the greycat blog

Available from the Paranoid Press shop on CafePress, this homage to Captain Jack Aubrey’s greatest flight of wit is our current t-shirt of the week: ‘the lesser of two weevils’.

Those who don’t recognize the reference, which comes from Patrick O’Brian’s 1979 Aubrey/Maturin novel The Fortune of War, will find an explanation here (or another, backed by the full authority of the CIA itself, here; note that the Agency spells O’Brian’s name wrong).

This t-shirt’s qualification for being t-shirt of the week is very straightforward: it made me laugh. It’s the ‘you shall not pass’ t-shirt from the Humdingers Cafepress shop.

A nice touch of the Gandalfs.

Actually, this week it’s two t-shirts of the week, to make up for being late. The theme this week is guns, and that well-known claim that guns don’t kill people. Here are two variations on the theme: top, ‘guns don’t kill people, it’s the bullets’, and bottom, ‘guns don’t kill people, well actually they kinda do’.

There are lots of gun-related designs on CafePress, but trust me, these are the only ones that are both funny and look good (although to be fair, this is a trick almost no-one selling through CafePress can pull off).

A very superior and classy design on this week’s t-shirt, selected from the pick of the CafePress marketplace: True to Type.

I like the blurb for this shop: ‘Be a writer, not a word processor; type, don’t keyboard; make a mark on the page, not a flicker on the screen. In other words, be TRUE TO TYPE’ (capitalization in the original). As a typewriter user myself, not because it’s retro or cool but because for me it’s a way of writing that works, I can relate to that.

This week’s superior CafePress t-shirt design: the splendid bi-polar bear.

As everyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with CafePress knows, most of the stuff that is sold there is rubbish. Occasionally, however, decent designs and clever concepts appear through the mire of mediocrity, and in ‘t-shirt of the week’ it’s my intention to highlight the good ones that come to my notice. CafePress sells a lot of different product lines these days, but t-shirts are what most people are interested in, so it’s ‘t-shirt of the week’ rather than ‘CafePress product of the week’ (which is less snappy as a title anyway).

First up: the AD/79 Truth shop sells a nice line in Pompeii truther-wear. ‘Pompeii was an inside job, impeach Emperor Titus’, etc. Guaranteed to appeal to volcanologists and truth-seekers everywhere.

The grasp of history shown by 9/11 conspiracy idiots is every bit as firm as their grasp of, say, rational debate or the laws of physics. While browsing all the dreadful 9/11 stuff that is sold through CafePress I came across a range of shirts making use of the ‘World Trade Center was Bush’s Reichstag’ motif. Brilliantly, they illustrate this idea with a design in which President Bush’s face is superimposed onto a picture of … Benito Mussolini.

I keenly await the next design in the series, in which the attack on the Pentagon is likened to Adolf Hitler’s surprise assault on Pearl Harbor.