Nothing to see here. Move along.

Mistakes. I’ve made a few. Many of them about my wardrobe. I wore double-knit slacks while my weight fluctuated in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Not a good look for ANYONE. When I had to wear a tie at work, I never let food stains break up my day-of-the-week rotation. And I still insist on having a breast pocket on whatever kind of shirt I wear, even a t-shirt, and filling it to capacity… unless, having been drawn into the world of message-bearing shirts by popular webcomics and woot.com, I find something I consider totally awesome. But I never get much of a chance to promote my favoritest, most awesomest designs for long; they are usually discontinued quickly due to lack of interest from anyone but me.

Designs like this:

and this:

The above from the Goats.com store, which still has some OK stuff.

Or this:

Sold by DieselSweeties.com which has other stuff YOU might like better.

Or these (from woot.com which does that ’selling one item a day’ thing, but still makes available previously offered shirts at an anti-reduced price until they lose in an online poll which both of the following did rather quickly):

(I cannot believe Mr. Spork was not a hit!)

Now I can still wear any of those shirts in public with only moderate ridicule, but my absolute worst shirt design choice was what I considered a good political statement about a compromise between the GOP Elephant and the Demo Donkey back when I ordered it in July.

But after a certain VP candidate was selected who hunts moose from helicopters, that shirt’s message has been totally munged.

It must be noted that I have been a Bullwinkle the Moose fan since he first appeared on a black-and-white TV when I was 3. But I do NOT want this “Grab Some Tail” tee with Bullwinkle grabbing Rocky the Flying Squirrel’s tail, which falls into the “just plain wrong” department for me. However, I did previously note (in a blogpost lost in the transition to my new home) that I am totally in love with this design, mashing up secondary Bullwinkle Show characters with “Back to the Future”.

Time Travel t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com
In all the recent confusion, I have not yet bought it. Which is probably why it hasn’t been discontinued yet. Get it while you can.

A version of this was originally published, and is incredibly still accessible at epinions.com. Thanks to a link at the perpetually popular “Belgium Doesn’t Exist!” page, I will be required to keep this in a prominent location at every version of my blog until the Internet burns itself out (which should be in the next six months or so – but that’s ANOTHER story). I just did a long-overdue rewrite, so I’ll put it here up front instead of back in the archive.

For those of you who are considering to include Minneapolis, Minnesota in your future “See America” plans, there is something you need to know. But let me first explain how I came to learn it.

It started when I attended a 1998 event at Hollywood’s Museum of Broadcasting saluting “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. The emcee, Gavin McLeod, announced that all of the show’s original writers were present “except for Allen Burns, who, as you probably know, is so busy with the Minneapolis Project.” There was a scattering of applause, and I, puzzled, asked the sunglasses-wearing-indoors person next to me what the writer/producer was doing in Minneapolis.
“No, man, he’s not doing anything IN Minneapolis, he is DOING Minneapolis.”
And he went on to explain that the metropolitan area of Minneapolis/St. Paul was the totally fictional creation of Hollywood writers, devised to provide a location for the popular ’70s sitcom.
Is that all? Of course that’s not all! Click Here.

I hope Kmart never totoally disappears, as long as it continues to support certain little parts of the Shopping Experience that have gone SO out of fashion. For example, it’s the only store around that still has those little coin-operated kiddie “rides” in front of the store. The little fire truck that vibrates and moves side to side to “simulate” rushing to a fire, and the plastic horsey that gallops in place just enough so that the really little kids have to have a parent hold them on. Is that all? Of course that’s not all! Click Here.