Though a friend has been living in the 914 area code for the past six months now, he’s retained his old 212 prefix, so that anyone with Caller ID will assume he’s phoning from his Trump Tower penthouse, not his Westchester basement.

To him, 212 is a luxury label — he’s reluctant to switch brands to the generic equivalent. And he is hardly alone.

My parents teased my oldest brother in high school that he only liked Levi’s because of the tag. He insisted the tag had nothing to do with it: Levi’s fit him best. So I went to the clothesline with a needle-nosed pliers and ripped the red tag from the back right pocket of his blue cords. It was like pulling a healthy molar – it took forever, and left a ragged hole. Then I silently presented the tag at the dinner table, like a horse’s head, at which time my parents seized the needle-nosed pliers and tore me a ragged new hole.

But I made my point: My brother, to my knowledge, never wore the tagless Levi’s.

Likewise, I’ll bet any imbecile who buys this Rolls Royce does so largely for its $200,000 hood ornament.

I’m hardly immune. I bought a driver last week in the same way I buy wine: I weighed how much I was willing to spend, which label I liked best, and whether Greg Norman had anything to do with its production. Then I went home and pretended that I really loved it, when I have no idea if I did.

The same thing happened when I bought a riding lawn mower last year. I preferred the colors of the John Deere. And it came with a free hat. But I ultimately chose the Cub Cadet, because LeBron James drives one in a commercial. And you know he mows his own lawn. I’ve seen the grass stains on his Nikes in the NBA playoffs.

Such come-ons do not always work on me. Have you seen this commercial for Tropicana’s Pure Valencia orange juice? While dripping oranges jiggle on-screen in a kind of citric wet T-shirt contest, a siren’s voice declares it “The best orange juice Tropicana has ever made.” And it must be, because it comes in a vessel shaped like a premium vodka bottle. Even so, I’ll continue to buy my OJ in a cardboard can, from concentrate, and decant it from a plastic pitcher.

While traveling with the family the other day, my wife sent me to Target for toothpaste. I stood in an aisle of nothing but toothpastes, four shelves high, a quarter-of-a-mile long, before settling on Crest. But that scarcely narrowed the choices. There were 100 sub-labels of Crest, none of which were Just Plain Crest. In a panic, I chose Crest Pro Care over its immediate neighbors – Octobercrest and Pete’s Wicked Winter Crest – and regretted it that night, when I brushed (when I grouted?) my teeth with it.

I’ll leave the last word on branding to Ogar, who sent me the following e-mail this morning:

“Selling more crispies—or, rather, Shreddies—was indeed the goal of the 2008 ad campaign that took home last weekend’s Grand Clio award. Created on behalf of a Canadian cereal brand, this winking campaign sought to convince viewers that boring old square Shreddies had been radically reimagined as ‘New Diamond Shreddies.’ (In fact, the piece of cereal photographed on the front of the box had simply been rotated 45 degrees.)”

Last night the Celtics played a sold-out playoff game on the parquet floor of something called the Garden, and M.L. Carr and K.C. Jones and Cedric Maxwell and Danny Ainge were courtside, and I became nostalgic for the Celtics of ‘84 and ‘86, my two favorite sports teams of all time. So I decided to account for the last-known whereabouts of every one who played a minute for either of those two teams.

Danny Ainge. The Celtics general manager was named Executive of the Year this week and became a grandfather for — sigh – the sixth time.

Larry Bird. The president of the Pacers is suing an Indiana couple who bought his former home in French Lick and is now running it as a bed-and-breakfast, alleging that they used his name without his permission. All I know is I want to stay there.

Quinn Buckner. As anyone with NBA League Pass knows, he is the color analyst on Pacer telecasts.

M.L. Carr. Far more than Jay-Z or Beyonce, the Charlotte Bobcats investor was the biggest celebrity at Game 5 of the Celts-Cavs series, where I did not see him waving a towel.

Carlos Clark. He’s been coaching high school basketball in the Naples, Fla. area — most recently at Seacrest High. There — according to the book Boston Celtics: Where Have You Gone – Bird and Rick Carlisle stopped by in 2004 to play H-O-R-S-E with the kids.

Gerald Henderson. He and his wife are both realtors in Pennsylvania. Their son Gerald plays at Duke.

Dennis Johnson. He died of a heart attack on February 22, 2007 while coaching the Austin Toros of the NBDL. K.C. Jones told the Boston Globe, “Larry Bird was just totally in awe of Dennis.” And in fact Bird called DJ the greatest teammate he ever had.

Greg Kite. He played for the West Coast Sports team in the last Masters Basketball National Championships, for guys who — God bless ‘em — don’t want to hang it up. Kite was named to the all-tourney team in the 45-and-older division, along with ex-Rocket Mitch Wiggins. The MVP of the finals (in the 40-plus division) was . . . Tim Hardaway.

Cedric Maxwell. He’s the color analyst on Celtics radio broadcasts.

Robert Parish. Chief told Celtics.com in 2004, “Well, basically, I’m doing, shall we say, a lot of nothing right about now. But seriously, I’m doing some personal appearances and some autograph signings, which keep me going. But in all honesty, I’m just enjoying life right now.”

Kevin McHale. He is, of course, the vice president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Scott Wedman. In January, he resigned as coach of the Great Falls Explorers of the CBA and returned to his real estate interests in Kansas City.

Rick Carlisle. He was just named head coach of the Dallas Mavericks.

Jerry Sichting. He’s an assistant coach for the Timberwolves.

David Thirdkill. His former high school coach told the Peoria Journal Star last year that Thirdkill is still living in St. Louis, though he hadn’t spoken to him in 20 years. “For whatever reason,” the paper reported, ” “Thirdkill has cut ties with Bradley,” his alma mater. Bradley was unable to locate him, as was the Journal Star’s reporter.

Sam Vincent. The Charlotte Bobcats fired him as their coach in April.

Bill Walton. The alias under which we would order pizzas in high school, “Bill Walton” is also an NBA analyst for ESPN and ABC.

Sly Williams. He was released from prison in 2006 after serving 3 ½ years of a five-year sentence in upstate New York on a charge of second-degree kidnapping of a woman. Prison, he has said, was a blessing, as it forced him to kick drugs and alcohol.

Ray Melchiorre. The Celtics trainer left Boston for the Rockets in 1987, when he was succeeded by Ed Lacerte, who remains the Celts’ trainer to this day. Melchiorre won two more titles with the Rockets and is now the trainer at Northland Christian (High) School in Houston.

K.C. Jones. I see him all the time in Connecticut, where he does work for the University of Hartford athletic department and occasionally sang with a jazz combo at a bar-slash-hamburger joint 15 minutes from my house. Alas, that place — like Boston Garden — is no more. It closed last summer.

Sic transit gloria.

Before Phil Jackson ran the triangle, Ed Grimley played the triangle and the U.S. invaded the Sunni Triangle, there was the geometric mother of them all: The Bermuda Triangle, which has — aptly enough — all but vanished from your radar.

A reader writes: “Have you noticed that nobody talks about the Bermuda Triangle anymore? My 10-year-old did not even know what it is (was?). As [a friend] said, ‘Good observation, it is hard to notice things that are not there anymore.’”

Too true. Like the ships and planes that entered its Herculean (and Isoscelean) maw — from Florida to Puerto Rico to Bermuda — the Bermuda Triangle itself has disappeared, taking with it many other menaces that scarcely survived the ’70s: Killer bees, Ouija boards and disco, to name just three.

Like other things that terrified me in that decade — “The Exorcist,” AC/DC, deviled eggs — it had a Satanic association: “The Devil’s Triangle.”

The Bermuda Triangle was a real-life version of those Irwin Allen disaster movies that unnecessarily alarmed and horrified Americans in the days before cable news assumed that role. (If only all those missing persons from all those missing-persons stories were found, safe, in a Bermuda Triangle of their own.)

Allen, “The Master of Disaster,” produced “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno” and the killer-bee epic “The Swarm.” But not, strangely enough, “The Devil’s Triangle,” a 1969 documentary. Perhaps the Devil’s Triangle is where the S.S. Poseidon went down, in 1972, taking with it Shelley Winters.

“The Poseidon Adventure” was the first movie I saw in a theater — at the Southtown mall — and after viewing it I vowed never to set foot on a ship or listen to Maureen McGovern, the most-popular McGovern of ‘72, eclipsing the guy who lost to Nixon.

To a grade-schooler who learned all his news overhearing Johnny Carson’s monologue at the top of the stairs, Nixon joined the Bermuda Triangle, earthquakes, OPEC, the NBC commissary in Burbank and Mediterranean fruit flies among the most frightening things of the Me Decade.

(Incidentally: Groucho Marx said “Times flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana” and he was a good friend of Irwin Allen’s. Discuss.)

Eventually, the spoilsport insurers at Lloyds of London reported that the Bermuda Triangle was no more dangerous than any other stretch of ocean of its kind. And the U.S. Navy seconded that emotion, which may explain why we don’t hear of it anymore. (The Triangle, not the Navy.)

In short — in Bermuda shorts? — the Devil’s Triangle died of exposure, the way all the best urban legends do. The emperor has no clothes, it turns out. The Devil wears nada.