today's .plan

[fflo]

Hearing the NPR report this morning on last night's college football championship, including how, in Austin right after the game, fans were already wearing their 2006 Champion t-shirts, I was reminded of how we made up t-shirts at the bookstore in Kansas prophylactically like that. In particular we had hundreds of Fiesta (or Holiday?) Bowl winner shirts on hand one year, ready to reap the bounty of bucks if the team won. I asked what we'd be doing with the shirts if the team lost (which it did); the answer was that they'd probably be donated to charity heading out of the country (no doubt for a tax deduction). Somewhere in Central America---where there had been an earthquake, I think---had gotten a truckload of the last no-good-after-all optimistic-for-a-cash-in shirts.

I never did find out where specifically the K-State Fiesta/Holiday Bowl loser/winner shirts ended up. It's a funny and embarrassing thought. But I guess we couldn't have thrift stores in Junction City selling 'em, or the homeless of Ogden wearing 'em, could we. Walking around bearing false witness on who won the big football game could prompt serious fights, or maybe even arrests.

Comments

what goes around

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

my friend sofija went to school in elicott city, md, in 1990-1991 and had their dance team's jacket. she also had a striped sweaeter (knitted by her host-grandmother), which said 'jeans' across the chest, for which she had to say 'thank you' because she got it as a xmas gift. so she came back to serbia and gave the jacket and the sweater to the red cross in novi sad. then, some time in the mid-nineties, she was walking in belgrade (where she was in college then), and she saw a woman at a bus stop wearing the elicott city high school dance team jacket, and thought that either the dance team must have made it real big, or that was her jacket. the sweater has never been seen again, probably because it was set on fire by the wrath of the gods of aesthetic values (the godless thought it was spontaneous combustion from exceeding ugliness).

Re: what goes around

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh, no---now I know my entire wardrobe is in danger of going up in flames at any moment.

Funny about the jacket sighting. Hey, I spent some time in Ellicott City (pronounced "ell-ih-cut," not "ell-ih-cot") c1990. Probably not as much as vjsmom did, though, as that was among her favorite places to wine & dine. My brother used to be a bouncer at a pub-type place there called the Phoenix, where Elana & I did an entire NY Times Sunday crossword one afternoon, to our delight. One of my first days of hanging out with H was in EC, walking around & not caring that we were thwarted in Xmas shopping, cuz most everything'd closed. My old gf used to love to shop in that little downtown. We briefly pondered buying a house with (now-dead) Bill in an old mill town nearby. (What a disaster of a choice THAT would have been.)

Ellicott City is also where the dress shop was at which vjsmom bought a garment you might well have approved of for our crazy opera date night. It was a dress with ---lord, I'm bad at describing these things, but it had a sort of inner dress of a semi-see-through black material, and then a layer of fancy shiny maroon mostly-see-through lace(-like stuff) over that. I had admired it, and then she just showed up in it. Wonder if there are any pictures of that dress.

[squirrelykat.livejournal.com]

yeah, i was amazed when i saw those texas dudes with their championship shirts right after the game ended! you know those USC people had them made, too. they were so sure they were gonna win. ha! maybe they have to burn them......
there was a scandal here in A2 back in 1997-1998 when UofM won the National Championship - the USA today poll and AP polls split the team at the top (UofM and Nebraska) - then they made shirts `we're the REAL champs'.....

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

You know, I think I've seen pictures of people in the third world wearing garixh, non-sequitur clothing. Didn't pay any mind--just things like African goatherds wearing shirts with English words and garish logos that I couldn't identify. I thought it kind of sad--seeing these people wearing those shirts instead of some sort of traditional garb. Kind of like finding litter in a nature area. But I figured, who am I to impose my aesthetics on someone else's life.

Now suddenly I get it. They must be wearing decades' worth of Dewey-defeats-Truman shirts throughout the third world.

Imagine a nuclear holocost, destroying the nations with wealth, making them uninhabitable, and even unvisitable for centuries. Scholars would put together a history of world athletics based on the evidence on hand--all the shirts declaring the victory of the teams that lost.

Hmmm...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Garish and litter-y, indeed.