T-shirts kick ass. I love them. I have several. Here are my ten current favourites. Am not 100% convinced about the order, but it’s a decent approximation.
1. It’s a real shame that torsopants.com didn’t pull through and got absorbed into it’s much ruder mothership, tshirthell.com. I mean, they still make funny shirts, but one feels ever so slightly nervous wearing them in public.
2. This one’s a bit of an in-joke for viewers of the awesome, awesome American sit-com, 30 Rock. On the back it bears the claim “Not polluting rivers since 1997”. Having worn this out and about, however, it’s clear to me that 30 Rock isn’t quite as popular here as I think it ought to be.
3. This one turned up in a t-shirt shop in Reykjavik, and I thought it was funny enough to break with my “no buying t-shirts with just plain words on them” rule. Which I obviously adhere to, obviously.
4. Ampelmann is the little green dude on the traffic lights from the former East Germany, who has been kept in many places as a link to some of the cultural past of those regions. I just like his hat.
5. Despite how many people point and gasp inaccurately, “MIGHTY MOUSE!”, this is still a favourite. DM is part-legend, part-klutz, and having a shirt with his face on has become one of my Must Do tasks. This is the original one, which is getting a bit dog-eared now. The replacement blue one is on the shelf too, but this greeny/khaki one still has a bit of life left in it.
6. Sid James, of the Carry On film series, is the quintessential Dirty Old Bastard with the filthiest-sounding laugh ever recorded in any medium. And what better to commemorate his work than by wearing around an image of him astride a bicycle.
7. Many years of dedicated searching finally paid off the discovery of this gem, which as any Spinal Tap enthusiast can tell you, is an exact representation of the inside of their body. Aaah, and it is green. Because you know how your blood is, like, purple…
8. Can’t argue with the sentiment, can you? CAN YOU?!
9. Ever since the age of 14 I’ve had a Save Ferris t-shirt, in homage to one of the greatest films ever made. I’m not up to about my 5th one. The first one I bought off a dude called Tim who used to hang out with us down at the bowling alley. The second one I bought off a rack somewhere after a door handle tore a hole right through the Ferris quotation on the back (“I asked for a car, I got a computer – how’s THAT for being born under a bad sign?”). The second one I traded with a girl in New York City for another t-shirt (wasn’t gonna say yes, be she was so goshdarned friendly), so I had to buy a third one, which disintergrated one day after I’d ridden my bike in to work in the rain with it on, and when I went to pull it over my head all that came away in my fingers was the neckband. By this time they were becoming quite hard to find, so I set up a Cafepress store to make new ones. Must be almost time for number 6.
10. Any self-respecting computer nerd who’s not familiar with Randall Monroe’s excellent stick-figure comic should take a good hard look at themselves. It’s consistently beyond excellent.
So that’s the t-shirt top ten!