T-shirt #310 - Tropical Rainforests - A Disappearing Treasure

T-shirt #310 - Tropical Rainforests - A Disappearing Treasure

I cannot remember how I acquired this shirt. I am adding the gift category to today's entry because I think this shirt was a gift from my parents bought for me on some trip they took. I am going to say I was not with them. It's a Smithsonian shirt, and it's copyrighted as 1988, so I think my suspicion may be correct. It was a gift from a trip they took to Washington DC for a conference my father had to attend. My parents took many such trips in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s before my mother came down with the meningitis that paralyzed her.

The text under the image reads: "Tropical Rainforests are places of immense diversity and mystery where nature's grandest possibilities find expression." (Google Chrome does not like the spelling of "Rainforests" as one word, capitalized, but what does it know?)

Obviously, T-shirts have been my thing for some time. A safe gift that my mother (possibly with my father's input though an idea driven by my mother's loving and generous spirit) could obtain in most any gift shop. My mother loves gift shops.

Obviously, many of us understand the need to preserve the planet's rainforests. I do not need to belabor the point. Though the clear cutting of Amazon rainforests to make pasture for raising and then slaughtering cattle for the insatiable hunger of Americans for fast food burgers is disturbing. If you really want to get disgusted and swear off fast food (if you have not already), Google search the following term: "Advanced Meat Recovery." You can thank me later, unless you own, run, or have financial interest in some aspect of the industrial food industry, and then feel free to suppress the urge to post a rebuttal.

WHY T-SHIRTS EXPLANATORY BLURB

I am doing a series of snippets that will add up to a larger whole answering the "Why T-shirts?" or "What's with all the T-shirts?" question. I have also decided to include the previous items in an ever growing list, hence the "previous items" section next.

PREVIOUS ITEMS
#1: T-SHIRTS ARE COOL
#2: I BE BRANDED - CHOOSING TO ADVERTISE

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #3: It's my tattoo

In the last few years, tattoos have become popular and somewhat mainstreamed. Originally markings of tribal significance, such as by the Maori, sailors were the first to introduce the practice to the western world. In my college years, it was still seen as low-brow activity or a mistake that some people made in a drunken night of poor decisions and general debauchery. A few years after I graduated from college, this perception was changing, and today, tattoos are accepted as art forms and are common enough that service workers do not have to hide them anymore, such as the Triforce symbol from the Legend of Zelda game on the forearm of the young woman who rang up my purchase yesterday at Office Depot. Certainly twenty years ago, and maybe even ten, all but the most progressive of organizations would make her cover up the tattoo and may have excluded her from the pool of job applicants had they known of her "skin art."

Our culture is transforming and for the better.

I don't have any tattoos, and I am not going to get any. I don't say this unkindly. Many tattoos are beautiful, and I support people who want to wear art in this way. It's just not for me. My two step kids and my wife all have tattoos. My best friend just added some art to his body. It's just not for me, but I support their choices.

I played Ultimate for years with a guy named Matt Robshaw, who put a great deal of thought into the words he had tattooed on his skin in big, bold, black script. Wisdom and Courage were two of his words. I cannot remember if he was choosing word three or four when I last saw him. He has moved to Minnesota, and I only communicate with him occasionally via Facebook. But his personal convictions and his long deliberation period to choose his words were impressive. After all, if you're having ink injected into your skin in a way that will keep it there, more or less, for the rest of your life, you should put a great deal of thought into your choices.

Not to diminish those who adorn their bodies in skin art, but I think of my t-shirts like tattoos, though hardly as serious of a commitment. Like a tattoo, a T-shirt is ART, and it makes a STATEMENT. It allows me to show off something that is important to me, though in a way much less permanent than a tattoo.

But the future of skin art may be as interchangeable as T-shirts. Combinations of genetic engineering and nano-technology could transform many elements of how we maintain our bodies, the least of which may be changing tattoos as often, if we wish, as we change socks. Already people are selling their skin as billboard space, allowing corporations or organizations to buy their skin for tattoos that advertise something. Obviously, this real-skin-estate is only practical for people whose skin is seen weekly by hundreds if not thousands of people; those in large cities and/or who travel are prime skin estate for those willing to sell. Think of how much more prevalent and interchangeable this commodity will become if science allows skin art to be re-configured in the same way a photo is manipulated in Photoshop, much like how often I change shirts.

In the future, this blog could be "365 Tattoos" and follow the same principle as one dedicated to T-shirts.

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

Today I am wearing this shirt (above).

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 55 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.25 - 19:11

T-shirt #309 - TPTA Corporate Olympics - Shirt A

T-shirt #309 - TPTA Corporate Olympics - Shirt A

Today's shirt is another gift from my father from the years that TPTA participated in the local Corporate Olympics. I have two, so expect to see another.

Not much to say, hence the ...

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

Have we established that I am not always wearing the shirt I am featuring that day? Below I have assembled seven images of the shirts I have worn this week, including the one I am wearing right now (the United Federation of Planets Logo).

Perhaps, this is interesting...

Maybe I will do this kind of thing more often.

THIS WEEK'S SHIRTS

 
WHY T-SHIRTS EXPLANATORY BLURB

I am doing a series of snippets that will add up to a larger whole answering the "Why T-shirts?" or "What's with all the T-shirts?" question. I have also decided to include the previous items in an ever growing list, hence the "previous items" section next.

PREVIOUS ITEMS
#1: T-SHIRTS ARE COOL

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #2: I BE BRANDED - CHOOSING TO ADVERTISE

When I taught media studies, I taught from a book called No Logo, in which the author, "took aim at the brand bullies" and discusses the impact of brand-oriented corporate activity and the ways in which people have chosen to fight back, such as Culture Jamming.

Since I was in a different T-shirt in every class, always showing off some comic book logo or musical artist, I would have been a huge hypocrite if advocated for NO LOGOS. Instead I advocated for making conscious choices and owning one's choices. After all, wearing a T-shirt with something printed on it is choosing to be a walking, traveling, interacting billboard for whatever "brand" is displayed on the shirt. I talked about why I wanted to promote this comic book or that musical artist, and I asked the to question if they really wanted to pay their own money to advertise that beer, that school. or that clothing company. Because that's what this is all about: we spend our own money to advertise for other corporate interests.

The above set of shirts from last week show that I paid (or was gifted) about $140 worth of clothing to advertise a podcast, a TV cartoon character, a VERTIGO comic book, a phrase from a set of fantasy books, a comic book character in a logo style of a TV show from the 1960s, a magic company, and a fictional organization in a science fiction TV show. I am purposefully not naming them all in my list to see if you can figure them all out. If you care that is.

So the question is: why would I choose to spend my own money to be an advertisement?

I mean if I am going to pay to have the privilege to advertise I better have some damn good reasons for doing so, and thus I will explore these ideas more in tomorrow's WHY T-SHIRTS post. Also, postscript, it is possible that I will add to this posting after I publish it. After all, I added I sentence to yesterday's, which means I should post the entire WHY T-SHIRTS? essay all together when it's complete.

WEEKLY COMICS LIST

I gave a lot of thought to keeping The Walking Dead in my number one slot. I almost dropped it. This week made for many tough choices. I loved the first issue of Black Widow (even though I suspect Marvel of trying to compete with Image's Velvet), and as you can see, it jumped from the seventh slot two weeks ago to number two and almost number one.

Excited for the new Invaders comic and with good reviews by some tough readers at the comic book store, I log in the All New Invaders comic at number three. The rest of the top six-seven all look good and were close calls in the rankings. Batman falling to ninth may change as I start to work my way through the stack.

I am proud to have cleared the back log enough that there are no issues from this week that go straight to back log.

And on the strength of many recommendations, I am buying Unwritten to give it a go. I just finished Nowhere Men last night and added it to my large stack of comics and graphic novels that I want to review on my blog. For now, just this week's list.

COMICS FOR 1401.22

The Walking Dead #120
Black Widow #002
All New Invaders #001
Mighty Avengers #005
All-New X-Men #022.NOW
X-Men #009
Captain America #015
Hawkeye #016
Batman #27
Avengers World #002
Avengers #025
FF #016
Iron Man #020.INH
The Man of Bronze: Doc Savage #2 (DYNAMITE)
Deadly Class #1 (IMAGE: Remender, Criag, Loughridge)
Justice League #27
Birds of Prey #27
Wonder Woman #27
Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics: X-Men #003
Indestructible Hulk #018.INH

NO BACKLOG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SPECIAL PURCHASE

Unwritten volume one (Carey/Gross-VERTIGO)

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 56 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.24 - 19:41

T-shirt #308 - Bell's Solsun

T-shirt #308 - Bell's Solsun

Today's shirt is something of a collector's item.

It features the logo for the abandoned Solsun beer produced by Bell's Brewery here in Kalamazoo (also known as Kalamazoo Brewing Company) but became Oberon in 1998 "as a result of legal action by the Mexican brewing company Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, makers of a beer with a similar name: El Sol (The Sun)" (Bell's Wikipedia, 2014).

From what I can tell with a Google search, my Solsun shirt is a bit rare and could fetch a fair price if I were to auction it off. (Make me an offer readers. I am willing to sell pre-auction. It's an XL like all my shirts and in near mint condition despite being over 16 years old).

I like beer. I like Bell's beer. But I don't have much more to say about that. I have another subject to tackle today, plus, as you may know, I am in hiatus.

My previous Bell's post and my preferred shirt is to be found here: T-shirt #186.

WHY T-SHIRTS?

I have not really addressed the central question most important to this blog:

WHY T-SHIRTS?

What's the deal with all these T-shirts? How did I get so many? Why are they important to me? Why am I spending so much time writing about T-shirts?

Obviously, I am doing more than writing JUST about T-shirts. I use T-shirts as a way to write, period. Just to write and then publish what I write and see what readers think. But even without any reader feedback, I am writing, I am exploring, I am producing.

So, the blog is dedicated to writing more than just about T-shirts, but the question about the T-shirts still lingers, and it's time to tackle it.

I have a "Wearing T-shirts" category with five posts in it. And now, I am adding the "Why T-shirts?" category to contain all the content I plan to produce in this series.

But first, here are the contents of the "Wearing T-shirts" category:

T-shirt #77: Narcissism

T-shirt #83: X-Men Logo

T-shirt #96: House of Secrets

T-shirt #93: Free Katie

T-shirt #87: Aliens, Robots, and Zombies

The last one, T-shirt #87, has the most content that applies to this question, some of which I will reprint as I am working on this series.

Even though I am on "hiatus," I am going to parcel out, one point at a time, the answer to "Why T-shirts?" Here we go.

WHY T-SHIRTS #1: T-SHIRTS ARE COOL (and I mean temperature)

I am always hot/warm. I go around my house in shorts and a T-shirt year around. My favorite work outfit is shorts and a T-shirt. I would wear shorts and a T-shirt outside all the time if it didn't get as cold some days as it is today. It's 14 degrees outside my house at this moment. When I woke up, it was eight degrees. Wind chills are as low 20 degrees below zero. I do not leave the house in shorts in that kind of temperature if only to run to end of the driveway to get the mail or the knocked over herby.

Otherwise, I feel most comfortable in a T-shirt. So, being cool means COMFORT. T-shirts are comfortable, and obviously, I am not the only who thinks so. And so, I slowly accumulated many of them over the years. But more on this in the next item, tomorrow.

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 57 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.23 - 15:58

T-shirt #307 - TPTA Corporate Olympics 1995

T-shirt #307 - TPTA Corporate Olympics 1995

Today's shirt is similar to ones you will see frequently in the hiatus, and I think this one is the best of the lot.

This shirt comes from my father's company, TPTA (Tower, Pinkster, Titus, and Associates) and its annual participation in a local corporate Olympics competition. I do not recall ever participating myself, but there were always extra T-shirts, and I got one (or sometimes two or three).

During the hiatus, I have decided to spread out what will be a longer essay on "Why T-shirts?" which is a topic that I have not really explored yet. I plan to start this exploration tomorrow with one item at a time.

As for today, I want to share one thing.

I started re-reading Stephen King's On Writing today as an audio book. This may be my third time through, maybe even fourth. I have lost track.

I am experiencing the book as an audio book, which is narrated by Stephen King. I like that he has done his own narration here. Not only is it a personal touch, since, after all, he wrote the book in first person, HIS voice, but also King has the chops to pull it off and make it work. Not all authors have the right voice, tone, inflection, and diction to make this kind of thing work. Neil Gaiman sounds good on audio as does Orson Scott Card. I am sure others do, too, but I have not heard too many.

I am not very far into the book yet, so I am likely to have some more observations to share before I am done with it. But one thing struck me. In his "Second Foreword," King claims that "most books about writing are filled with bullshit." He goes on to recommend Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which is never far from my desk, because "there is ... no detectable bullshit in that book." King tells his reader that he went with a shorter book for On Writing to strive for less bullshit (though not as short as Elements of Style).

As I revealed something in yesterday's blog entry that I have historically kept close to the vest if not outright lied about to cover my own shame and regret, I have a renewed determination and commitment to a "no bullshit" rule on this blog. I know I can go on at length and can be quite self-involved, but that's part of The Blog Journey. In fact, "no bullshit," which is my wife's number one motto, may take a place in the developing Rules of Chris.

As a side note, I have Rober McKee's Story in the bathroom and I am chipping away at it for the third time, too. Can you tell that I am gearing up for the actual "writing" (fiction) come the end of the blog year?

Yup.

No bullshit.

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 58 shirts remaining

- chris tower - first published - 1401.22 - 21:26
final publication - 1401.23 - 7:52

T-shirt #306 - Oxford University - Blue

T-shirt #306 - Oxford University - Blue

Today's shirt comes from a trip to England in 1986 (see photos) and a visit to Oxford University. It is a companion to the shirt from T-shirt #148, which I was as pajamas. Scheduled for August 16th, 2013, T-shirt #148 has the distinction of being the shirt I posted the day of of my prostate surgery.

Today will be short and carried (mostly) by the photos with the exception of the hiatus text.

I spent most of the day working on T-shirt #303. I imagine readers checking my blog periodically and watching the incomplete entries grow, as I work on them as time allows. If this is true, please let me know in a comment.

It is worth noting that I think one of the shirts, this one and the one in T-shirt #303, may have belonged to my mother, who does not really wear T-shirts. But I am not sure if this is a "true fact" or not.

Aren't all facts true?

That's what makes them facts.



Though not from our European trip, I will throw in a picture of me and my mother from 2012 just because.

You may recognize the shirt in the photo as T-shirt #14. I just came across this photo to add to the mix.

In the next photo, you may recognize that rocky thing in the background as Stonehenge. This is 1986 as we toured England. I am amused at how I dressed back then.

In the next photo, we are not in England anymore. We are in France. I was supposed to stay behind and live in France for a few months, but when I could not connect with friends I had made in college, I bailed on that plan and returned home with my family. This is the first time I have publicly admitted that truth. But we are dedicated to "true facts" today. Gosh, did I ever like those little round glasses.

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 59 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.21 - 19:26

T-shirt #305 - Michigan Sectionals 2002 (NO PLAY)

T-shirt #305 - Michigan Sectionals 2002 (NO PLAY)

Today's shirt looks just like the shirt for T-shirt #165 because it is an identical copy like all the shirts in print run with no print errors.

As I have discussed before (T-shirt #168), I have PLAY and NO PLAY shirts. In other words, one that can be soiled in the often messy playing of Ultimate, and one that I wish to keep nice and unsoiled as often soils do not wash free of the fabric.

The long and short of what I am trying to tell you is that I have two of these shirts from the Michigan 2002 Sectionals Tournament, a shirt I helped design and guided through to the print and sale stages. In my previous post, I gave Kent Elliott design credit formerly and the printing (and final layouts) were done by Artwear Apparel of Kalamazoo.

HIATUS

I am taking a partial hiatus from the blog, but I want to explain what that means.

There is no real "hiatus" from this blog. I dedicated myself to one post ever day for 365 days without interruption or break. And so far, I have not missed a day.

But what that means, "not missing a day, " is that some days I have posted incomplete blog entries. You may not realize this is happening if you follow me on Google Plus, Twitter, or Facebook. I do not post to any of those social media sites until I have finished an entry completely. But I do publish the unfinished work to the blog.

Before this month, I was at most one day behind, and I usually finished the unfinished entry early the next day. But this month, I have fallen several days behind, and I have needed multiple days to finish entries that I have already posted. As I type these very words, I am two days behind, with T-shirt #304 from Sunday January 19th (my birthday) and T-shirt #303 from Saturday January 18th still unfinished.

Now some of you may be wondering why I do not just wait and publish when I have the entry done. Well, if I have not been clear before, I can have no skip days. Also, I sometimes have an entry planned, and I have nothing else ready to go. Other times, I intend to finish the entry soon. It's only recently that I have been multiple days and multiple entries behind. So, there can be no skip days. I have to post something, and I do always post SOMETHING. I have never published a blank page. And so, I publish what I have, and I make readers wait for the finished product. I apologize if this screws with your sense of order in the cosmos.

some of the new stuff
Birthday gifts stacked
yes, shaving cakes

There is a "publish back in time" button. Okay, not really. But Blogger has a "schedule to publish" feature. One day, I discovered how to use it like a time machine. I was working on a blog entry I had not finished. And to get the "save" button, I reverted the entry to draft, which "unpublishes" it. (Is my use quotation marks growing annoying?) Since I was a day or two late with the entry, when I re-published it, the date was for the current day and NOT the day I had originally published the entry, which is not how I thought it would work.

I was devastated. I might have just screwed up my consecutive days of T-shirt publication. And then, I wondered about the schedule feature. What if I scheduled the entry to publish, but I scheduled it to publish the day before? Guess what? You can do that. Or at least I did that one time. Unless I have lost track, I have no skip days, though I have made errors in the consecutive numbering of the shirts, though this is something I can fix more easily.

I have not used the "back in time" publishing since. I do not wish to tempt fate.

Also, while I am on the subject, I learned how the schedule feature worked after it failed to work as I thought it did. I scheduled the post to publish during my surgery. Later that day, when I was awake enough, I checked and the post had not published. I did not understand. But eventually I figured out that I had to click publish, like I normally do, and Blogger will release the post at the scheduled time. Makes sense, right? I am sure there is a help page that says as much somewhere that I did not read.

So with all that long-winded explanation out of the way, which may be only interesting to me, I have standard hiatus text that I plan to post in all of the forthcoming shirts that I considered hiatus shirts (I also made a category).

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

JUST FOR FUN, here's a few comic book covers that I have saved in my downloads folder. Because what's a 365 T-shirt blog entry without comic books?

If you want to know more about the comics, click the links! Isn't that a great blog?

COVER GALLERY


There are several entries in which I have "borrowed" images shared originally on the wonderful blog PENCIL INK: Vintage Comic Book Art & Artists 1940s-1990s by a Blogger user known only as Teddy, as explained HERE. All the covers here are attributed with the links to the pages in which he shared them. If you love comics as much as I do, then add his page to your reader, subscribe, or whatever you do to keep track of blogs you like. Thanks Pencil Ink blogger. Your blog rocks!!

Amazing Adventures v3 #27 - Jim Starlin cover - today's posts

Fantastic Four #80 - Jack Kirby art & cover 

Fear #16 / Man-Thing - Frank Brunner cover - today's posts - Blogger

Apr 03, 2012

Metal Men #45 - Walt Simonson art - today's posts - Blogger

Mister Miracle #24 - Marshall Rogers cover, Russ ... - today's posts

Outer Space #19 - Steve Ditko art - today's posts - Blogger

Superboy #154 - Wally Wood art, Neal Adams cover - today's posts

Sword of Sorcery #5 - Walt Simonson art & cover, Jim ... - today's posts

Mar 07, 2013

Hint: some of the comic covers above preview soon to be featured shirts! :-)

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 60 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.20 - 19:33

T-shirt #304 - Abbott's Magic Company

UPDATE 1401.28: So far this entry holds the record for longest incomplete. I posted it originally on the 19th of January and now it's the 28th of January. Despite declaring a hiatus from really long blog entries, I have not saved enough time to finish it yet. I am working on it now. I will update this note once I am complete. One problem is that there is so much I can put in this one. But I have to remember that you, dear reader, probably don't know what's missing. And I do not need to pack in ALL OF MY magic-related content in this one blog entry.

OFFICIAL INCOMPLETE BOILERPLATE TEXT: Thank you for coming to my blog. If you have been here before, you know why I post unfinished blog entries. If you are new to the blog, and came here by an Internet search or some other nefarious means, you may be wondering why someone would post something incomplete to the Internet. The shirt (ha ha.... leaving in that typo: I meant "short") answer is that I must post something every day because of the goal I set for myself when I began 365 T-shirts in March of 2013. And though there is a way to post backwards in time thanks to Blogger's scheduler utility, I would rather post an incomplete entry when the daily chaos of work, family, and the universe prohibits me from completing the blog entry for that day. Sometimes, I need a few days to complete the entry, and readers who check may see a work in progress slowly bloom.

In other words, more tomorrow. Thanks for checking.



T-shirt #304 - Abbott's Magic Company

The picture above comes from Christmas 1975. I can be seen in the photo (in my Captain America PJs) experimenting with a magic trick that I had received as a gift. I do not remember the gift very well, and I am not sure where the trick has got to. It did not become one of my regulars as seen in the pictures below.

Today is my birthday.

I was planning to catch up today as the last blog entry I completed was Thursday January 16th, which I finalized last night (Saturday the 18th). But since it's my birthday, I am giving myself permission to only work on the blog for a while and leave it incomplete once it's time for me to officially celebrate my birthday, which I will do by lounging on the couch with my puppy while reading comic books and watching football.

Today's shirt features The Abbott's Magic Company of Colon, Michigan, which I wrote about here:

T-shirt #134 - Secrets of Balloon Anatomy

T-shirt #135 - KUDL 2007 Yellow

T-shirt #136 - KUDL 2013 Pink

I used to perform magic as a semi-part-time professional. I re-connected with the magic world this past summer as I fulfilled a "bucket list" item shortly before my prostate surgery, in which I attended a day of a magic convention (with my step-son Ivan) and took a ride up the Kal- Haven trail (with my pal Chris Dilley) as explained in those three T-shirt posts linked above (134-136).

I have many plans for topics I want to explore in regards to magic, but I cannot get them all in one blog entry.

The next picture, directly left, shows me with my magic table, which serves as both a storage cabinet and a performance space. More on that in the text below.

In this first picture, I can be seen holding a top hat, which you would think I could have found easily and purchased at some magic shoppe. But in the mid-to-late 1970s when I did the majority of my performing, there were none to be found. Eventually I located a hat in a theatre costume shop and begged the costumer to let me buy it.

Many of my favorite magical "illusions" (dogs do tricks; magicians do illusions) sit on the table. From left to right, there's a standard Abbott's die box, a lotus jar, the Blarney Die, Dissecto is the big one with the yellow blade in the handle, a crystal box in front of that with a chick pan on top, a Genii Tube in red and yellow, and the Cube in a Tube, which I am about to describe. Though I will describe the genesis of the magic table in forthcoming text, I do want to point out the table cover with the gold fringe, classic magician fare that my aunt made for me, a special order organized and supervised by my mother. My parents were extremely supportive of my magic endeavors.
This illusion is known as the Cube in a Tube.

CUBE IN A TUBE.

Though Abbott's still sells it (see link), it is about five times more expensive than when I bought it. I remember mine selling for $45 in the late 1970s.

I like the Cube in a Tube illusion because of it's visual impact and how it ends with something that can be held and examined by an audience member.

The magician begins by showing the square die cube, a wooden piece painted black with white dots. This die is placed in a red square box. A metal tube is pounded into the box with a wooden hammer. The magician lifts away the box to reveal just the tube. When the tube is lifted (as in the picture), the cube has been "tubed," the die is now a wooden cylinder that an audience member can examine.

Awesome, right?

It's quick and can be performed silently because the visual impact is so clear and dramatic. This is one of my favorites.


I became interested in magic around 1973 or 1974. I am not sure what started it. There were magic sets advertised on television. There were ads for magic shops in my comic books. But probably the thing that closed the deal was the annual Christmas catalogues. My sister and I always started our Christmas lists by scouring the annual catalogues from Sears, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward. I know I started my magical interests with a magic set sold by one of these companies. The magic advertisements and TV commercials probably only stoked the fires of my passion for magic.

There was also a magician (as there often is), but I am not sure if I had the magic set before or after I met the magician. I think I already had the magic set when we were staying at the Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island for a convention my father needed to attend, and I met Robert Downey (no relation to the actor), who was performing magic at the hotel.

After these two influences inspired me, I discovered that the "Magic Capitol of the World" was about an hour's drive (not even) from my house. The great Abbott's Magic Company called Colon, Michigan its home and annually hosted the Abbott's Magic Get-Together as magicians from all over the world flocked to the little town of Colon for many events, the best of which were the nightly performances in the Colon high school.

Abbott's published a HUGE book sized catalogue that became my new shopping spree and holiday list making enterprise.



I do not perform magic so much anymore. It's very stressful. If an actor flubs his or her lines in a live show, it's often no big deal. Sometimes the audience does not even notice. The actor can cover or someone else covers for the actor if needed.

With magic, if a magician makes an error, flubs the prestidigitation part of the magical illusion, the mistake ruins the effect, the "magic" is lost, and the performer may as well quit because the willing suspension of disbelief that kept the audience engaged has left the building.

Audiences of senior citizens tend to be very forgiving, especially those in nursing homes, anything to break up the monotony, and some of them are not fully "home" anyway. But children and drunk people are especially vicious. Blow an illusion around them, and you're goose is cooked.



Other stuff

Dissecto

Blarney Die

My magic table

........... still under construction.

to be finished SOON.

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 61 shirts remaining

- chris tower - first published - 1401.19 - 15:38
final publication - date - time