Cranberry sauce. Brown gravy. Sweet potato casserole. Some sort of cherry Jell-o mold, with what appears to be fragments of fruit encased inside. Nope, not the menu. That's what's on your shirt at the end of Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving meals are great, but they are also a brightly colored minefield of foods that, for some reason, seem particularly attracted to your clothes. When you're at a family dinner, or at her family's house for dinner, you don't want to spend the evening with stains on your shirt. (And if you've seen the way food flies when my family sits down to eat, you know there will be stains.)

Here's a solution: While we were at lunch a few weeks ago, a buddy of mine used a Tide to Go stain remover pen to take a tomato sauce stain out of his dress shirt. I sat there, amazed and dumbfounded, looking at him like people looked at David Blaine when he announced he was going to spend a week buried in concrete up to his neck with a cage of live rats over his head. (He didn't really announce that. It's just something I keep hoping for.)

I've been addicted to Tide to Go ever since. I bought a 3-pack, and keep one at work, one in my briefcase, and one at The Pad. It's great on fresh food and drink stains - like ketchup, bbq sauce, coffee, wine - the usual stuff I find down the front of my shirt.

When you're heading to a holiday party, or an important business meeting or job interview, slip one of these pens in your briefcase or pocket. That way everyone will focus on how sloppy the Lions are playing, and not on how sloppy you are.

I paid about $6 for a 3-pack. Available at supermarkets everywhere. www.tidetogo.com

Smoking jackets used to be de rigeur if you wanted to look cool. Sinatra had one. So did Dino. And Hef was never seen without his. These days the only people you see wearing them out is sad, old, lounge crawlers, or twenty year-olds trying too hard to be ironic. Hef even switched over to silk pajamas. (Though in his case it may have more to do with spending so much time in bed). Too bad. Guys could use a little extra style once in a while.

Recently, I found a great, updated take on the classic in the Cordarounds Reversible Smoking Jacket. Cordarounds is the San Francisco company that dared to ask the question: how come corduroys are always running vertical?, and then created pants with the fabric running horizontal.

They expanded the line into jackets, and designed the first run with silk brocade fabric as a cool looking liner, nothing else. The founder of the company turned the coat inside out, tried it on, and the Reversible Smoking Jacket was born.

Now the jacket has pockets on both sides, and a signature skull button fastens it when in smoking jacket mode. According to Cordarounds, most guys wear it in regular jacket mode 90% of the time, but love the option of becoming the center of attention at whatever party or bar they are at.

Frank did it his way. Now it's your turn.

$155. www.cordarounds.com