Funny t-shirts Friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus

I've got a packed schedule this weekend, so I thought I would get this up, though in my defense, it actually is Friday here. Content, or something that purports to be content, below:

Now that there are 5 Disneyplaces™ in the world, I'm not sure if they use the 'Happiest Place on Earth' line any more ('One of the 5 happiest places on earth' doesn't really have the zip), but here's an article about how the Japanese one isn't so happy at the moment. 

Located about 200 miles south of the earthquake’s epicenter, Urayasu should have been well beyond the danger zone. There was no tsunami wave. No buildings fell. Rather, what happened here March 11 seemed straight out of a science-fiction movie: As the ground shook, muddy sludge oozed up, gurgling out of newly formed cracks and swallowing what it could.

Today, the mud is dried and gone, but Urayasu, the home of Tokyo Disneyland, resembles a town reflected in a funhouse hall of mirrors: severely warped streets and fences, tilted houses and police booths, sunken utility poles and pushed-up manhole covers resting on three-foot-high piles of dirt. At Disneyland, the parking lot rippled and buckled, a ride the 68,000 patrons at the park that day hadn’t counted on.

To the list of destructive forces that have wracked Japan — earthquake, tsunami, radiation from a crippled nuclear power plant — can be added liquefaction, a phenomenon that occurs when the earth’s violent shaking forces sand particles, once packed tightly, to shift apart and allow water to seep in.

Lest you think this will happen to any Disneyplace™, only the one at Urayasu has been built on reclaimed land, so don't worry that while you are shedding your dollars/euros/HKdollars/renminbi, the same thing will happen there:

Susumu Yasuda, a civil engineer from Tokyo Denki University, said that Urayasu is highly susceptible to liquefaction because the town, built after World War II, sits on reclaimed land made from a mix of volcanic ash, garbage and sand dredged from Tokyo Bay.

Although the Japanese government had enacted stricter liquefaction building codes for factories after a 1964 earthquake, most residential homes were built without 60-foot underground steel reinforcement poles, which were considered too expensive, Yasuda said.

He said he worries that Urayasu officials are rebuilding too quickly, noting that the ground remains vulnerable to repeated liquefaction if a major aftershock occurs. In Christchurch, New Zealand, a February aftershock from an earthquake in September sent mud oozing 20 inches above ground — higher than it had piled during the initial quake.

I also linked to this article about interracial marriage in Mississippi. (actually, the original article was in the NYTimes, this is a shorter version that was picked up by the Seattle Times), which became grist for the mill of 'what's the matter with Mississippi'. I mentioned that it was from my college town of Hattiesburg. Unfortunately, I think that that town is actually an outlier in the state, a place where, I have heard folks in the northern part of the state feel all the queers and liberals are. I guess this article about an opinion survey in Mississippi supports that view (not about the demographics of the town, but about how the town is an outlier)

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there aren't any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions.

Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal. Tells you something about the kinds of folks who like each of those candidates.

Which gets me to the title. I'm pretty sure that my college town is the outlier based on a t-shirt seen on campus. It said, in big letters across the front: 

Jesus is coming

and below that. it had

look busy

Good advice, to be sure. Have at it.

 

42 thoughts on “Funny t-shirts Friday open thread”

  2. Of funny t-shirts, I have a handful of favorites.
    Although I don’t have any photos of it, probably my favorite is a shirt my father bought me back in the early 90’s. I was an audience member on the talk show of Ken Schram (an obnoxious local TV personality) when he did a fearmongering segment about the dangers that lie in wait for your children on chat BBSes. When he called on me, I laid into him about the hyperbolic tone of his program, and the fact that he used out-of-context screen grabs of an innocuous conversation involving a friend of mine in the teaser. He responded with some blather about kids getting online without their parents’ knowledge, which I shot down with something to the effect of “then parents need to educate their children about blah-de-blah”. You could sum the entire exchange up as: “Oh noes! Internets!” “Well, where are the parents?”
    Shortly after that my father presented me with a black t-shirt printed with white block lettering that said: I BUY INTERNET ACCESS FOR MINORS. I treasure it.
    After that, my favorite funny shirt is probably ONLINE PREDATOR.
    Followed by MONOGAMOUSLY CHALLENGED (long story short: I used to be in a poly relationship).
    And then there’s my various Lego t-shirts, such as the reproduction of the original patent application illustrations for the 2×4 brick, but those aren’t funny so much as extremely nerdy.

  4. lj, I saw that “Jesus is coming” t-shirt in Provincetown about 20 years ago. I laughed for a week. It’s still one of my all-time favorites.
    As to earthquakes and liquefaction, never mind just Disneyplaces. A lot of Boston is built on fill and a lot of the buildings are old and vulnerable to an earthquake of a size that’s not at all out of the question. The possibilities aren’t comforting.
    And then there’s this to worry about.
    I wonder how far inland one would have to go to outrun a 164 foot tsunami, with (if word got around instantly) 8 hours’ warning. (Yes, it would depend on topography…) Even with my creaky old knees I think I could walk pretty far in 8 hours if a tsunami was coming and I knew which direction to go.
    In the meantime, spring is coming here in the north country. Finally.

  5. Janie, we used to joke that the welcome sign for the state was ‘Welcome to Mississippi, set your clocks back 20 years’ (Actually, the better version of this joke is going across the Alabama-Georgia border where it is supposed to say ‘welcome to Alabama, set your clocks forward one hour and back 20 years’) Googling to check if that’s the case, I found this
    The entire state is officially in the Central Time Zone. However, a handful of communities unofficially observe Eastern Time because they are part of the Columbus, Georgia metropolitan area – Phenix City, Smiths Station, Lanett, and Valley.
    Speaking of tsunamis, in looking at Wikipedia about it last month, I was led to this page that mentioned Spirit Lake, and this page about Tsunami in lakes.
    So, seafront AND lakefront property is out. Just thought you’d like to know.

  7. My sister tells me she once saw a U-Mass student in Amherst wearing a T-shirt that said:
    JESUS HELPS ME FOOL PEOPLE
    My own favorite (sweatshirt, actually) displays Maxwell’s equations. I can’t wear it any more, but the reason is girth, not embarrassment.
    –TP

  10. JamieM: I have one much like that! Except it has a graph on the front and that text with the equations on the back. Got it from the NRAO in West Virginia.

  12. My favorite teeshirts weren’t ones with clever things written on them. My favorite one was one that was an advertisement for KNON’s (Dallas) Uncool Hour radio show, which even in the area was obscure enough that it got people wondering.
    Consistent with my personality, I’m guessing.
    And I had always wanted a Tupelo Chain Sex teeshirt when I was younger. Now, not so much. Nowadays my deliberately unsettling shirts run more in the direction of an AC-130H Spectre shirt that I got for having worked on one of its systems.

  14. my wife got me a t-shirt that says “I found Jesus! … He was behind the couch!” and there’s a picture of Jesus standing up in back of a couch in a “tada!” pose.
    i wore it once, to a bar, and some meathead got all up in my face asking me “what [i] mean by that shirt?”
    she also got me a shirt that has a sketch of a factory, with a sign in front that says “Jerk Factory”. coming out of a chute on one side of the factory is a little stick figure, with the word “You” and an arrow pointing to it.
    i think she wants me to get beat up.

  15. Graffiti spotted somewhere, long ago:
    “JESUS SAVES SINNERS
    and redeems them for valuable prizes!”

  16. Amezuki, your drumming with Sabbath inspires me. Did you really drop acid every day for year (or whatever the story was)?
    I saw a t-shirt in one of those cheesy catalogs that read “There 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” I use that now whenever I get the chance, though I didn’t buy the t-shirt.
    When I was in college, my fraternity was considering selling t-shirts on campus to raise money. One of my frat brothers and I came up with some very unpopular ideas, like a t-shirt with a cucumber on the chest and a random alpha-numeric sequence underneath it, just to f**k with people. It never happened, but I still like the idea and would gladly wear such a t-shirt.

  17. “Did you really drop acid every day for year (or whatever the story was)?”
    While this sounds good, research suggests the effect becomes muted by physical tolerance and inability to process the drug much faster than this without a break.

  19. “Personal research?”
    I am sure the study was 35 years old and, as I very vaguely remember, the sample size was quite small.

  25. “I just ordered CSE&Y. MY life in a t-shirt.”
    Actually it only let me order a greeting card but, I can pretend its a t-shirt.

  26. CCDG,
    Glad to be of service. I ran into the guy at a street market a few years ago and bought one that had a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral behind a large lunch bag.
    “The lunch bag of Notre Dame,” of course.
    Also have “Gorgonzola” as a poster.

  27. My musically themed choice would be “Nice resume, Mr. Hendrix….” (And not just because it was first.)

  29. I guess it highlights my irreligiosity (if that’s a word) that I now remember something, either on a tee or a bumper sticker that said:
    Jesus Saves!
    But Gretzky gets the rebound and scores!
    though it might be the linguistic content, as another I love is
    Time flies like an arrow.
    Fruit flies like a banana.

  30. Amezuki, your drumming with Sabbath inspires me. Did you really drop acid every day for year (or whatever the story was)?

    Wait, what?
    Oh, I see. At first I thought this was a “you look like a heavy metal musician” comment. Guilty as charged.
    Then I realized that one of those photos of me–from Brickcon 2009–is actually in someone else’s photostream. A guy in the Lego community whose name happens to be Bill Ward.
    So no. :>

  31. Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay. I came to say, I must be going. I’m glad I came but just the same I must be going.

  33. I don’t see many t-shirts, but I do recall the day of the clever bumper sticker:
    Lawyers Do It Legally
    Lady Lawyers Make Better Motions
    Divers Do It Deeper.
    Etc, etc.
    My Favorite:
    Plumbers F**k Better

  36. Bernard (8Apr 2:57 PM) thanks for that. the “Victorious Egret” had my wife (a big bird lover) practically falling out of her chair.

  37. LJ: Let me point out that a (hockey) generation before Gretzky, it was “Jesus Saves / [Phil] Esposito scores on the rebound.” Actually worked better, because Big Phil had no great skill other than skating back and forth through the crease and popping in loose pucks.
    Meanwhile, there’s the even older: “Jesus Saves / Moses Invests.”

  42. I saw one recently on someone’s blog made in about 10 seconds with simple text “I have a dog heart”. Maybe I was in a weird mood but for some reason I found it hilarious.

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