Winning the T-shirt wars

There are several great mysteries in the history of western literature:

• What was in Aristotle's lost treatise On Comedy?


• What became of Dr. Watson's account--which Holmes called "a story for which the world is not yet prepared"--of the Giant Rat of Sumatra?


• Where is the post I've been promising for ages, on why liberals are funnier than conservatives?

Alas, neither Umberto Eco nor the Firesign Theatre is at hand to help straighten the first two questions out. (And no, in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I'm not going to explain either of those references here. Figure it out yourself.) And, regarding the third question: I've just got to rein in my tendencies to overexplain--tendencies that should have been left behind when I departed from academia in the 1990s, but apparently aren't--and finish it. You can take the boy out of the classroom, but apparently you can't take the classroom out of the boy.

In the meantime, the most excellent Doctor Beyond checked in today with this observation:

Perhaps it is just my political leanings but I think the progressives/liberals have better, more attractive propaganda t-shirts.

How does this work on any kind of level? (OK, the model works on a couple of levels for me.)

I would think this one might be OK for someone in the military, but how many of the folks who have these sentiments either were on any of these tours or will be participating in the future ones?

I think the closest they come to clever is this one.

I guess it is because they are just too earnest in their pursuit of freedom for the entire world that they have no sense of whimsy.

Doctor B's note arrived at a propitious time. I've been having a running mostly private discussion with Lisa over at scratch & sniff about the odd things that drive readers to a blog. She had extraordinary, if inadvertent, success with a photo of an AK-47 she once posted. (Can't find the link; if she sees this post and remembers where she used that image, perhaps she'll send it . . . ?) My recent attempts to excite attention with a rubber duckie from hell . . . not so much, actually. Her basic theory, which I can't really fault her on, is that guns and breasts bring 'em in like sharks to chum. Maybe I'm just going at this wrong.

So, as you can guess, those photos that Doctor Beyond links to are, on another level, a pathetically transparent ratings gambit on my part. Still, in my own defense: It took a lot of searching to find an image of an empty T-shirt with cleavage. Blogging is hard work; only the good ones make it seem easy.

By the way: Do those women look conservative to you?