Tribulum ad hilarity - Part II

As you might be able to tell by now, I spend possibly more time than the average person at grocery stores.

I can't help it. Not only are grocery stores facinating places, but you can actually get food there! It's quite the novel idea, actually. I can go and trade my government-issued paper (and minted!) currency for food stuffs and other items - and don't forget, Shirty was born at a grocery store. They are magical places, indeed...

But I digest...

When one is done wondering around, taking in all of the ingenious/deceptive/eye-catching/head-shaking marketing, one must proceed to the check-out counter. You might perceive that as an ending to the adventure, but you'd be wrong. And naive. And probably too short.

For, it is an ending of a beginning, but also a beginning of an ending, and so is just as confusing as it sounds. But, there are magazines to look at while there. And said magazines can impart some pretty interesting information.

Like the existence of today's Daily Shirt! I can still remember being a little tiny Shirtmaster, and seeing this character grace the cover of the revered Weekly World News. And oh what a character...uhhh...'it' is. Lately, 'it' is supposedly off in the Middle East, fighting evildoers, as a matter of (Weekly World News) fact. He ought to be careful though...the CIA can be pretty dastardly...

What would you rather?

Today's Daily Shirt is proving to be another tough writing assignment.

It must be eloquent but informative, honest but compassionate, and, most importantly, neither too tall nor too short. This is critical.

Today, we have a man, who after many, many years of failthfully feeding at the corporate news trough and dutifully regurgitating as the anchor for a nightly news program, has had his career essentially ended for him through what looks like chicanery. Tough to say. But really, who among us hasn't been screwed out of a news anchor job???

Reminds me of my days back at CNBSCABFNNOX (Cable News, something, something, something, in case you were wondering...) I had the 3:00-3:10 AM talking head spot when, unceremoniously, I had the carpet - stained with the blood of all who came before - yanked right out from under me, just over a little slip up about the impending nuclear armageddon that sorta didn't happen. Though in retroperspective, the bloodied carpet should have been a giveaway that things weren't going to go well, regardless...

The U.S.' subsequent peak fashion specimen

Last season - whenever that was...at least a few months ago, it seems - a couple of the ladies of Shirtville (namely Lil' E and Red) used to love gossiping about the show featuring today's Daily Shirt.

Having never seen the program myself, I was generally left to my own devices, as it pertains to assessing their descriptions of what one human being did or said to another human being for the entertainment of a whole assortment of other human beings on the other side of the cable outlet.

And a couple of things occured to me; not actually seeing a group of beautiful women being not-so-beautiful people, that much of what I heard talked about sounded little different from the politics of real life relationships. Granted, the context is completely different, but these are essentially ego-dramas (that few of us would tolerate, in real life) branded as entertainment. As well, while most people are on generally good behaviour if they think someone is watching them, there is something about a TV camera that takes this equation and turns it on it's head.

Perhaps it's that the people watching aren't 'there' to see this behaviour as it occurs, or that others will only see this long after it's actually happened and thus time somehow makes it all better?

I personally think it has something to do with Pluto's deplanetisation. I hope those scientographists know the damage they've caused.

There's always room for...

Jay-Hyphen-Elle-No Elle-Oh!

You're right, it's dumb, but it popped into my head as I was thinking up a title for... the first post of a new week of Daily Shirt!

I guess it's pretty obvious who today's Daily Shirt is. Or not. I'm not you. I can't make these associations for another person.

But, I will say that today's Shirty-head is/was another darling of the tabloid media; dipping her hands in many different pies to stay as front-and-centre as possible: movies, CD's, romances/marriages, high-profile archeological digs...she's done it all. Except for the archeological digs... I made that one up. I meant anthropology.

She's kinda disappeared lately though, and being that I don't much care, I can't be bothered to find out what she's up to. I'll just wait till she starts popping up in the supermarket rags again. Which should be anytime...now! Hmmm... okay... ... ... now! No? ...

UN-cool

The United Nations...an great idea in theory, but is it just a great theory in ineffective practice?

We'll take a look at just that question, in a special Daily Shirt Investigative Report: The UN - Body For World Order or Pulling The Shirt Over Your Eyes?

The UN is always in the news. Why? It's an organisation that proports to represent the governments - and by extension, the citizens - of the world. They are supposedly the keepers of the keys to order, justice and warfare. While we can all agree that these aspects of societal living are of paramount importance, why is it such a maligned organisation?

Well, there are couple of problems. 1) When you staff an organisation with bureaucrats with their own agendas, the natural result is gridlock. Everything becomes a tradeoff and no one gets what they want - or need - for their countries or people.

2) This business of 'the veto' ensures that those bureaucrats who come from countries special enough to wave their economic or war-making wand and say that one discussion or another is off the table guarantees that the strong dominate every conversation and ideas of order and justice are advanced only as far those who dictate the terms of conversation will allow them to go. That's the short version. Don't like a topic? Wave that wand, say that it's a non-issue and that you don't recongise it, and away it goes. If only life for the rest of us was that easy.

3) That, in the eyes of a certain section of a certain religious denomination, the UN represents the anti-Christ embodied and that it's existence is evidence of the end of the world. Well, how can one argue with such a well-defined, logically argued position? Especially in light of the picture that the Shirtmaster dug up of the current Secretary-General. This is a zoom-in on the right eye...

Obviously, the double white-spot is proof positive of this assertion of evil. No doubt about it. I can feel the evil just leaping off the screen and trying to suck my soul into an abyss of malignancy from which light and hope are doomed to writhe in tormented despondency.

So, there we have it...bureaucratic gridlock, organisational undermining from positions of power, and the influence of Hell. From this, it's clear that the structure is rotten at the foundations and needs to be torn down and rebuilt in our, enlighted Western image.

That, or realise that power must not be allowed to corrupt, lest we find ourselves in a perilous struggle for equality...kinda like the one we're currently in.

Oh, and here's Shirty...

More than pizza pie

There's so much going on in Shirtland right now, I'm going to need some sort of digital abacus to keep it all straight. A palm-sized one would be ideal, and giving it an LSD display would be all the better. Maybe, if I can find a way to move the beads fast enough, I can get it to play music, or even download porn from some other digital abacus halfway across the world! I hope someone invents something like this soon...

So, what you ask, is going on to make Shirtland such a bustling metropolis of stuff n' things? Well, aside from stuff n' things, we're stickin' heads on shirts and somehow trying to get some work done while we're at it. It really is a juggling act. Now, I just gotta get some flaming midget chainsaws and the metaphor is complete!

Anyway, today's Daily Shirt is yet another relic of TV dumbdom, going back to those innocent days of western complicity in the Iran/Iraq bloodbath, the birth of those coming-of-age movies like Breakfast Club or Wall Street and totally over the top kids cartoons...that weren't really for kids even though they were marketed that way (are you listening, people who put words like 'Princess' or 'Juicy' on the butts of pants marketed to children?!? I'm calling shenanigans on your shenanigans!)

So, now the object of today's Daily Shirt is being turned into a movie. Goodie. Proof once more that the 'creatve' people in Hollyland aren't so creative, as they 'reinvigorate' an idea from two decades ago. And proof as well that cashing in on childhood relics from the last generation - who now has their own money to blow on junk - is just too easy to pass up for these geniuses. And proof further, that 'voting with the dollar' enables people to continue to produce junk, because apparently garbage is an easy sell.

Bear arms!

It's said that guns don't kill people, people (or bullets) kill people. True enough. But without guns, bullets definately couldn't kill people, and people would be deprived of their simplest method of killing others.

This is a great example of a logical fallacy. Guns themselves don't do the killing, but they are the enabler. From this, we can deduce that guns could be considered an 'accessory' to killing. And to take this a step further, that could make weapons manufacturers accessories to the act of killing. A criminal offense in most cases, I believe...

But all this doesn't matter. People in the US will still continue to take this "constitutional right" out of context. And the people who shamelessly continue to enable murder will still make gigantic profits from their trade. And I'm still gonna stick heads on this dumb shirt.

So, here's to you, today's Daily Shirt - one's of the goodest, oldest boys going.

What's YOUR price?

Today's Daily Shirt is another hero of daytime television, though I remember being a little kid and this cat was actually on somewhere around prime time.

I was just thinking that game shows on prime time is such a relic of the past - and then I realised that the biggest television hits of the last decade or so have been 'reality' shows. Two points about this. One, that these shows have little-to-no basis in reality, hence the label of 'reality' is exposed as the shameless marketing that it is.

And two, reality shows are prime-time game shows. Just replace 'Plinko' with eating worms while throwing water balloons at the letters which spell your name while hanging upside down from the skids of a helicopter! That's all. As you can see, there really is little difference.

Here, you have nobody people showing up on TV trying to win stuff. Sounds like a game show to me. Just rebranded, and with more bikini-clad women. Ahhh, evolution...

And I guess that in the end, that's the appeal. Ordinary people + winning stuff = hope for the chance for good things in ones own life. That, and women in bikini's...

The Divorcening

I realised recently that there's a certain irony in my tirades against celebrity-mongering and the very same celebrity-mongering that Shirty engages in. I choose the term 'irony' over 'hypocrisy' because, for one, this is mine - and Shirty's - blog, and I can be as blind as I want here. Secondly, well... Shut up!

Anyway, today's Shirtological Cranial Recalibration Eliciting Wonderous Yawns (S.C.R.E.W.Y., for short) is a woman who's gettin' herself a dee-vorce. You'd have to be living under a rock that's in a box that's in the trunk of someone's car that parked in a corner of their backyard and is overgrown by weeds and hasn't been touched in ages to not at least heard tell of their marital troubles, via the supermarket check-out line, of course.

Whether it's drug and alcohol abuse or physical abuse, this is one couple who understand that love hurts. And by that logic, they must really love each other. Alot.

Quitters never win - but they don't lose, either

Dear Tony,

We were all really sad to hear about you deciding not to continue in your current occuption of leading your country of origin. But, really, we totally understand that you've been in an increasingly untenable situation - like the equivalent of keeping the Spice Girls together, were it that Posh et all were world leaders as well as pop divas; destroying lives with bombs, but saving souls with song.

Really now, the good folks at home who initially put you into power just won't stand for anymore blood on their hands; as it is, the English are right up there with the French and Spanish (with the US hot on everyone's heels) as colonial powers who've been at the root of unquantifiable destruction and misery. Of course, no one expects the madness to end with your leaving (though it's hard to believe that there are tools that think everything will be fine once GWB is out of office), but that's not really the point, is it?

Look, we all know that we're pretty well at the mercy of the US, and you personally can't be faulted for tagging along like an obnoxious little brother. So maybe it's best that it ends like this.

Respectfully,
The rest of the world, C/O Shirty

Ice cream as evolutionary tool

Fighting is barbaric.

It just is. Whether it's with weapons or not, this Shirtmaster can't think of an activity that ignores - and in fact, retrogrades - the human spirit of progress more than the destruction of life; and, to a lesser extent, things.

People often complain that other 'people are animals.' Barbaric and brutish, life is a struggle for survival that is ultimately fatal anyway. But there's no need to hasten the inevitable demise along.

This obviously raises an obvious contridiction; what about a survival struggle or some sort of resistance movement that exists to counter a certain colonial power? Both examples employ 'the fight' in a venue that speaks to both this human spirit of progress AND the destruction of persons (though a good counter is that to force a party into a fight is as barbarous as the fight itself, thus generally absolving one who is forced to fight as a means of survival and placing all blame on the aggressor - though not all will buy this argument). Either way, how do we reconcile this? I say ice cream. But that's just me.

So, I guess what I mean is that, specifically, fighting as entertainment is barbaric retrogression. This means you, Ultimate Fighting Championship...and you too, today's Daily Shirt



(though, to be fair, he's not a fighter anymore - now he's busy shilling; obviously a much more noble endeavour...)

Critical condition...

Today's Daily Shirt is a sort of nod in the general direction of a yearly event that brings much attention - and, YAY! Celebrities - to the Shirtmaster's hometown of Toronto, Canada: The Toronto International Film Festival.

What was once just another small-time film fest from a city with a permanant inferiority complex, has, in truth, grown into a seriously big-time event that draws film folk from all over the gosh-darn place to this city for 10 days or so to clog up our streets, extend the length of our line-ups and all sorts of delightful other side effects that naturally come with an infusion of carbon-based bipeds. Sure it brings in money, but real economists understand that money is a means, not an end itself.

And while today's Shirtological transformation doesn't perhaps know much about economics, he is someone who knows alot about film. Alot. And not just the ones you go home with in a brown paper bag. Though maybe those ones too; I dunno. But, what I do know (and by 'know,' I mean 'made up just now'), is that today's Daily Shirt has seen 3,639,184 movies in his lifetime.

For those of you who are new to our alphanumeric system, that's a bunch of movies. Assuming an avarage length of 90 minutes per movie, (and remembering that there are 525,600 minutes in a year) that means he's at least 623 years old right now. And that's not even counting bathroom breaks.

Now that's dedication.

A side-kick is still a star, just with a smaller entourage/drug problem/fan base

Today's Daily Shirt is the result of me standing in the check-out line at the grocery store, glazing over while staring at all of the various magazine covers: People, and their celebrity-mongering; Teen People, and their umm...teen celebrity-mongering; The National Enquirer, and their reports of aliens and/or Satan and/or Nostradamus impregnating and/or probing and/or abducting batboy and/or Anna Nicole Smith and/or crop circles; and of course, Guns, Bikini Models And Micro-Biology...you know, the usual supermarket-aisle-suspects...

All I wanted to do was pay for my bananas and pizza buns and go back to the office to have lunch, and who comes swimming into view? She's a full-fledged side-kick (to an earlier Daily Shirt even! What are the odds?), and apparently has an eating disorder (according to Celebrities Who Would Puke On You As Soon As They Would Run You Over In A DWI Incident - Magazine). Can you guess who it is? Here's another clue: If she wasn't on the cover of a magazine, it's quite likely that she could just as easily be the girl asking me for the $1.36 that those bananas cost me. Such is the breadth and depth of her impact...

The great croc pit in the sky

Today is a very, very sad Daily Shirt. Not sad as in 'pathetic,' but more of the remorseful type of sad characterised in movies like "Airplane" or "Spaceballs;" films that really get you 'right there.' Right there, being where they get you. Just to clarify.

Yes, Shirty was awfully distraught to learn of the recent passing of this television legend.

He's a man of bravery, a man of courage, a man who - week after week over the course of years - caused me to yell things at my television like "don't do that!" "Dude, are you messed up? I can't begin to count the ways in which that's a bad idea!" And "you're a manic! Stop it!"

It was like being some kind of (absentee) surrogate parent to a rambunctious grown-up Austrailian...but now he's gone. If only I had yelled at the TV louder, maybe he'd still be around...

So, here's to you, Mr. Fast-Talking, Fearless Crazy Guy.

Stuff about things

Wow...you Daily Shirt readers have no idea how tough today's post was.

The Shirtmaster must have false-started on this thing a dozen times, but the wordsmithing just wouldn't come out today.

First, it was going to be a tale about Frank's attic, and how today's Daily Shirt was a result of the adventuring inherent in cleaning out that space, and the treasures found therein. No dice.

Then, it turned into an idea about Shirty's references to the artworld; but honestly, I just don't know enough about art to BS my way through that. Not even the mighty (but often hilariously flawed) Wikipedia would have helped me through that - without a bunch of research to hide my ignorant buffoonery.

When that fell apart, I thought of doing a little ramble on the beauty of the non-sequiter and absurdism - as that's the premise that we work under, here (in more ways that one...). But, well, that would have taken too long; and such an amusing topic (with so much potential for idiocy) demands more planning than I have time for today.

So, here we are, a post about a bunch of non-posts. But hey this equals 'Post Count +1' and is an update with a new head on Thy Mighty Shirty, so, you're welcome.

What the Fred?!

See? See?! Look what happens!

So, when Frank was off galavanting around the world in his hot-air balloon, you'll remember that Shirtmaster helped with a particular transformation - that of The Great Gazoo. That was a pretty good one; an incidental, supporting character that wouldn't necessarily be a 'first choice.' And isn't that what we all want in life? To not be the 'first choice'? To be an incidental character? A ghost of a memory of a half-remembered illusion that no one's sure ever happened in the first place?

Well, what happens? He - HE - doesn't even check the blog to see who's been shirted, and then he goes and picks a related head.

No, it's not Barney or Betty, Wilma, Bam-Bam or Pebbles, Mr. Slate, The Way-Outs, those Addam's Family...family, that lived next door for awhile. It's not Dino or Fred... Actually, it is Fred.

Spelling lessons

Who was born "Victoria Davey;" is estranged from her mother, and has used her own 'celebreality' (who makes up these stupid terms???) show to publicly criticise said mom; is on her second marriage - this one to a man who was already married but who was 'stolen' away; has been described as a 'butterface' on amiannoying.com and has had alleged against her that the only reason she has a career is due to nepotism?



(thanks to wikipedia for all of this useless infomation - that I'm now going to have to unlearn. Thanks. A bunch.)

Monsterous implications

Hey all, time to shirt you all up another Shirty...

Well, Frank is back from his 6 weeks off, during which time toured the mountains of Tibet by gazelle for a couple of weeks, than spent a couple of weeks discovering the Mayan culture (and by 'discovering,' we mean drawing pictures of what he -thinks- it's like), and finally, he learned Hindi, Spanish, American Sign Language, Polish, and, combining it with Engligh, called it "Spindilish-Hand Sign-Hand-Sign." It's a shame that he's the only one that understands it though. It sounds (and looks) fun!

What does this have to do with anything? Well, mainly it means that he's been reshirtifying the shirt, and this is the first of his transformative endeavours. It's also technically a repeat, being that it's a different monstrosity, but the same guy played this one too. So...ummm...roar...?