Category Archives: What year is this?

ECSTASY: LONG-TERM EFFECTS REVEALED

Posted on July 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

Woah there. This is real weapons-grade stuff, so if you could all just step behind the screen while I don my hermetically-sealed suit, grab my giant tweezers, and carefully – veeerrry carefully – place this under the microscope for closer analysis…

It’s a helluva lot to take in at once. Let’s try and break it down to its base elements.

RAVE/ROCK
“Ibiza. Ibiza. Now, that’s something to do with music, isn’t it? But is it ‘rave’ or ‘rock’? Tell you what, I’ll stick both on there. Best put ‘rock’ as the prominent one though, that seems the more likely option.” Ahhh… This close.

PRIMEIRO VOO
This translates as “first flight” – in Portuguese. Sod it: Portugal, Spain – all the same thing, innit? Donkeys and sunshine and moustachioed widows, all that lark. What are you, the Lonely Planet or summink?

IBIZA
The one undeniably accurate thing about the entire garment. Yes, Ibiza is a place, and yes, that is how you spell it.

ESTADOS UNIDOS
Spanish for “United States”. Now, I’m no geography expert, and I don’t actually have a world atlas to hand, but nevertheless…

1991
You’ve lost me.

So there we have it. Absolutely textbook. Hats are very much off.

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Posted in America woo yeah!, Deeply distressing, I love musics, What year is this?

IT WAS LEGAL IN THE SIXTIES

Posted on July 27, 2010 | 1 Comment

Well, yes, 1964 was an incredibly successful year for the Paedophiles Nurturing Backwards Youngsters Rowing Club – but given some of the shocking accusations that eventually came to light, why on Earth would you want to commemorate that?

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Posted in We are sailing, What year is this?

JOB DONE

Posted on July 24, 2010 | Leave a comment


“What can we get Nana for her 94th…?”

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Posted in Mystical numbering, What year is this?

SAY WHAT YOU SEE

Posted on July 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

Sweet and tender Jesus. This T-shirt is so thumpingly literal and “will-this-do?” that it’s actually genuinely heartbreaking.

With their poor mind wibbled into lukewarm mush after years of churning out nonsense-clothes, the best this designer could come up with here was a phrase so sighingly lifeless and shruggingly perfunctory that they may as well have just randomly mashed their dispirited hands across the keyboard.

“Different things.” It’s a cry for help, that’s what it is.

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Posted in What year is this?

BUM-NUMBING NUMBERING

Posted on July 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’m not buying it – my Spidey-sense is tingling on this one. There is just no way that this T-shirt could be as burpily inane and fartily arbitrary as it first appears.

Could this design in fact contain a sinister coded signal, intended to rouse a terrorist sleeper-cell? Or maybe it’s a brilliant astrophysics equation, wistfully snuck out by a disgraced professor forced to eke out a living as a lowbrow T-shirt designer? Or could it be – and this seems by far the most likely option – an encrypted message from Baby Jesus, forewarning us that The End Times are upon us?

Look, if you will, at the evidence: 87 plus 45 plus 1867 equals 1999. Factor in that M (which translates as 1000 in Roman numerals) and you get 2999. Turn that upside-down, and what do you get? 666 and a left-handed tick. And is left-handedness not a classic mark of Satan?

O why did we not give credence to the T-shirts? They spake naught but truth to us feckless sinners, but we had not the wisdom to heed them.

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Posted in Deeply distressing, Mystical numbering, What year is this?

OIL BE BACK

Posted on July 23, 2010 | 2 Comments


As an outward indicator of rampant inner lunacy, wearing a faux-vintage T-shirt promoting a fictional brand of motor oil has to be up there with dancing around in your dead mother’s nightie while you scoff back cat-poo after cat-poo.

Oh, no, wait – I stand corrected: there’s a great big 48 on there. Now it all makes sense.

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Posted in Deeply distressing, Mystical numbering, What year is this?

CASDIA: SCENIC AND TEEMING WITH FISH

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Does the fact that “Casdia Reef” is an entirely fictional place make this Meaningless T-Shirt less pointless, or even more pointless?

It’s hard to say, although it does at least indicate a rare flash of imagination on the part of the designer. Alternatively, it could indicate that they couldn’t be titted to fire up the low-level synapses required to remember a location – any location on Earth – where a fishing trip could take place. They simply tilted their exhausted, demoralised gaze over to the catering-size bottle of anti-depressants sat atop their monitor, squinted at the label, and copied down the name of the active ingredient.

Casdia 35mg. May cause itchiness, wincing, palpitations and foaming.

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Posted in Sand and crabs, We are sailing, What year is this?

BEHOLD YE THE FUTURE, AND TREMBLE YE

Posted on July 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Assuming it’s not supposed to be an acronym for Miriam Margoyles’ Crazy Labia (you can never really know with T-shirts like this), “MMCL” translates, in Roman numerals, as “2150″.

You’ve got to hand it to Uniqlo: while most of the meaningless years that emblazon blah-de-blah nonsensical T-shirts fall somewhere between 1966 and 1984, these fearless fuckers have zoomed off a whole 140 years into the future – possibly on the wondrous-sounding “poem rocket” mentioned on the T-shirt’s bottom-right-hand corner.

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Posted in That's crazy talk, What year is this?

THAT GOLDEN SUMMER

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 2 Comments

Well let’s hope for H&M’s sake that their stores are suddenly flooded with people for whom Santa Barbara circa 1976 holds some very dear memories – memories they’d like to have forcibly jogged every time they look down at their T-shirt.

Otherwise, H&M aren’t going to sell many of these buggers, are they? Because, y’know, why the cock would you want a time-and-place that you’d never actually experienced proudly splurged across your torso?

And therein lies the riddle of many a Meaningless T-Shirt, and the puzzlesome bozos who wear them.

Sadly, the thin, silvery lines of ‘handwriting’ were illegible, but I’m guessing that they probably relate, in weirdly specific and uncomfortably intimate fashion, an intense moment of sweat-drenched copulation that took place in a motel, in Santa Barbara, in 1976. Duuuude. Helluva summer, dude.

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Posted in America woo yeah!, Sand and crabs, What year is this?

ROCKIN’ IN COTTON

Posted on July 18, 2010 | Leave a comment


Given their comfortingly generic name and their reassuring unoriginal, guitars-aflame logo, I think we can all agree that Eagle Flame 2000 are a band destined for big, big things. If you’re not deeply excited about rrrockin’ out to their upcoming album The Sound Of Fire (comin’ atcha “fifth March”) then you must be some kind of cloth-eared titty-brain.

Given the comparatively tiddly size of the font used for the “2000″, I suspect that Eagle Flame 2000 had the “2000″ part of their name foisted upon them, possibly due to a legal cease-and-desist order from another band called Eagle Flame.

“It’s cool, guys,” their cigar-chompin’ manager Tony will have assured them. “Howsabout we rename you Eagle Flame 2010? It’s hot, it’s feathery – it’s now!”
“Nooo, dude!” flounces lead singer Bruce Horses. “Modern music sucks, you dig? We’re all about that ’70s rock’n'rollll shit! Flames! Eagles! Wizard-women in lace!”
“Okay okay,” sighs Tony, who’s heard this speech a million times. “Let’s compromise then, huh? Howsabout… Eagle Flames 2000? It’s hot, it’s feathery – it’s half sorta retro!”
“Whatever, dude,” shrugs Bruce. “But you’re totally snuffin’ out the Eagle Flame.”

But never mind that whole sordid enforced-name-change business, Bruce – what you should really be getting upset about is the fact that Tony – inept, cheapskate Tony – has chosen to promote your hard-rockin’, whisky-pissin’ debut album via the medium of an insipid T-shirt, hanging like a yawn in a sleepy corner of Marks & Spencer. You know how Nickelback made it? Neon sports-socks in Asda. That‘s the way you break a band these days.

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Posted in America woo yeah!, I love musics, What year is this?