T-shirt #315 - The National Air and Space Museum

T-shirt #315 - The National Air and Space Museum - The Smithsonian, Washington DC

I am a space junkie. I can't get enough of books, movies, TV shows, TV news, written news, and especially museums that have to do with outer space, the exploration of space, and other related subjects.

This shirt is a companion to T-shirt #310: Tropical Rainforests as both have a listed copyright of 1988 on the shirt, and I suspect that both were purchased at the same time. Though I am guessing that these were gifts, as I wrote in the previous entry, purchased by my mother and father on a trip they took to Washington DC, a few days has improved my memory. I may have been with them on this jaunt. I was still going on trips with my parents in 1988 as I recall a trip to Milwaukee with them the year When Harry Met Sally came out, which was 1989. I remember a trip to Washington DC, in which I had dinner with my friend John Locke in the Takoma Park neighborhood, and I must have been with my parents. So, it's likely that these shirts came from such a trip.

Pictured to the right, the shirt features a picture of the earth and a caption: "The sphere of the Earth as photographed from Apollo 17 spacecraft during the final lunar landing mission in the Apollo program. The photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to Antarctica south polar ice cap."

I would amend that caption, explaining that the Mediterranean is visible at the very top of the Earth's sphere but the dominant image is Africa and part of Asia. Madagascar looms very large in this perspective. Antarctica is at the bottom of the sphere as it always is and as it is always visible from this angle.


Though I love this and the rainforests shirt, I think both are destined to become pajamas as I have worn neither in years, and with constant wear and washings, the current pajama shirts are growing more worn and thin.

The picture above depicts the The Southern Pinwheel-spiral galaxy M83. I cannot remember where I snagged the picture. I think it was Reuters pic of the day, and it's been sitting in my T-shirts Blog folder for months.

I divulged my love of space and things to do with space science and exploration in the first ten blog entries I posted. T-shirt #5: Do you want to move to Mars? featured a shirt Liesel bought for me after I asked her if she wanted to move to Mars once the Mars One Project gets underway. I was half-serious. I used to fantasize about space exploration when I was a kid and a young man. Not so much as I got older and more settled. After all, I like too many of the comforts of Earth and our life here that would be missing in a move to Mars, where we would not even be able to go outside. If I am feeling cabin fever now with the dangerously cold temperatures this January, I can only imagine how much more intense would be the cabin fever on Mars and enroute to Mars. I should amend my former comments. It's not that I could not go outside the spacecraft or domed-living-environment-pods, but I could not do so without a space suit.

I also mentioned space stuff in my post devoted to Spektrmodule, the Warren Ellis podcast, in T-shirt #75.


I am surprised that I have not written more about space and associated topics given my love the subject. Obviously, my love of science fiction comes from my love of space. The love of space came first. One of the first sets of things I learned were the planets of our solar system in order. I may have known these before I knew the alphabet. Though the "science" category only has three entries currently (and now this one) and none of them really to do with "space" (obviously the two I named already should be grouped there), the science fiction entry contains 29 posts (one of which is still a draft). These contain all the Star Trek  and Star Wars entries as well as ones focused on other print or multimedia science fiction.

APOLLO SPACE PROGRAM

My last point today (and I could make many but I am Grading Robot and I have to keep it short) concerns an apocryphal story I tell. I am not sure if this story is actually true or not. But I have told it so many times that I have made it true. I was about to start second grade in 1969 when the Americans sent the three most famous astronauts in the history of space exploration thus far to land on the moon for the first time (Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins).

My affection for the Apollo Space Program and science fiction surely kept me hoping to explore "brave new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." But instead I settled for being an English teacher, an ultimate player, a husband/father, and a writer. Wait... maybe I am going there, to that place the no one has gone... you tell me. :-) But in the summer of 1969 if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have probably said a superhero, which you would have rejected and made me pick something real and attainable, so my real answer would have been an ASTRONAUT.

Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July of 1969, not long before my sister was born, when my family was moving from Schoolcraft, just south of Kalamazoo, to Richland, just northeast of Kalamazoo, and before I started second grade at Richland Elementary in the Fall of that year. However, there were several Apollo missions after the first moon landing, two of which, Apollo 12 (November of 1969) and Apollo 13 (April of 1970), took place during my second grade year of school. For some reason that still puzzles me today, my teacher was more interested in teaching us subtraction, basic spelling, grammar, and other useless bits of knowledge when AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS WERE LANDING ON AND EXPLORING THE MOON!!!!!!!!

I mean, really, what was she thinking? Her name was Mrs. Tuttle, and she was a strict, disciplinarian. And yet, I was a precocious child. I insisted that we have  a television in the classroom showing the news broadcasts of the Apollo landings. Here's where my memory is a bit murky, and I just have always made up the details to make the story work, much like any good writer of fiction.

For accuracy sake, let's say this is in November of 1969 and the advent of the Apollo 12 project. In my usual version of the story, Mrs. Tuttle cannot do anything to comply with my request, and so I bring my own family's TV to the class to watch the orbits and landing. This is the part that is probably not true. I have a clear vision of television atop a big metal cart in that second grade classroom with Mrs. Tuttle presiding in front of it, attempting to make deals with us for our right to watch: so much subtraction, so much spelling and grammar, so much time watching the TV. I remember the principal also in attendance as this was the first time there had been a television in a class room at Richland Elementary. It was historic.

This was also the year that due to my obsession with the soap opera Dark Shadows that I sold a case or two of plastic fangs to all the students in my classes and others. The fang sale was my first business enterprise as a primary school student though not my last. But that's off topic. More on this one some other time.

I like my version of the story best. We brought in the family TV. It's probably not true, but it shows my overriding focus on the space missions that year, when I was not watching Dark Shadows that is.

Okay, so reprinting T-shirt #5 because it fits this subject, it's short, I am not sure it was widely read, and I like it. :-)

T-Shirt #5: Mars One: Funny thing, my wife bought me a T-shirt. It's not really funny as in laughter evoking by itself. But it's quirky and cute.

One morning last year, I asked my wife Liesel: "Would you like to go live on Mars?"

I was just checking. I wanted to see what she would say. I have always liked the idea of going into space. Moving permanently to Mars is a neat idea but maybe not realistic.

This subject came up because of Ray Kurzweil.
"Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google" (Wikipedia). 

If you like science, Ray Kurzweil runs a great Twitter feed of science news here:

KurzweilAINews

@KurzweilAINews

KurzweilAI is a newsletter/blog covering nano-bio-info-cogno breakthroughs in accelerating intelligence

California/Mass · http://kurzweilai.net

Google has hired Kurzweil to work on AI, which is an exciting proposition.

There is also a great website: Kurzweil Acclerating Intelligence.

I like to follow Kurzweil and watch the news he shares. He sends A LOT of Twitters, and they are always entertaining and informative.

Late last year (2012), he sent this
Mars One plans to establish human settlement on Mars in 2023

No return ticket

Liesel called me a "dork" for asking about going to Mars, but then, she searched the Internet and bought me a T-shirt from the Netherlands based Mars One project and gave it to me as a birthday present.

Kuzweil has updated the search for people to colonize Mars here:

WANTED: MARS COLONISTS TO EXPLORE RED PLANET

At this time, we have no plans to move to Mars, but I do like the shirt.
- 1303.26 7:46


PLEASE NOTE: WHY T-SHIRTS: I am taking a day off from the WHY T-SHIRTS? series as I am at full power as Grading Robot, and this shirt is very much a continuation of yesterday's item, the proof I did something and the promotion of it: I went to this museum, and I love space science.


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 - 50 shirts remaining

- chris tower - first pubished - 1401.30 - 20:07
final publication - 1401.31 - 9:58

T-shirt #214 - Traverse City - Blue Earth

T-shirt #214 - Traverse City - Blue Earth

I have written about Traverse City before, though I have not made a Traverse City category. There's a "Places" category but none of the Traverse City posts were in it when I started this entry. It's an oversight I fixed. I thought I had written about Traverse City more, but I only have two entries, seen below.

T-shirt #85 - Up North

T-shirt #171 - The Neahtawanta Inn - Goodbye Bob Russell

I have at least three more Traverse City shirts, so I m not going to deliver more content on the most glorious city on the planet in this entry. Stay Tuned.

I will share one thing. For me, Traverse City evokes many wonderful memories. Much of the best times of me childhood were spent there both living for three years and visiting for summer vacations. I resumed the vacation ritual in my adult years and made Traverse City a place I retreated each summer for up to two weeks to write. Now, these memories are inextricably linked. Traverse City is a place of childhood nostalgia and happy memories of family and love. But it is also a place of retreat, renewal, and writing. I spent weeks and weeks there over a 15 year period, mostly alone, reflecting, exploring self, and working on various novel projects.



Right now, as I have mentioned before, I am reading both Stephen King's On Writing (the delightful audio version that he narrates) and Robert McKee's Story (which I wish was on audio...okay, I just checked, and it's an abridged edition, so I wish it was available as an unabridged audio), and I have been thinking a great deal about a novel I was writing in large part during my Traverse City retreats from about 2001 through 2009. I had abandoned the project because it had grown too complex and was turning into a different book than the one I had wanted to write. I am going to return to it and simplify it. King's thoughts on story especially are driving my determination to tackle this project again. I just have to find the time, now, to dump what's in my head into a file, re-read what I had done before, and start banging out a new draft of this book, which just happens to be set in the region up north, near Traverse City. Also, and this is probably more interesting to me than to you, I decided to set the book in 1985, which has helped me to do away with complications caused by modern technology. This and a couple of other projects are the work (both writing work and blog work) that I am planning to shift to when my blog year sends on March 22nd (less than two months from now).

I have many bits and insights on writing to share from what I am reading and thinking, but in the interest of keeping this short (and since it's late), I will save those for now and present them another time.

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

#3: It's my tattoo

#4 PRIDE AND STATUS - "It's my thing."

#5 -  "LET ME GEEK FLAG FLY!!"

#6 - UNIFORM SHIRTS ARE COOL

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #7. PROOF THAT I DID IT - SHIRTS FOR EVENTS



Today's featured shirt on Traverse City makes the point as well as a shirt featuring a concert or a play. I have featured all of these types of shirts in abundance: shirts featuring places; concerts T-shirts; other types of shows, like theatrical plays; and even shirts from businesses or special events all qualify under this motivation for why I am so inclined to wear T-shirts. Colleges factor here also. I have several shirts from my undergraduate alma mater, and I have not even featured them all yet, I also have several shirts from my graduate alma mater, and I have featured none of those.

Obviously, this reason connects strongly with the pride idea. If I feel pride and feel I have achieved a certain dubious status with a shirt featuring the logo of a superhero team, then surely a shirt with the name of my college, a place I labored for years to earn a degree, carries with it great pride and powerful status. It's funny. I was very out spoken in my criticisms of Kalamazoo College while a student there, but after I graduated, the love and affection I have for the place drove all those criticisms away. I wear the shirts now with unabashed pride.

Also, I have been accused of being a hipster. I don't think I qualify. But one of my failings is pride for the many concerts I have seen and how I am likely to tell stories in a tale swap of "one-upsmanship" that drives my wife crazy. But again, like with the schools, I am proud of the concerts I have seen and feel that there's some status conveyed here. Sadly, I purged many of my most vintage concert shirts in the packing up and clearing out of my parents home just before I decided to start work on this blog. What was I thinking? Clearly, I had dismissed the idea of doing a blog like this, and I was quite convinced that there was no way I could maintain a daily pace, especially with my tendency to be long-winded. How wrong I was.

And so, I add another post to The Blog Journey category, which is about writing, which is the topic I started with before today's Why T-shirts blurb. I needed proof. I needed confirmation that I had the chops to write EVERY DAY, even on Christmas and my birthday and the Fourth of July. Though there have been some skip days, though I have fallen behind quite often (this entry being a case in point as I originally published it last night, Wednesday, and I am finishing it this morning, Thursday), and though I still have one unfinished entry that's going on day eleven of not being done (I am working on it, if you keep checking it -- T-shirt #304 -- you can watch it grow, I am doing it. One day at a time. One word at a time. I am building a huge body of work that lays bare my own journey of self discovery as a geek, as a reader, as a writer, as a husband, as a father, as a man.

And I am not done yet. Stay tuned.

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 - 51 shirts remaining

- chris tower -  first published - 1401.29 - 19:11
final publication - 1401.30 - 8:05

T-shirt #313 - Kaaaawasaki Productions

T-shirt #313 - Kaaawasaki Productions


My wife made a friend on Facebook named Sam Campos who has his own media company (comic books among other things) called

KAAAWASAKI PRODUCTIONS .

When my wife visited him a few years ago, he gave her this shirt, which became mine because it fits me and my wife doesn't wear T-shirts.

Apparently, Sam's production company made a movie called DRAGONFLY, stills and some of the vitals about the project can be seen via the link above. The costumes look awesome.

Kaaawasaki Productions looks to be a progressive, right-minded company based in Hawaii.

I thought that this was a good shirt to share today because my WHY T-SHIRTS text is focused on uniforms and logos.

Also, Check this: from JUNE 19, 2012 1:15 PM:

Interview with President, Creative Director, and Janitor of Kaaawasaki Productions about ‘Dragonfly…!

I will include a video I found in my searching. The production looks good and the outdoor visuals of Hawaii are breathtaking.

Martial arts, motorcycles, cool costumed hero, Japanese influence, great location visuals, and a punchy editing job make this a fun video to watch. Also, DAFT PUNK music, which is always awesome.

Here's the data from YOU TUBE about the video:
"Published on Sep 10, 2013
DRAGONFLY starring Cole Horibe, Alison Kam, Mitchell Kekoa Campos, Jim Akina, Maki, and Kahinu Holt. Created by Sam Campos Kaaawasaki Productions LLC. This is a Proof of concept video for DRAGONFLY. Music is by Daft Punk. Kaaawasaki Productions LLC does not have or own the rights to this song."

DRAGONFLY Legacy

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
#3: It's my tattoo
#4 PRIDE AND STATUS - "It's my thing."
#5. "LET ME GEEK FLAG FLY!!"




TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS - #6 - UNIFORM SHIRTS ARE COOL

Today's WHY T-SHIRTS installment contains a reprint from T-shirt #83: The X-Men Logo.

Much of this subject I explored in the previous entry, and since I feel I did a good job with it, I am reprinting it. But first some preamble and additional thoughts.

As I explore in the previous entry, there is an element of "dress up" or what is today known as "Cos Play" in wearing a shirt that replicates the uniform look of a superhero character's outfit. As an adult, I am not immune to the effect that when I wear the X-Men shirt, I am feeling like one of the X-Men. I am barely suppressing the impulse to wear cool red quartz shades and raise them to release my optic blasts or gesture in way that shows I am manipulating all the metal in the area with my magnetic powers. I do not feel that any kind of adulthood is achieved by leaving those playful thoughts behind. Surely, I could engage in such make believe with a four year old without suffering ridicule. Why could I not engage in such imaginative play without the four year old? What is it about adulthood that supposedly prohibits us from playing and using our imaginations?

Cos Play has suffered much ridicule over the years and has only recently (and in large part thanks to the Internet) become cool enough or accepted enough that there's less ridicule. People still laugh when the Big Bang Theory characters show up dressed like the Justice League. This idea of "adults" dressing up is still silly and the brunt of jokes. But now that the San Diego Comic Convention is featured in its own issue of Entertainment Weekly each year, and the Internet makes "okay" and brands as "cool" Cos Players, the ridicule is less, but it's still there.

It's this ridicule that made me very choosy about my T-shirts as I started to make purchases and as I chose which ones I would wear out of the house. Early on, I would only buy and wear logos that were not immediately recognizable as logos from comic books. And if I did buy a T-shirt with the picture of a super hero on it or the name of a comic book on it, I would be unlikely to wear it out of the house. This has changed, I am happy to say. I felt I was letting it all hang out before this blog, but the blog work has removed the final shackles holding back my geekiness, and so, as I wrote yesterday, I let my "geek flag fly" with reckless abandon and no inhibition.

Still my wife wants to make sure I am not going to become a Cos Player or a LARPer (Live Action Role Playing), and though I will buy and wear costumes for Halloween or KUDL costume night as I have shown on this blog, and though I will buy and wear shirts that mirror comic book costumes, I am not likely to Cos Play or LARP any time in the near future. But this is less about inhibition or thinking something is inherently wrong with it, as just not having the time to devote to it and do it well. Because the costumes look pretty damn cool... :-)

Logos are cool.

But why? Why are  logos so cool?

I have written about logos many times so far in the history of this blog. One of my best descriptions of this idea set comes with the Flash Logo and T-shirt #20. In entry #20, I listed many of my favorite logos and their appeal. Few logos are as iconic as the X-Men logo. And yet the X-Men were named by default. Originally, Stan Lee wanted to call the comic The Mutants, but this title was rejected by the publisher as being too arcane ("no one will know what the Hell a mutant is"), and so The Uncanny X-Men resulted not as a tribute to Professor Xavier, the team's leader and teacher, but for the X-Gene that gives the mutants their powers.

UNIFORM COOL: I AM AN X-MAN: Part of the appeal of logo shirts is the uniform aspect. It's costume play. When I wear a logo shirt that matches or resembles the costumed hero's uniform, I am engaging in a form of "dress up," what role players now call "cos play" because these days everything people do must be defined with a label and a sub-culture.

The X-Men have all gone through many uniform changes. The movies and animated series programs also affected uniform changes in the comics. Unlike many superhero groups, the X-Men had a uniformity from the earliest days of the team in regards to their wardrobe. Whereas groups like the Avengers, Justice League, and Teen Titans are all collections of individuals with their already established costumes, groups like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four have more of a homogeneous relationship and often have matching uniforms. The original X-Men all wore matching uniforms with iconic X logos. Later incarnations got away from that model, though the character of Cyclops has consistently worn some version of the classic blue X-Men uniform that he began wearing in the late 1960s during the re-invention period by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams (more forthcoming on this subject). This shirt most closely matches Cyclops' uniform.


LOGOS ARE VIRAL

Logos assume iconic status and spread like viruses. The most powerful logos are simple yet stunning. They tap into something primal and deeply rooted in the human psyche. They correspond with a reptilian, seminal core located in the locus coeruleus or basal ganglia of our human brains, what some feel is the first step of our pre-mammalian, evolutionary development.










I am extrapolating. But the power of a logo derives from instincts, and our instincts trace back to our reptilian and bird, pre-mammalian origins. Because we all share this feature of the brain stem, the reaction should be universal. One can argue that these logos are archetypal. I am arguing that our connections and attraction to them is not only hard-wired into our anatomy, and possibly coded at the genetic level, but also tied to a spiritual, energy connection through the Collective Unconscious. The most iconic logos are archetypes because they are ancient, archaic paradigms matching our repeated experience not just as a species but as living and evolving beings. The simple X logo is one of the best examples of this kind of iconic archetype.

Thank you for reading or re-reading.

For a supposed "hiatus," I am still generating a lot of text. And don't worry. I won't reprint all the time.

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 - 52 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.28 - 19:08

T-shirt #312 - Centrals 2001

T-shirt #312 - Centrals 2001

Today's blog entry features another Ultimate tournament shirt, one I designed, one featuring a Calvin knock off drawing, and a collection of content in the entry that has nothing to do with the shirt, the great sport of Ultimate, or Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame.

I have more than one of these shirts, so I can post another one. In fact, I stuck at least one of these shirts in a drawer when I made them back in 2001, thinking that a time would come that I would want a crisp, clean, new version of the awesome shirt I made. not even realizing that I would strive to do color Calvin and Hobbes for the next two tournaments.

Instead of dwelling yet again on the sport of Ultimate, making shirts, and all that, I have for you the next installment of my "WHY T-SHIRTS?" series during my supposed "hiatus" and some random links and things that have been cluttering up the old desk space and noggin. Not much rhetoric on those just fun stuff to explore.

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
#3: It's my tattoo
#4 PRIDE AND STATUS - "It's my thing."

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #5 -  "LET ME GEEK FLAG FLY!!"

Most people reasonably educate in music of the 1960s and after will recognize my swipe and modification of a lyric from the  song "Almost Cut My Hair" from the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album Déja Vu, which I listed on my top ten albums of all time list in T-shirt #292 - SPRINGSTEEN.

Wearing T-shirts is exactly like Neil sings, though he sings "letting my freak flag fly." I changed it to "geek flag" for obvious reasons. This has been what wearing these T-shirts has always been for me, though I have come more out of my geek shell in the last 312 days than ever before.

It's a geek flag. It's a freak flag. This is me in all my resplendent dorkness.

'Nuff said as the Great Stan "The Man" Lee always says.

RANDOM STUFF

The rest of the text in today's blog is dedicated to random stuff. If you like random stuff or glimpses into what's been pulling at my attention lately read on.

To start random stuff, I would like to share a blog entry called RANDOM UPDATE. My friend Walter Curley just posted this blog with pictures of t-shirts. What's the deal Walt? No selfies? Though COVET, especially the WONDER TWINS shirt.

Today I discovered a new web site for techie news. This may be old news to a lot of you.
re/code NET

I was drawn to Re/code after learning that Google bought the AI company Deepmind, which gave me all kinds of ideas.

If only I had stuck with computers. In 1978, I was programming on the high school Altair 8800 computer with a whopping 4K of RAM compared to the 6 gigabytes I am currently using (my laptop has 8 GB).

*SIGH*

Stephen Hawking has some new ideas about black holes. He's Stephen Hawking, so you have to take him seriously, though many physicists are scoffing.

Stephen Hawking's new theory on black holes


Some BITCH MAGAZINE fare, starting with a great comic about comics (and I may have to do more than post the link). Oh cool, I can post the whole thing...


"Don't be a dick!" A comic about how to talk about comics

Also, this next thing from BITCH MAGAZINE.

An Epic Feminist Edit-a-Thon Takes Aim at Wikipedia's Gender Gap

It's well known that female artists are underrepresented in art museums, but what about in our more modern and malleable institutions?
Next week, groups of artists and tech-savvy folks around the country are taking aim at gender imbalance in representation of female artists on Wikipedia. The "Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon" being held in New York on February 1st has inspired simultaneous editing marathons in 17 other cities, all focused on adding more female artists to the public encyclopedia and fleshing out the meager entries of existing women artists.
The exciting thing about Wikipedia is that it's a cultural institution with very few gatekeepers. Artists don't have to impress a curator or strike it big at a fancy gallery show in order to get their work on the site. Instead, they or one of their fans just has to have the tech skills to create a Wikipedia entry. The huge number of people adding information to Wikipedia should theoretically mean that the ever-changing encyclopedia can present a more accurate and diverse portrait of American art than, say, the Met. But while anyone can edit Wikipedia pages, surveys show that the vast majority of people who actually do edit the site are men: less than 13 percent of people who create or change Wikipedia entries are women. 

Read on at the link above...



The photo (above) comes from multidisciplinary artist Krystal South's internet-exploration project Identify Yourself: IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

What has identity become, now that our social selves are laid bare online? How is identity established within the form-fields of Facebook? Our connections are tagged and bound to our profiles. These digital networks have not only transformed our societal structure, they have also re-shaped our internal selves.

Read more from IDENTIFY YOURSELF. Awesome STUFF.
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updating from 2023 with new content to make up for unavailable content.

The Psychedlic Experience short film 1965

Introduced by Timothy Leary with music by Ravi Shankar.

ॐ

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"The Psychedelic Experience" a beautiful 1965 short film that was so controversial the filmmaker had to leave town

POPKIN  12:55 PM THU SEP 23, 2021

"The Psychedelic Experience" is a beautiful short film created by San Francisco art teacher Jean Mayo and filmmaker Allan Willis in 1965. It includes contributions from Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and music from Ravi Shankar.

The film won a prize at the San Francisco film festival that year, but caused such a big controversy because of its title, that Mayo had to move to another town. 

This film begins with Timothy Leary saying "'Psychedelic' means 'mind expanding.' The psychedelic experience is a voyage inside. A trip into the countless galaxies of your own nervous system. For thousands of years, philosophers and poets have told mankind that there's more inside. That the reality of the external world is only one of millions of reality within the human nervous system."  Leary's visionary ideas are more important now than ever before. 

From Youtube:

"in 1965 san francisco art teacher jean mayo (now millay) and her good friend film maker allan willis set out to make a short experimental film and used materials close to hand to help the effects (soap bubbles etc…) but once completed it needed a name so they came up with 'the psychedelic experience'….Timothy leary/Ralph metzner were asked to contribute along with music by ravi shankar and his always brilliant tabla player alla rakha…it won a prize at the san francisco film festival held that year & then the troubles began….hippiedom was in its infancy and certain people were upset with a film named 'the psychedelic experience' so mayo had to leave her job and move along to another town!..when you think that two years later it was very passe to mention such words!..rare to find for many years and unseen it now makes an arrival here for your viewing pleasure.."

Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show

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David Bowie - Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)

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Also, see I GUESS I KNOW ABOUT ORIGINAL SIN for bloggery committed in regards to this rare and unreleased Bowie cover.

Listen: Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde's Band Snowbird: "All Wishes Are Ghosts"




And lastly, Bully's Comics at Blogspot is doing a 365 Days of Kirby Tech, as in the far-out and freaky technology from comic books drawn by Jack Kirby.

Here's two bits. This stuff is great!!

DAY 9 -The Growth Machine






DAY 10 - Reed Richards' Heat Image Tracer






Read more at the links.
Classic stuff.

That's enough for today.

Almost caught up. One outstanding post to finish and than getting ahead as the hiatus was designed to help me do!

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 - 53 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.27 - 20:09

T-shirt #311 - WIDR FM - WMU Radio

T-shirt #311 - WIDR FM - WMU Radio Evolution

Time to talk about college radio.

I am a big supporter of college radio. When I went to Kalamazoo College, I became involved with the campus radio station from day one.

Though it's not much like it was "back in the day," I am proud to say that WJMD still broadcasts today (on the Internet) and I hope something of what I contributed still remains (though probably not).

Though I have served as a guest a few times, I never had my own show on WIDR 89.1 FM once I came over to WMU. Unlike WJMD, WIDR was actual broadcast as in you could tune into it in the car. WJMD was "carrier-current," meaning that it transmitted through the electrical wiring system of the campus. If you had a radio plugged in to the wall anywhere on campus, you could tune into the AM only radio station. WIDR was the big time. I could pick up the signal all the way in Richland. It got a bit scratchy in Battle Creek.

Here's the WIDR SITE and you can also read about WIDR on WIKIPEDIA.

One of the most famous DJs in WIDR history and one of the longest running shows (going back to the early 1990s) is Bat Guano's SwaG! I would say that I "know" Bat Guano, but then, does anyone really "know" Bat Guano?

Later, in the mid-2000s, my friend Ryan Walters, also known as DJ Pretentious, started his own show, the most excellent SOME KIND OF JAM, which still exists as a podcast. Walters has recently returned to the states after a long sojourn with his fiancée in Korea. Welcome home, kids. Don't forget to invite me to the wedding.

I loved participating in college radio. I did several different radio shows over the years and increased my musical knowledge exponentially as other people shared their finds while new music came pouring into the radio station all the time. My fellow managers and I went to national college radio conferences in Chicago and Cleveland. Meanwhile, I began to make mixed tapes with the radio station gear, flowing one song into the next. Later, I evolved to mixed CDs and playlists in iTunes. Now I could podcast the mixes, like my friend Ryan's SOME KIND OF JAM, Warren Ellis' SPEKTRMODULE, or the awesome (and not frequent enough) AT WATER'S EDGE. Maybe someday. For now the writing is enough of a commitment.

If you don't know these podcasts or WIDR FM, please explore.

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
#3: It's my tattoo

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS - #4 PRIDE AND STATUS - "It's my thing."

I discovered that the more I carefully selected the shirts I would wear, and the more thought I put into it, the more pride I felt in the shirt and wearing the shirt. I cannot say I have great pride in every shirt I own. Definitely, some take on greater favor. For instance, The Love and Rockets shirt (seen above left) became one of my favorite shirts from the time I bought it. The King Crimson DISCIPLINE shirt is my second shirt from the Discpline album. The original, a large, from when I saw them in 1983 (or was it 1984?) is lost in time and the past, probably part of the great T-shirt purge that occurred at the time I had the idea for the blog, about two months or a little more before I started it. I have been meaning to acquire other styles of King Crimson Discipline shirts, but I have maxed out my T-shirt budget presently.

In preparation for this section, I selected five shirts that I take great pride in owning and in wearing. These shirts have powerful meaning, symbolic and iconic. I feel the power of the shirt's art when I wear the shirt. I glow with pride. My aura shimmers and expands with the status I feel is conveyed by wearing the shirt. For instance, I wear the Love and Rockets shirt when I am in the mood to ROCK OUT. Check out those characters from the Hernandez Brothers' comic. THEY ARE ROCKING OUT! I wear the King Crimson shirt when I have to remember that success in my job means discipline. I must be disciplined, which I am not being at the moment (which is Monday, not Sunday, as this blog text comes from the near future) because we have a snow day.


When I left the hospital, I wore the HAWKMAN shirt (left), and I feel it symbolized what I needed to do post-surgery: FLY! And of course, Doctor Whisky and Winter is Coming. These are all good images. There's more pride in the imagery now than there would have been without the blog.

Here's the links for these shirts:

T-shirt #6: King Crimson Discipline

T-shirt #19 - Love and Rockets

T-shirt #49: Hawkman

T-shirt #265 - Winter is Coming

T-shirt #284 - DOCTOR WHISKY

So, the wearing of T-shirts, the choosing of T-shirts, and all the pride it gives and the status it brings became my thing. It was not a conscious choice. I did not decide, after much deliberation, to be a wearer of many T-shirts nor did I make a conscious decision to "collect" shirts if that is indeed what I am doing. In fact, there was surely a long period in which I did not wear the T-shirts very often as I felt it was more fashionable to wear other shirts. As I cared less about "fashion" and cared more about what I cared about, and my desire to "show off" what I cared about, I gravitated more and more to the wearing of T-shirts, and carefully selected ones at that.

Even as I entered into this blog enterprise, I felt some reluctance to be seen in certain shirts, as explored in T-shirt #24. But I think The Blog Journey (see category) has helped me get over those feelings. I am not reticent to be seen in any of my T-shirts (well, except maybe this one of "shame" : T-shirt #236).

I addressed this issue of pride and status to some extent in T-shirt #87. I feel that reprinting that content is warranted.

SELECTION PROCESS: How I select T-shirts

Before I started the blog, my method of selecting T-shirts to own fell into nine categories. I know this kind of material may not be of interest to too many other people, but this blog exists to catalogue and inventory, and so I like to make a record of the process. This topic and the three that follow have been on my mind for a while, and so I felt it was time to document them.

1. T-shirts ordered at Fanfare (mostly comic book related) - T-shirt #1 Son Of Satan
2. Concert T-shirts - T-shirt #86 Erykah Badu
3. T-shirts bought on trips and vacations - T-shirt #85 - Up North
4. Gifts - T-shirt #63 The Comics Code Authority
5. Ultimate T-shirts - T-shirt #60 Team Venom
6. Sports T-shirts to show my fandom - T-shirt #15 - Tigers ALCS Champs 2012
7. Shirts I bought to support a business - T-shirt #9 The People's Food Co-op
8. Shirts I ordered based on Internet/social media ads - T-shirt #23 Planet of the Snapes
9. Shirts I had made to order - T-shirt #64 Embrace Uncertainty

Now, I would add a tenth category in that I have been purchasing shirts based on what I want to write about and feature in this blog, such as my Planet of the Apes shirt for T-shirt #79, my Evolution of Darth Vader shirt for T-shirt #45, or my SpektrModule shirt for T-shirt #75.

WILL I WEAR THIS SHIRT?

Shirts with "sayings": There are many T-shirt companies, even more now with the Internet that feature DAILY T-shirts. Prior to the easy accessibility to the Internet, catalogues like Wireless would offer all sorts of specialty T-shirts with cute sayings. Today's T-shirt came from the Wireless Christmas catalogue circa 2012. Though I am not finding it in a Google search at Wireless, but if you like it, try SNORG Tees in grey (not this nice green).

I am very choosy about the "shirts with sayings" that I purchase. I like the Venn Diagram idea, and since I had only one other Venn Diagram shirt, as gifted to me by my best friend (and also a great father), the Lord of Chaos, Tom Meyers, which I featured in T-shirt #77: Narcissism, wherein one could find a secret message that I do not think anyone has actually found yet, I bought this one. (How is that for a complicated sentence??) I think this shirt is clever enough to wear with some pride. However, I am very wary of the "I am Stupid" type shirts, and so very choosy of the shirts with sayings that I own. I have a few more, though, so I will be returning to this topic in the future.

Shirts with brands: Technically, almost all of my shirts fall into this category. A comic book is a brand. The logo of the hero is surely the brand's trademark (and it is legally trademarked). Movies, TV shows, sports teams, and so on are all brands, and I am providing free advertising for them with my T-shirts. In fact, I am spending MY OWN MONEY to be a walking advertisement for the brand. I know I have written about the advertising angle before on this blog, but I am not finding where and in what entries. Feel free to explore and let me know.

So, setting aside these approved brands, you will not see me in a shirt that advertises a clothing company (the Gap, Ambercrombie and Fitch) or a soda pop (though I did have a Pepsi shirt that is now a rag, but I am not sure where it is... though it may make an appearance). With the exception of two shirts advertising Bell's beer, I do not own any alcohol related shirts.

This blog is very much dedicated to the kinds of things I feel are worth wearing on a shirt and parading around with pride as a walking billboard for the product depicted. I am increasingly snobbish about what I find acceptable and unacceptable in this regard, and a trip to the mall the other night MORE than confirmed this snobbery for me. More to come on this subject in future blogs.

OTHER PEOPLE'S SHIRTS

Since I have started this blog, I am noticing other people's shirts much more often. Shirts that would not have hit my radar before are now glaring sirens or lit up like flares. Some people have some really STUPID shirts. Again with the snobby. See previous topic. More on this subject in future blogs, also.

T-SHIRTS HELD IN HIGHER REGARD

I am valuing T-shirts more now than I had been before I started this blog. This may shock some of you, my oh so faithful readers, but I did not really consider myself a T-shirt collector or some great T-shirt fan prior to starting this blog. Really, as I have explained many times, the blog came about as simply a curiosity. Do I have enough T-shirts to wear a different one every day of the year? It was more about being embarrassed for owning so many shirts not really out of a sense of pride, collectorship, or fandom.

(okay one more favorite shirt as a text break: T-shirt #207: Fantastic Four [grey])



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 - 54 shirts remaining

- chris tower - first published - 1401.26 - 19:22
final publication - 1401.27 - 11:04