Style Rule #9
Patterned socks should be worn with a solid color suit

Style Rule #11
Wear either suspenders or a belt, never both

Style Rule #29
Style cannot be bought

The Mandarin Oriental, Las Vegas, which opened in CityCenter in December, is a serene sanctuary located in the center of the bustling Las Vegas strip. From the moment you enter the non-gaming hotel’s 23rd-floor lobby with soaring views of the city, it is clear the hotel has a different point of view. It has an expansive two-level, 27,000-square-foot spa that specializes in holistic treatments that combine Eastern tradition and modern techniques, and it is home to the already-famous chef Pierre Gagnaire’s three-Michelin-star restaurant, Twist.

Interior designer Adam D. Tihany and architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates are responsible for the elegant design. The hotel has earned a LEED Gold certification because of its energy-efficient features—including heat-deflecting, light-colored rooftops, which substantially reduce the amount of artificial lighting by providing an abundance of natural light. Each room comes equipped with an automated control panel that allows guests to personalize their environment by adjusting room temperature, lighting, and entertainment systems with one central control. The 47-story, 392-room hotel has suites ranging in price from $575 to $15,000.

1. Most people, most of the time, judge you by what you’re wearing, and if you care what people think, you should care about what you wear. Life doesn’t get much simpler than that.

2. If you like something, respect it. Hang your pants. Roll your ties. Put shoe trees in your shoes. Oh, and wire hangers? The instruments of Beelzebub and, coincidentally, dry cleaners. Stick with wooden ones.

3. Pull yourself together. Always. Everywhere. Whether you’re going to the deli or on a date, every occasion has minimum standards. Try to meet them.

4. People who are slaves to matching (e.g., belts to shoes, socks to trousers) are shallow and tend to lack in the friends department. Anyone points out that something doesn’t match? Punch him. That’ll teach him.

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Technology has changed many things about the way we as men go about our lives, including how we interact with the opposite sex. The effusive novel-length love letters our male ancestors once painstakingly scrawled as signals of affection have now given way to instantly transmitted, tipsily mashed 140-character text messages. This means we have fewer words to explain ourselves with and a greater likelihood of botching up what does get sent.

Similarly, the pool of available prospects women have today is now open to any dude with an internet connection, as opposed to just the small collection of eligible bachelors putzing around Main Street. Forget about the benefits of having a former love interest quickly fading out of the picture once they stop visiting the homestead since, thanks to Facebook, women can continue to receive a stream of life updates from any ex if they don’t un-friend them.

While these examples may paint the picture of technology as the ultimate libido killer, the reality is that it can cut both ways. In fact, if you’re smart, advances in instant communication and digital information can serve as the ace up your sleeve for impressing women in ways you never could before. . To prove it, we’ve trawled through countless iPhone applications to select the top 5 that provide you with a leg up for wooing the lady (or ladies) in your life. Remember: Apple’s marketing slogan for the app store does state that “there’s an app for just about anything,” and it wasn’t lying.

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Frankly, the food truck scene could use some real excitement.

You’re thinking self-serve froyo, and maybe the occasional fleet of leggy Brazilians.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Big Swirl Truck is officially upon us… and you won’t be able to miss it.

Think of yesterday’s Korean fried chicken as this week’s entrée, and this as your dessert. When you’re in the mood for something cool and refreshing, you’ll step up to the side of the city’s first self-serve froyo truck, where dispensers await with 10 rotating flavors. It’s your chance to create a (nondairy) masterpiece for five bucks with flavors like Nutella, pistachio and blood orange. (Mmm, Nutella-pistachio-blood-orange sundae.)

But this is less a truck than a full-on mobile party. They’ve installed flashy lights and a mother of a nightclub-worthy sound system, and they’re happy to deploy a troupe of Brazilian dancers to liven things up. . (We highly encourage this option.)

So though you might see this thing on the streets now and again (pay attention to the Wells Fargo building next week), their real specialty is events. This is going to be your new way to cool down at this summer’s music festivals, farmers’ markets… and maybe your next barbecue blowout.

Trust us, the neighbors won’t mind…

The first time you go, you’ll find yourself deliriously lost. The Bazaar, in the SLS Hotel, is magically absurd, a fun house of possibilities, absolutely delicious and visually decadent. You drift. You circle. You won’t know the Rojo room from the Blanco room, and you surely won’t understand the half-hidden Saam room (tasting menu, fancier service). The food, by America’s greatest Spanish chef, José Andrés, isn’t the rustic dishes he learned to make back in Catalonia. It’s Spanish food that’s lost its exotic ethnicity, become whimsical, playful, and even molecular—mad-scientist stuff. Andrés prepares dishes that are absolutely accessible to American tastes; he’s decoded our dining DNA. His traditional tapas include ibérico ham, sheep’s-milk cheese, and piquillo peppers, all Spanish staples, but no smelly, fishy stuff, which is fine with me. There’s what he calls new tapas, including a play on cheesesteak made with thin baked pita, Cheddar foam, and rare Kobe beef, a combination I never encountered in my South Philly days. There’s a slew of liquefied, bite-size doodads that taste (and sometimes look) like cherries, mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, and olives but are actually science fiction versions of them. Once, long ago, in a place only a few miles away, Wolfgang Puck made fancy dining informal. José Andrés has made it insanely, totally fun.

Read more here.

Does this tie match? What color shirt goes with these pants? These confusing, colorful questions burden every man, everywhere.

Gentlemen, to truly master the art of dressing, we must become learned individuals on the basics of color coordination. And learning to combine colors isn’t as difficult as you might think. A complete understanding of color and the color wheel is a time-consuming lesson, but thankfully an easier, more basic way for coordinating colors exists. While numerous, more complex rules are out there, here are five easy-to-use rules for color coordination.

1 – White shirts go with everything
When all else fails, raise a white flag. A white shirt works with absolutely anything you have, especially those uniquely colored items you’re not sure how to match. Couple it with a bright, patterned tie or wear it under a pastel-colored V-neck sweater; either way you’re looking sharp and perfectly coordinated. A classic, well-fitting white shirt is timeless, worth its weight in gold, and sure to keep you on the front line of fashion.

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Style Rule #7
Tall, slender men: avoid stripes

Style Rule #23
Your sports coat and trousers should not match, but should complement each other

Style Rule #37
Your tie should complement your jacket, not strictly match it .

No matter how many artisanal whiskeys hit the market, it seems there’s never one that matches your idea of smoky, caramel-hued perfection. So why not make your own?

The Whiskey Your Way program at House Spirits Distillery in Portland, Oregon, lets you tailor an entire barrel (about 100 bottles) to your exact specifications. And just to make sure you know what you’re doing, the process kicks off with a tasting seminar, which will help you explain to you drinking companions back home why a Port finish and Oregon oak barrels are the only way to go.

Read more here.

Here’s a tip for your next trip to your favorite watering hole: find the ice machine. The state of a bar’s ice machine speaks volumes about the establishment’s overall attitude toward the customer experience and, sadly, most bars fall frighteningly short. I remember a particular ice machine at a local bar that was crammed in the corner of a perpetually too-hot storage closet. The cooling vents looked like my dryer’s lint collector and sheets of ice would fall into the bin speckled with black dots. I stuck to pints (at least the beer lines were cleaned regularly).

But times, they are a-changin’. Upscale joints are now paying closer attention to their ice, ice, baby, (had to be done—just be glad it wasn’t this post’s headline), according to an article in the L.A. Times. Triple-filtered, custom-cubed, hand-chunked ice is becoming all the rage in places from the Windy City to all the way across the pond in London. But come on, just how important is ice to a cocktail? As long as I can taste the booze, does it really matter where my ice comes from or what it looks like?

You’re damn straight, it does. Ice impacts a cocktail in a number of ways:

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