Being cool when it's cold.

Winter has come to slap New York upside the head -- and not just upside, but downside, east side, west side, all around the town. Today is freezing rain, but tomorrow is just flat-out freezing. Here in the beautiful Hudson Valley, just north of the busy metropolis, we got a few inches of snow overnight, with that freezing rain making it crunchy and dangerous; it's dropping to 3°F tonight and tomorrow the high is 10. So we're cold.

The thing about being cold is, it can be hard to look cool. It it's not that cold, say just below freezing, it's no big deal; you can be dressed for skiing like James Bond and look awesome. But when it dips below zero Fahrenheit, with a windchill in the painful negatives, it becomes harder to avoid looking like a gigantic dork.

Everyone knows that the best defense against really cold weather is layers, right? Yeah, trying looking suave when you can't put your arms down.

every girl crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man

The problem is compounded by the fact that the truly warm clothes are historically dorky. Goofy Christmas sweaters became a thing because all the nice, toasty sweaters were goofy. The hip ones you would wear at the chalet, or for the après-ski disco, wouldn't protect you ten minutes out in a real winter storm. For that you need Grandma's ugly fair isle knitting with eight billion stitches. Modern protective gear made from space-age fibers are a definite improvement in many ways, but I am telling you, if you want to stay warm, stick to your ugly Grandma special -- although it has its limitations, as will be explored below.

Real animal fur is very warm, they tell me, and looks grand, so assuming you're not as poor as your average writer/editor, you may not have to duct tape squirrels to your parka to get that feeling of fur. Is that an exception to my cool rule?

Not always. First of all, you have to deal with people getting mad at you for wearing fur (some of them in leather jackets... yeah). But also, just slapping on fur is not really enough for truly horrible winter weather. Let me tell you about Roald Amundsen.

According to Roland Huntford's masterful book The Last Place on Earth, Amundsen, a native of Norway, learned how to deal with REALLY cold temperatures from the Eskimos: "He realized that millennia of evolution and specialized adaptation had taught the Netsiliks how to survive in the cold, and he was only too happy to learn all he could from them." As for clothing, which for the Netsiliks was fur-based, "garments had to fit loosely, so as to form pockets of air. They also had to allow air to circulate, so as to prevent sweating; a dangerous enemy, for it dissipates heat, and makes protective clothing freeze, thus destroying the insulation."

We're a long way from Raquel Welch's fur bikini from One Million Years B.C.

Which might keep you warm, but
wouldn't have helped her in the antarctic.

So Amundsen, one of the greatest if not the greatest polar explorer ever, wore fur on his polar expeditions, but a not some Park Avenue fur; what he wore looked more like a fur sack, like the raccoon coats associated with the 1920s. (Waterproofing was less of an issue, since Antarctica is actually a desert.) In other words, he still kind of looked dorky while on the mission.

But here's the point: A lot of coolness -- maybe most of it -- comes from the person inside the clothes anyway. After all, you may be cool, but you ain't Roald Amundsen chilling with his dawgs having led the first successful expedition to the South Freaking Pole cool.

Sorry, you ain't.

He could have been dressed like Randy from A Christmas Story and he would have been just as awesome. Hell, he could have worn Ralphie's bunny suit from that movie and he would have been just as awesome.

So if you want to be cool when it's cold, dress warmly, be smart, and be fearless. That's an unbeatable combination.

And don't duct tape squirrels to your parka. It doesn't make you warmer and it annoys the squirrels.