Hollister name and, of course, there is a Hollister Co. shop in the mall.
I would bet next month's Social Security check (how's that for staking my claim to geezerhood?) that 90 percent - maybe more - can't find Hollister on a map.
The ones wearing the Hollister Beach Club shirts strike me as the most clueless because Hollister, Calif., for which all this stuff is named, is about 27 highway miles from the nearest beach.
Hollister was created by parent company Abercrombie & Fitch to market Southern California surfing lifestyle-inspired duds. According to Wikipedia, a study by U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray found the Hollister brand ranked first for four consecutive seasons since 3007 as the top clothing brand among teens.
I've been to Hollister, which makes it even more puzzling to me that kids have seized upon it as some kind of surfer lifestyle glamour destination. Hollister is a dusty little California valley town of about 34,400 people. It's just down the road from Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world and northeast of Salinas (the hometown of author John Steinbeck that shows up in the song "Me and Bobby McGee). The town was named for W.W. Hollister, a rancher in the area.
If you want a closer look at Hollister, go there via Google Maps where you can take a street-level photo tour of the whole town. Let me know it you see anything that suggests surfing.
The national spotlight fell upon Hollister over the Fourth of July weekend in 1947 when an estimated 4,000 motorcyclists took over the town, wrecking bars, fighting and generally raising drunken hell. The incident inspired the classic Marlon Brando movie, "The Wild Ones" and was a strong influence in the evolution of the biker lifestyle. Which has absolutely nothing to do with surfing.
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