SIAO: where Shift happens (and sometimes shiksas are involved?)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/23 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/23/6473202.aspx

The time of year when it is perhaps too late for T-shirts still manages to inspire fun designs, so I'll essentially give unpaid ad space to some of the funnier ones I have seen related to my interests.

I found these over on bustedtees.com, after someone pointed the site out to me.

If someone wanted to buy me one of them, I prefer XL (my size is L but three washes later an L is an M and that just doesn't look right, better to make the XL into an L and call it a day!). But although I just blathered about my theory of T-shirt sizes, I am honestly not looking for clothing; but over the last few years I have received the occasional M sized T-shirt from a reader, which cannot be considered much more than a symbolic gesture given my frame!

You can click on the images to see the shirts.... 

First there is this design, because (and let's face it) Shift happens!!1 (and sometimes it doesn't!):

With both men's and women's sizes and not a CAPS LOCK in site, not even a Colemak fan would have a cause for complaint on this apparel....

(I regret mentioning the name of the alternate keyboard here since as a group the spirited supporters of this keyboard have been the only significant non-spam inspiration of censorship on this blog, and unlike Beetlejuice you don't have to mention the name three times for them to appear. But what can you expect from any topic that as been successfully endorsed for Deletion (following Deletion reviews) on Wikipedia five times? I'll once again have to cull heavily in the comments for having invoked the name)

And then there is (in the spirit of bancomicsans.com), the natural hostility that some people feel for particular typefaces.

And from that not entirely healthy spirit of aggression comes this example of artistic expression:

Now unfortunately they could not use the 0x55 symbol glyph from Wingdings for the U, since FUCK WINGDINGS might have offended even more people than the original message of the shirt. So, given the limitations here, F-CK WINGDINGS seems like a fair compromise, suggestive of the font and using a symbol contained within it.

With a description of "This t-shirt is symbolic" and both men's and women's sizes, this one is just plain funny even if not really work-appropriate attire. Come to think of it, where can you wear it? No idea. Maybe at a TypeCon party....

And then, as long as we are dealing with Wingdings, this last design was kind of amusing:

Not a design one would necessarily wear when one is going to the family Seder on Passover, though to be honest (given the relationship patterns of my uncle, myself, and others) my family has always seemed a great deal more flexible in this regard anyway. So it might be more the fact that one wore a T-shirt to a Seder than the message on the shirt itself. :-)

But either way, I Y SHIKSAS did make me laugh when I saw it, as the really appropriate mix of metaphors (in a mildly inappropriate way).

Much less controversial than I ♠ MY DOG or I ♣ MY WIFE, obviously. And of course it is not as patently offensive as a concert T-shirt with a picture of Hitler on the front and a "European Tour" listing on the back that I saw years ago, which is my ultimate edge case test for inappropriate T-shirts, on a scale of 1 to that shirt...

Not to mention the fact that this T-shirt also carries some women's sizes and the site has a female model wearing the shirt is also pretty funny as niche markets go (no M.O.T. lesbian friend of mine ever used the word shiksa to refer to a non-Jewish partner, which is hardly a completely representative statistical universe size sampling, but is for the moment somewhat convincing to me until/unless I am corrected!).

Anyway, yet another random place on the web with funny designs vaguely relevant to what happens here at Sorting it all Out, where Shift happens, with shiksas....

This post brought to you by ✡ (U+2721, aka STAR OF DAVID, aka מגן דוד)

# Name (required) on 24 Nov 2007 8:48 AM:

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# Michael S. Kaplan on 24 Nov 2007 4:53 PM:

# Kemp on 24 Nov 2007 5:26 PM:

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