For the gormless gommuses amoungst you, we are talking kilts! Mike reminded me this morning of one nearly rational pronouncement out of Pyongyang - dinnae go oot w'oot yerrrr hanbok if your are a Korean lassie. Now why would the Magnus Gommus himself warrant something like (but not really much like) support? Because, as Mike says what is a hanbok but a kilt...a national garb.

My interest in manly national garbs took a great leap forward on Friday evening when I watched the last episode of Michael Palin's "Himalaya" on TVO. For the most part he was in Bhutan (where for once I filled in a CUSO application) and it was a very manly and oddly familiar place - gentle farming scenes, evergreen forests, laid back culture, snowy and...kilts - every man in kilt like garb. It was like a Buddhist kingdom in Cape Breton circa 1923.

So I wondered what the outfit is called and came across, within a kilty website, a very manly page called MUGs Around The World which is sub-titled "Examples of the many unbifurcated garments worn by men around the world". There we see India's dhoti, the hakama of Japan and Bhutan's gho as shown to the left. Note, too, the sash and earthy plaids. I think these highlanders are not so foreign at all. As it turns out, the gho is the subject of royal decree:

all males are compelled to wear a knee-length dress, with a sash at the waist, and long stockings. If you are caught wearing anything else, you face a stiff fine, equal to about three-days' pay.

One imagines that there might be an republican uprising if it were not so damn natty. But wee Bhutan is having a crash course in the 21st century generally and perhaps the gho law is a bit of the rear guard action it appears to be. But, more to the point, is there a gho retailer in Canada where manly men are free to have a breeze about the knees? It looks like the very thing, when not in Thimphu, for walking across one's estate through the woodlands to check the eel pens of a misty morning.