T-shirt Illiteracy must be stopped.

I apologise in advance for not including any cartoons in this post. The next one will have many, but I’m saving the ones I’ve drawn for later. I am also too jetlagged to find a scanner.

I am now in Hong Kong, and between it and Senegal, I have come to two conclusions:

The first is that no matter where you are, cockroaches can always be killed with a flip flop, even if they have a 2 inch wingspan and fly at your face. Make it so.

The second is a rant:

In many parts of the world, The West has been woven into the fabric of ‘coolness’; European and American products have become fashionable to wear, sing and drink. This is stupid, and should be stopped immediately. If you live in Dakar, 50Cent does not belong on your belt anymore than your underpants belong on the city lampposts. However, that is not my complaint, because there are, after all, some Western things that do have marginal worth, such as Sprite, Ron Weasley, and Wigan Athletic Football Club.

No, this is my conclusion: just because something is cool, it does not mean that you should be allowed to put it on your own body in blind faith. I am of course referring to one product in particular: T-shirts. The world is filled with individuals who cannot read their own clothing because it has a language that they cannot understand on it.

In many cases this is hilarious; my second cousin has a shirt without any vowels. All it has are consonants and punctuation, in equal and random parts. There are also people in Senegal whose shirts are not nearly as manly as they would have you believe. Yet in some cases t-shirt illiteracy is a dangerous phenomenon. Yesterday, I saw a man sporting the message: “F*** You”, but without the asterisks. It was a pity, because he looked quite cheerful.

And then today, I saw undeniable proof that something must be done. I saw the pinnacle of public indecency.

I saw a shirt that read: “YOU’RE DOING IT TOO SOFTLY”*. Now, I may just be very dirty minded, and there certainly is a possibility that the 15-ish year old girl wearing this message was simply crying out against poor massages, but I don’t think so.

I would therefore like to appeal to anybody, particularly at ALA, who may one day become some sort of commerce minister, or even president, to make t-shirt illiteracy an issue of paramount importance upon assuming office. In fact, I propose that we be legally required to successfully translate every single t-shirt that we would like to purchase before we are allowed to actually buy it.

And while I'm at it, the same goes for tattoos. The law should also force all Americans who decide to get a Chinese character tattooed onto their skin to seek out a native Chinese speaker and double check that it does in fact mean wind, and not petrol, bison, or nothing at all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to be protected from ourselves.

If you made it this far, thank you for listening.


*I know I wrote "slowly" before; that was a mistake.