Coat

Since "long" is the season's fashion buzzword, it goes without saying that a classic long coat is an excellent choice for cold weather this year.Fewer garments pack more potential.Wear a long coat with jeans and boots to football games on weekends, or with a long skirt and platform pumps to the office during the week. Layer it over a dressy suit for a Saturday afternoon wedding, and turn around and don it that night at the ballet with a short, backless dress."It tops off everything you're wearing," says Donna Kimmel, women's wear fashion manager for the Wool Bureau Inc., a marketing organization.

If this is your year for a coat-buying expedition, say mush and go.The hot coat look now is borrowed from arctic explorers and glacier climbers. Call it a parka, anorak or storm coat. It has to say warm, tough and trendy.The familiar storm coat has been pumped up a few degrees, sort of an L. L. Bean-designs-for-Barbie style -- a younger and more energetic point of view. That means more color, a harder, slicker finish and exaggerated details. The hottest cold coats come in emergency squad yellow, traffic cone orange, neons, or sparkly fabrics -- sure to be spotted by a rescue team or fashion watchers.

I have had some unfortunate home haircuts in my day, captured in school photos for the amusement of future generations. There's one in particular that stands out. I am about 8 years old, in a maroon polyester dress with a drooping collar that manages to create a "beagle-ears" effect. But it is my hair that commands attention; I am sporting startlingly asymmetrical bangs that slope sharply down my forehead. I remember sitting for home haircuts on a stool in my basement; hair dripping wet, a towel pinned around my shoulders.

In his previous life he was Rance Smith, laboratory technician, working in a white coat amid pristine glassware and microscopes at Anne Arundel Medical Center. So his roost at Rance's Relics, a junk and collectibles shop on Route 175, is something of a departure.A visitor found him the other day dressed in striped overalls and a T-shirt, a bandanna wrapped about his head, sitting in an old stuffed chair tucked behind dusty shelves of glassware, baseball cards and ceramic figurines. Above his head hung a few old hats, a powder horn, a banjo and a bugle.

Although casual dress has become the fashion rule in many workplaces, we prefer our doctors to be dressed neatly and formally in the old-fashioned white lab coat. So says Dr. Lawrence J. Brandt, a medical-school lecturer who has become a 21st-century one-man band for the return of dress codes. He's just written a heavily researched commentary in a major medical journal to make his case. A few years ago, the chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., began noticing that many of the medical students attending his lectures were slouched and unkempt, wearing scruffy jeans and sneakers, toting filthy, beat-up backpacks.

Q: Why doesn't my 2-year-old want to wear a coat? She refuses to put one on, even when I feel she needs one, and she takes it off as soon as I look away.A: Putting on a coat before leaving a nice warm house requires thinking ahead -- foreseeing being cold. That's well beyond the reasoning power of a 2-year-old. We know of toddlers who eagerly put on coats, but probably because they have linked coat-wearing with leaving the house to do something fun, or because they fear when they see others with coats that they are about to be left behind.

My husband, who is not a tuna aficionado, recently changed his mind about this distinctive fish. During the past few months, while dining at one of our favorite bistros in Paris, he ordered sesame-coated tuna steaks on three separate occasions. Each time I looked on in surprise as he devoured a beautiful tuna steak coated with golden sesame seeds. The clever chef deserves credit for my spouse's turnaround. First, the cook thought of pairing the smooth textured fish with the slightly crunchy seeds.

Men's basketball coach Dan Dakich just wanted to turn Bowling Green's luck inside out. Instead, he started a new fashion trend. After his team had lost four straight games, including an 81-57 rout by Kent University, Dakich stunned everyone when he arrived on the floor for a home game against Western Michigan on Jan. 31 with his buttoned-up sport coat on backward. The Falcons won, 77-61, so he dressed the same way during a 67-63 overtime win at Miami University on Feb. 3. The streak eventually reached six games.

POLICE LOG* Jessup: 7300 block of Assateague Drive: A Maryland driver's license and a Visa credit card were stolen from a coat pocket Dec. 6. The coat's owner was not wearing the coat during the theft.

Good morning -- Roger Federer -- You got a pink carnation to go with that white sport coat?