Militant Geek Custom Shirts

So CNN recently opened up its own tee shop. The idea was that when you found a headline you like you could order it on a shirt with the words “I’ve got nothing better to do than shill for CNN” “I saw it on CNN.com”. By itself that was only as titillating as a portrait of Bee Arthur on velvet. Luis, over at the Signal vs Noise blog, discovered that by manipulating the URL variables you could create something vastly more interesting - headlines that were actually funny. The subterfuge was made all that much more satisfying when ‘I saw it on CNN.com’ continued to be appended to whatever outrageousness could be divined.

Initially the only problem was that a checksum prevented people from ordering the shirts they actually wanted; “I’ll put Blitzer in a Situation Room” and “Anderson Cooper Has No Flag Pin” could only viewed, not bought. However, new reports show that even the ability to approximate physical impropriety has been nixed. Instead we’re left with “Shelter Dog Nurses 9 Orphaned Kittens”. Awesome…. and Fail.

Obviously running a tshirt blog on geek related items I’ve seen my fair share of shirts that capture breaking news. Wired’s Snack Culture Blog describes things as succinctly as a bite sized bit of blog can:

…companies like CafePress, Spreadshirt.com, and Zazzle have turned your sister into a T-shirt designer by making production and distribution simple and cheap. Result: T-shirts can create cultural memes, not merely follow them.

Spontaneous T-shirts for Nintendo Wii accidents and SNL skits have turned your humble Fruit of the Loom into a form of micromedia. T-shirts today broadcast the news: Less than 24 hours after Dick Cheney shot a man in Texas, satirical T-shirt designs were uploaded to CafePress. They predict it too: The STEWART-COLBERT ‘08 T-shirt anticipates our boredom with an election cycle that has barely begun.

In an age of media saturation, T-shirts are a tight-knit nano-statement.

Ok, yesterday we all had a bit of phun at the iPhone’s expense (to Apple’s credit it’s incredible how it won’t be released until June and already its a pop culture touchstone).

However, there is still at least one more video out there worth posting. Last night on SNL during the weekend update segment Fred Armisen did a great Steve Jobs impression and announced an iPhone with battery life of ‘about 20 minutes’. Let’s put the power of crowds to the test - 50 Geek Cred points to the first person who can link to that segment (YouTube, Google Video, whatever) in the comments. Update: 50 Geek Cred Points to Ritz for the quick reply (I was doing YouTube tag searchs for iPhone and SNL, but their search box is returning odd results at this time) - a tip of the hat also goes out to Mimoun for chiming in.

Not Worth Blogging About T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $19.99

Take Microsoft, the blogsphere, evaluation laptops (wink,wink), and a slow news week and what do you have? A perfect storm of much bluster and little consequence.

To quickly recap for those with lives:

• Microsoft is launching Vista©™® next year
• They need to get the news out because everyone is so otherwise distracted with their Zunes
• They read the latest issue of Time Magazine, got confused and thought the word blog was a misprint of flog
• Microsoft, through their PR agency Edelman, offered “celebrity” bloggers a copy of Vista©™® to keep evaluate (with a $2200 case to carry it around it, oh, and a copy of Office 2007 might have also slipped in there)
• The bloggers that didn’t get laptops complain about how those that did are morally compromised
• Others justify it while typing on brand new keyboards
• Still others that are offered machines instead mount their high horses
• After all that, Microsoft back peddles and asks for the laptops back - pretty please?
• Valleywag nominates the whole mess for Worst Marketing Campaign of 2006. Given that this year we also saw ‘Welcome to the Social’ as a straight-faced marketing pitch (Microsoft again, ironically) that is saying something.
• (Prediction) Everyone gets drunk on New Year’s Eve and forgets the whole thing moves on to more important debates: like what a tool Robert Scoble is.