UNPRECEDENTED!

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As long-time readers of this blog will surely be aware, I've had a Good Rubbish shop (www.zazzle.com/goodrubbish) established on zazzle.com for a couple of years now, featuring a medley of t-shirts and other assorted crap that I designed several years ago (it's rumored that a new Ronald Reagan hoodie is in the works, but I can neither confirm nor deny these reports at this time).

Anyway, as you might expect, the Good Rubbish shop has not been drowning in sales over the course of its under-hyped, neglected existence, totaling 16 sales over its first 24 months of business. And, if I'm being totally fair, only 14 of those were legitimate sales, as two of them were accounted for by my own Mother McHanslaw as well as the venerable Artimus Mangilord.

Anyway...

Suddenly, and without provocation or explanation, my quasi-derelict Zazzle shop has started blowing up over the past month, garnering 10 sales over the past 30 days alone. That's one sale every 3 days, which any math major can tell you is a massive increase over my previous average of one sale every 46 days. Yahtzee!

As might be expected, almost all of my sales over time have come from my most morbid shirt design of all, this homage to Leon Trotsky:

But as of late there's been a run on what's probably my favorite design of the bunch, this reusable grocery/tote bag design I crafted several years ago:

Take THAT, Westboro Baptist Church!

For the record, I own a few of the "budget" totes on that God Hates Bags design. And let me tell you, I could not think of a finer Christmas gift for your friends, family, or significant others than that affordable, adorable piece.

Now, I have absolutely no idea WHY my shop is suddenly getting all of these sales, or WHEN this hot streak of mine is going to come to a screeching halt, but I certainly am enjoying it. Of course, I shall keep you all up to date if I ever figure out why in God's name people have suddenly decided to start buying all this crap, but I honestly doubt that a question like that will ever present the world with a legitimate answer.

So yeah, that's it. Shameless plug post over, normal Rubbish post pending. Tah!

JUST WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECTED IT...

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...I bring to you the long awaited sequel to the Ronald Reagan shirt fiasco - Part 1.
For the sake of immediate transparency, let it be known that I am more relieved than thrilled with the final results. Whether it is merely "done" or it is truly "done well", the important thing here is that it is done at all - my treacherous whore of a white whale has been slain, so finally I can get on with my life and maybe, just maybe, get some quality content coming back up on this site.

Alright, let's get on to the meat of this here post:

As some of you may recall from my first post on the subject of this Reagan shirt, about 4 or 5 months ago the oft referenced Artimus Mangilord approached me with a request to reprise my "Tear This Roof Off" design that was originally unveiled in late April of 2008, but to replace the awkward and generally stupid design I'd created with a black and white adaptation of Reagan's iconic cowboy hat photo:



As my original post from a month or so ago details, the process of converting this image into black and white proved itself to be a certifiable pain in the ass. Feel free to reread the original post if you want all of the excruciating, long winded, and entirely unnecessary details, but the long story short here is that after simplifying and cleaning all of the lines in a black and white version of that particular photo (which is really all I do when creating one of these designs), you're left with an image that looks very little like Ronald Reagan and very much like a hybrid of a serial murdering clown and that Andre the Giant "OBEY" image that all the kids with ludicrously expensive denim pants are always talking about:



I probably went through about 5 or 6 attempts at this design that all ended up looking roughly like that (sometimes slightly better, often significantly worse... unfortunately those attempts are lost to history) before I eventually gave up. Temporarily, at least.

Late one night in early December I found myself with little to do, so I took another look at the image of Ronnie I'd been working with to see if I could figure out a resolution to this looming spectre of a problem. I looked at him, and he... well, he just looked right back.



And that's when it hit me: I'd been going about this one all wrong. All this time I'd been trying to simplify the image, to clean it up to its most basic state, so that there were large, clearly defined blocks of black and white with little interruption between them, but this photo demanded a different approach. It's a Western photo... a John Wayne shot really, so it only makes sense that it needs to retain a certain level of grittiness. It doesn't work as a clean, streamlined image - every wrinkle, pock mark, crow's foot, liver spot and over sized pore on Reagan's face (and there are a lot of those things) needs to be held in tact, otherwise the photo just won't look right. It won't look rugged. It won't look American, damnit.

Basically what I decided to do was just trace over the black and white image that I have pictured above - cutting out a couple of unnecessary lines here and there, but generally just tracing over and refining all of the imperfections instead of removing them (for the record, had I not done this the image would have come out looking very pixelated and blurry when printed on a shirt, by tracing over the image the lines come out crisp, like a delicious Triscut). What I ended up with was an image that looks much better when viewed in a large format, so I'm going to post it on here in the normal size and provide this spectacular link to an uncomfortably enormous version of the image:



Mmm... gritty. With that finished I just needed to find a good font for my text, but I really didn't have any non-hideous western fonts on my computer, so I searched around on the "world wide web" a bit and found this site with some pretty good free fonts on it, and this site with only one free font on it... but it was a damn good one. I chose the "Fusty Saddle" font from the second site, then plopped it onto the image and just like that this horrible shirt project came to a decidedly anticlimactic though unduly satisfying end:



As you can see I made a couple more revisions at the 11th hour... I cut off the top of the image around Reagan's hate to create sort of a Denver Nuggets circa 1987 motif, and I switched the text color to be white, as I think this image plays a lot better on a dark shirt. Oh, and I tried to see if I could lick the outside of my elbow with my tongue, but I couldn't. In light of all my recent achievements, I must admit that failure was kind of deflating.

If you'd like to see the exciting, tantalizing, and totally buy-able final product feel free to check it out over at my shop on zazzle.com (though considering how it turned out, I think you might be off the hook for this one, Dr. Mangilord). Like I said before, I'm more relieved that this project has come to an end rather than thrilled that it ended really well, so... I don't know, up your nose with a rubber hose.

The preceding Good Rubbish closing paragraph was brought to you by the many episodes of Welcome Back Kotter that are permanently etched into my frontal lobe. The end.

CAFE PRESS ENCOUNTERS THE BUSINESS SIDE OF MY SLAPPIN' HAND

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As of press date, Good Rubbish's longstanding courtship with the moderately adequate people over at cafepress.com has come to an abrupt, and long overdue, end. I just couldn't validate spending $7 a month to run a shop on cafepress when competing websites offer better features, more products, and a more attractive and intuitive interface for the low low price of "free."

What competing websites, you ask? Well, zazzle.com is one, and... well, that's actually the only competing website I'm referencing here. Not coincidentally, zazzle.com is also where I've moved all of my crappy t-shirt designs to (though some cuts to the merchandise catalog have been made, as a fair number of my shirts had become entirely irrelevant and/or upon further inspection proved to be incredibly stupid).

So without further ado, please feel free to meander over to my shop on zazzle and check out the new digs. While you're there, be sure to take significant note of the piss poor html job I turned in when trying to center the good rubbish logo on my page. Beautiful!

For the record, zazzle.com as a website is pretty sweet. Compared to cafepress their selection of customizable products is absolutely massive, and the variety of ways you can customize shirt designs is pretty impressive as well, so if you're thinking of running off your own shirt designs I'd highly recommend them from a user interface standpoint (and they have a good money back guarantee on their products so I can only assume that the stuff they print is pretty decent quality-wise). My only grievance thus far is that they don't carry any red shirts. I mean really... 30 different shades of light blue, but no normal red? What fucking country do they thing they're catering to here, Bulgaria? Ridiculous.

In closing, I'm planning on really busting my ass on some projects this weekend, MAYBE even getting a couple finished, so hopefully over the next few weeks you'll be seeing posts coming at you once or twice every week instead of once or twice every month. Change? Yes it is, but change is good. An Afro-American President told me so.

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK

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Note: This is the first time in a good six weeks that I've tried to write anything of substance, so please excuse me if this post ends up being dryer than the back of Bea Arthur's ankles.

Greetings adoring public... long time sans sight, eh? Well, I assure you it's been a mightily eventful month and a half since I last blathered upon you, but most of the goings on are tied up in the enigmatic nature of my internal composition, so I'll spare you the intimate details and just provide the Cliffs Notes:

I did not end up getting my gallbladder removed, but don't let that fact fool you into believing that the little guy's decided to start working properly again. Also, last Tuesday I got laid off from my job. The end.

As you might expect, I'm none too excited about either of these facts, but they're mine to live with so I guess I'll... well, you know, live with them. The new found joblessness is of far greater concern for me than my gut problems, as I really am not sure how I can go about looking for work at this point. I've been on a detoxing diet for about a year now, and as a strange side effect I've grown ABSURDLY sensitive to perfumes and colognes, to the point that I can smell the perfume of someone entering my house from 2 doorways and a steep flight of stairs away before the front door even shuts behind them. Worse yet, instead of just getting a rash or a cough from exposure like a normal person, the effects of my being around perfumes goes directly to my brain, putting me in this really panicky/uber-irritable state that takes hours to wear off and can really do a number on my sleep.

I suppose it's kind of a neat trick, this super smelling of mine, but in terms of being capable of working in your run of the mill office building in America it's nothing more than a certifiable pain in the ass. I was very fortunate that at my last job none of the people I worked with were vain enough to carry around any scents other than Pert Plus and Dial soap; and even if someone was hired on who had a strong hand lotion or something like that, it was a small enough workplace that I could discreetly inform them of my hyperactive olfactory system, at which point they would politely express sympathy for my situation and return to work the next day not smelling like a taxi cab air freshener and/or Liza Minelli.

Will I have much luck in finding a virtually scent free working environment going forward? Seems unlikely, but certainly far more inexplicable things have occurred in the past (I'll provide the celebrity status of Dane Cook as exhibit A), so I'm not about to rule out the possibility. For the record, the over/under on "the number of times your boy Enron will walk into an office, encounter an interviewer who's draped in Liz Taylor's musk, then simply say 'nevermind' before sprinting out of the building" is currently set at 2.5 - place your bets accordingly.

Alright, that's enough bitching from me. I'd hate to see this once proud blog turn into a "please enjoy reading about all of my personal problems" website like the Drudge Report. Let's move on to something resembling a project, shall we?

PHASE 2: RONALD REAGAN REDUX

Frequent browsers of Good Rubbish may recall that a while back I crafted a Ronald Reagan shirt for my shop on cafepress. The response to this design has been lukewarm at best (assuming that "lukewarm" and "zero shirts sold" can be used interchangeably), but Artimus Mangilord, the oft-est referenced of all Good Rubbish's associates, was quite taken with the shirt's tagline, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear off this roof." He requested that a second shirt design be commissioned under this same tagline, this time featuring a more simplistic/less stupid image - that of Reagan's trademark "Dutch in a cowboy hat" photograph:



Now if I remember correctly, this request came in about 3 or 4 months ago, and I've been working on the design intermittently ever since. To call this image a real son of a bitch would be a gross understatement - simply put, I have never had so much trouble converting an image to black and white in all my life. Allow me to explain why, while simultaneously providing a tutorial on how to make your own spectacular black and white t-shirt designs that will sell slightly better than the plague...

The primary method I use for converting photos to black and white is the "threshold" filter in Adobe Photoshop, which takes a color photo and converts it into a 2 color image (if you have Photoshop and would like to know how to find this filter email me at goodrubbish@gmail.com, though bear in mind that my copy of Photoshop is quite literally 8 years old, so my instructions may not do you much good if you're using a less archaic piece of software).

Usually the threshold filter works just swimmingly, assuming that the photograph you're using is of a decent size. To provide an example, let's assume that I wanted to craft a t-shirt that would showcase the awesomeness of silver screen magnate Gary Busey, as shown in the following photograph:



7 seconds later, following an application of the threshold filter, that picture magically becomes...



Boom. Perfect. Now all I'd have to do is go in with the lasso tool to clean up the lines (this usually takes far longer than you'd expect), add a tagline for the image (perhaps "batshit motherfucking crazy" or simply "TEETH!") and I'd be ready to roll. Unfortunately, not all photographs make the threshold leap as cleanly as Dr. Busey just did. The classic "Dutch in a cowboy hat" shot just happens to be one of these photographs. Here's the closest it can come to being a decipherable image after applying the threshold filter:



Admittedly, you can still probably tell it's a picture of Reagan, but you can't tell that he's wearing a cowboy hat and it appears that he's either just crawled up from the set of Backdraft (has that pop culture reference become terribly obscure yet? If no, will it ever?) or he's going through a George Hamilton circa 2013 sized bout of melanoma. Either way, it doesn't appear to hold much relevance to the "Mr. Gorbachev, tear off this roof" line, now does it?

To combat this "cavernous abyss in the middle of Ronnie's face" problem, I had to chop the photo up into about 8 pieces, then run the threshold filter on each of those individual pieces (doing this allows me to add more light to certain areas of the picture and less light to others), then put those pieces back together over the original picture to create a complete and cogent (albeit a bit grainy) image. Observe:








Not perfect, but pretty decent considering the circumstances, right? Well this is the point I'd reached as of about 6 weeks ago - all that remained was for me to go back in and clean up all of the grainy shit on the picture to come out with a somewhat polished and only modestly disappointing end product. Unfortunately, this is where I stalled once more. There seemed to be no way to clean up all of the grainy pixelated crap on this photograph without losing all of the picture's character... every time I'd try I'd just end up creating a black and white picture of what appeared to be an extraordinarily wrinkled clown, and that really wasn't the image I was going for. That's when I experienced nothing short of an epiphany that may or may not have led to this project's long-awaited conclusion.

What was this epiphany? Did it in fact lead to this project's conclusion? How unapologetically does the final product in fact suck balls? Tune in next week for the thrilling answers to these and many other questions... you know, after I actually complete the work on this fucking thing.

SARAH PALIN QUOTES THE GENERAL PUBLIC: THESE SHIRTS ARE MEDIOCRE AT BEST

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A none too brief disclaimer: It's currently 12:38am on Friday the 19th of September, and I've been forced to use broken toothpicks to pry my eyelids open long enough to write this post. As such, I hope you'll forgive me if my syntax is more disjointed than normal and I spall srveral werds improperlymassivepenis.

Normally I'd just put this whole thing off until tomorrow, but unfortunately my boss (who is earnestly one hell of a guy, by the way... I feel the need to note this as I'm not entirely sure whether or not I ever forwarded him the address to this fine web destination of mine) felt obligated to work within the friendly confines of our almost comically small office today despite the fact that he was violently ill - a decision which directly resulted in my breathing in more airborne pathogens than most Cambodian poison control centers could provide. I am the mother of all coal mine canaries when it comes to infectious diseases, so I'd say that there's about a 97% probability that I'll wake up tomorrow feeling like miserable crap (despite my overindulgence in herbal tea this evening), and that would translate to a 99.99999% chance of my not getting this post done until next Monday, if not later.

Condensed translation: If I don't get this shit done now, it's not going to get done for a long time. So despite the fact that my brain is currently about as clear as a slab of concrete, we're going to press through this goddamn post, not because I'll be able to craft lucid and enjoyable zingers along the way (I almost certainly won't), but because it's what any good American would do, damnit.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled post, already sullied by overwhelming mediocrity:

You may not be aware of this, but apparently a few weeks ago the GOP selected this woman named Sarah Palin to run for the office of vice president alongside John McCain. And by that I of course mean "the GOP selected this jingoistic caricature of a woman to give Pentecostals a large enough collective hard on that they'd forget that they're actually voting for John McCain for President." Well, mission accomplished. Our good friend Sarah has rallied the base, belittled community leaders, and brought the cult of personality Republicans back from the farthest reaches of the American landscape, where I can only presume they spent the last 4 years keeping their ears plugged while people yelled "I told you so" at them for voting for George W. Bush in 2004.

"Whatevurr... he schhtill's a whole bunch bettur than whut Kerry woulda dun." Yeah, capital argument my good man, and considering how well the past 4 years have gone, it's one rife with validity and logic as well. Good show!

For the record, I have no problem with people who support economic conservatism, I merely have a problem with people who claim to support economic conservatism and yet still vote for the modern Republican party. Considering how the GOP has operated for the past 8 years, voting for that party because you don't like government spending is like cutting off your kid's fingers because you want him to clean his room or eating your own poop because you like the taste of filet mignon.

But I digress...

So this Sarah Palin character... I don't like her. Actually, it's more than that. I have never had such a bad feeling about a person in all my life as the feeling I have about Sarah Palin at this point in time. Forget crawling, that woman makes my skin enter a dead sprint. She has made me vow to tune out all news outlets from here until the election, as the mere introduction of a Palin sound byte into my daily routine can turn an otherwise peaceful day into a celebration of dis chord and cold sweats. She's like the political version of Star Jones for me, it's just not a good thing.

Anyway, I'm trying to refrain from spewing purebred vitriol at this point in my life, so when the urge came over me to write a searing, soaring, and entirely senseless diatribe about the woman, I decided I'd just make up a few shirt designs with her as the subject instead. A couple of weeks later (seriously, even with the aid of computers this woman's head is a pain in the ass to draw) I've got a few designs finished and ready for your approval. Truly, this could be one of the all time great moments in passive aggressiveness.

Also please note that these are for all intents and purposes rough drafts, so if you have some suggestions as to how to make them better please feel free to let me know

That said, these rough drafts should still be showing up soon in my shop on cafepress.com fairly soon. I'd get them up there tonight, but getting stuff set up on there is a remarkably large pain in the ass, so it probably won't happen until sometime late this weekend.

Without further ado...



This first design is really the ultimate representation of my feelings towards Sarah Palin. If you'd like to test this claim, feel free to approach me at any point during the day and say the words "Sarah Palin" as part of a sentence. That's the noise I'll make. "Uggh." It's a guttural knee jerk reaction, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Feel the same way? Then buy the fucking shirt. It's not a complex equation, my friend.



Another fine selection from my onomatopoeia collection, though this one is intended to have more to do with the widely propagated though absolutely ridiculous claim that Sarah Palin is some sort of certifiable sex symbol. Look people, this woman is not that attractive. Yeah, she's pretty by politician standards, but you could say the same thing about Rumer Willis, Chaka Kahn, and RuPaul. Take me to any suburban Colorado grocery store on a Saturday afternoon and I could direct you to no fewer than 18 40+ year old women that look just as good as Palin, if not far better (and depending on the neighborhood we're in, I'd probably feel safer with 17 of those women running the country instead of Palin).

In summation, here is my response to the "Palin is hot" allegations: "Eh." Eh at best. It's the ultimate in flaccid statements, and therefore it could not be more appropriate in regards to the subject matter.



This one's in response to the multitude of "DRILL BABY, DRILL!!!" chants that rained down on Palin, Guliani and McCain during the RNC. Yeah, that's another reason to feel really good about the prospect of another Republican administration: Not only will we rape the shit out of nature, we'll do it with massive doses of hubris! I just hope I can be there when the last wild polar bear dies from losing its habitat. Hopefully the nearby Inuits will be willing to start up a "USA!! USA!! USA!!" chant with me right then and there. That'd be kick ass. Then they could teach me how to fashion the polar bear carcass into a canoe. That'd be even better.



And with this design we have officially ventured into, "yeah... I don't know if this one's gonna work" territory. This is supposed to be a reference to Palin's repeated claim that she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the notorious "Bridge To Nowhere" that was being planned for construction in Alaska 2 years ago. Mind you, she not only makes this claim, but has turned this claim into one of her primary speaking points during her speeches, despite the fact that overwhelming evidence has arisen showing that she in fact did not say "thanks, but no thanks" to this "Bridge To Nowhere," but instead said something along the lines of, "Thank you most sincerely, kind sir, I would be quite interested in advocating for the construction of this thingy," then changed her position on it when she had no other choice but to do so.

You've got to hand it to the woman, politicians are renowned for their ability to lie, but you don't see many politicians who make lies (like this one, for example) the keynotes of their public addresses. That takes some serious sack.



I call this one, "dreadfully uninspired."



While I call this one, "awful isn't the right word... but this one could be funny as hell." If you have any suggestions on what this one SHOULD say, of course, I would love to hear them. I've always been a big fan of "more like" jokes. Selma Hayek? More like Sell My Kayak!!! Baaa ZING!

Alright, I am certifiably delirious from lack of sleep right now, and my throat feels like a ferret just spent the past 2 hours fashioning a bed out of it. Yep... I'd say that probability of waking up feeling like heinous crap tomorrow is now up to about 99.2%. Marvelous.

Enjoy your day, miscreants, for soon winter shall be upon us. The winter of our discontent? Perhaps, but I would prefer to refer to it as "the winter when you got that huge boil on your ass."

Yeah... that ending seems just about right for this time of night.

DESIGNER APPAREL FOR THE MODERN AUTOCRAT

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You ever buy a t-shirt that looks really cool, but then you wear it for a while and it really chaffs on your skin, so you rub some calamine lotion on your abrasions, but then a few weeks later your doctor tells you that you've got chlamydia? Lord knows I have.

Well let me assure you that none of my shirt designs, least of all the one I'm about to unveil, will cause such a predicament to befall you. In fact, many new age healers believe that Good Rubbish shirts, when properly wrapped around popsicle sticks and used as urethra swabs, are the most effective treatment available for severe chlamydia. Many new age healers also believe that that last sentence was the most horrible thing I've ever written.

Rest assured that this will be the last time I go to WebMD for inspiration on writing an intro. Just consider yourself lucky that I didn't go off on a 5 minute long tangent about nongonococcal urethritis. Seriously, I was THIS close to doing that.

(abrupt transition)

So I just finished up a new shirt design that should have all my homeboys from the Eastern Bloc scrambling for their rubles. It's something of an homage to my favorite tragic historical figure, friend of the people Leon Trotsky. Dig it:



Now who can argue with a message like that? You can find all the new merchandise here

For those of you who aren't familiar with Soviet history, Trotsky was Vladimir Lenin's right hand man during the October 1917 Bolshevik revolutions that overthrew the Russian monarchy, laid the foundation for the formation of the Soviet Union, and launched the career of Yakov Schmirnoff.

Unfortunately, following the death of Lenin and the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was forced to flee from the Soviet Union due to the fact that Stalin wanted to murder him (this was a common problem among Russians who weren't already incarcerated in forced labor camps). Eventually, while Trotsky was holed up in Mexico of all places, Stalin succeeded in his quest (from Wikipedia, and get ready to hold your sides, because this tale's a real knee slapper!):

On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was successfully attacked in his home by a NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader, who smashed the pick of an ice axe into Trotsky's skull.

The blow was poorly delivered and failed to kill Trotsky instantly, as Mercader had intended. Witnesses stated that Trotsky spat on Mercader and began struggling fiercely with him. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, shouting, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell." Trotsky was taken to a hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day, dying at the age of 60 on August 21, 1940 as a result of severe brain damage. Mercader later testified at his trial:

"I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head."

According to James P. Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Funny, huh??? Actually, it really isn't... I can think of few notable historical figures who have died in a more horrible manner than my homeboy Trotsky, but for whatever reason his death has become something of a punchline amongst history majors and scholarly types. Why? I don't know, probably because those people are the dregs of society. Damned history majors with their books and obscure references... honestly, where do they get off? Onto a 17th century painting of Queen Anne of Great Britian, that's where.

So yeah, considering all the man went through, I feel that the very least you could do would be to honor his memory by purchasing some crap with his head printed on it. Wouldn't you agree?

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COLD WAR APPAREL THAT SPITS HOT FIRE

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Ahh yes... it's time to present another fine addition to the Good Rubbish shop on cafepress. If you don't care to read my latest attempt at pooping on my keyboard, you can check out the spectacular product line here. We now return to our regularly schedule drivel:

I got a little overzealous with a wrenching-intensive project I was working on this afternoon, which has lead to my right hand becoming more bruised than a 3 week old banana. What, too tame? Would you have preferred some sort of unsettling child abuse joke? Well too bad, 'cause I'm not going there.

Anyway, my bruised hand has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but everything to do with my rushing through the composition of the writing found within. Injuries things take time to heal, typing makes my spindly woman-hands hurt, get over it.

For the past few weeks I've been working on this shirt design concept that came to me during one of my biweekly candlelight readings of old speech transcripts from the Reagan administration, though I'm sure I could have come up with this idea without those transcripts in hand, as it plays off of what is almost certainly Reagan's most recognizable quote from his 8 years in office: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

(direct quote roughly at the 1:55 mark)

CHARLTON HESTON, THOU ART MY SAVIOR

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As you've most likely heard by now, the honorable Charlton Heston (the greatest actor of any generation) passed away last Saturday night of complications from his being ludicrously old and completely nuts. But through his death there sprung new life, namely in the form of the single greatest piece of graphic design-like work that I will ever compose:



Seriously, I'll never top this. I'm not even kidding.

I've got this fine graphic plastered to a bunch of crap in my cafepress shop, so if you feel like wearing the single greatest piece of Heston paraphenalia in the history of mankind, head to http://www.zazzle.com/goodrubbish, click on the "An Ode to Heston" link, and then spend, damn you! SPEEEENNNND!!!!!

UGLY CRAP FROM GOOD RUBBISH NOW AVAILABLE AT CAFEPRESS.COM!

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I have to admit that I wasn't expecting it, but several otherwise rational human beings have informed me over the past couple of weeks that they would not only wear, but also purchase some of the shirt designs I've slapped together over the storied history of this fine blog.

Well my friends, it's time to put your money where your mouth once was, for Good Rubbish has officially established a home at cafepress.com (edit: We've now moved to zazzle.com): The online mecca for those who wish to procure stuff with stuff printed on it.

http://www.zazzle.com/goodrubbish

Be sure to add that fine link to your bookmarks, as that section of your web browser is pathetically barren. I know these things about you.



As of right now, my Kucinich designs (which have been cleaned, polished, and appointed with less banal typefaces) are the only ones available, but I'll be adding new stuff with some level of regularity (say every week or so... at least until I run out of ideas, which should be in about 2 weeks). I've never ordered any clothing from cafepress myself so I can't comment on how good their wearable stuff is, but Mother McHanslaw ordered a decorative tile from there some time ago and the quality was surprisingly excellent.

And just think, if you buy something off of the cafepress corollary to the Good Rubbish universe, you'll be putting 2 or 3 dollars directly into my pocket, a feat which has not been accomplished by a legitimate employer in... I don't know, like a million bajillion years. You have this power! Use it, you son of a bitch!

That is all,

-Enron

MR. GORBACHEV, MAKE ME THIS SHIRT

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They called me a one flop wonder, but they shall call me that no more. I have designed my second hideous t-shirt, one that makes considerably less sense than the first. To commemorate this momentous occasion (and as a preemptive measure, in case this "shirt design" thing becomes a regular thing here at Good Rubbish), I have created a section of this site exclusively dedicated to my marvelous printable Photoshop creations. Rejoice in this gift I have bestowed upon you my friends, and drink of this fruit drink I have provided, as it contains 7 vitamins and minerals essential to proper colon function.

Speaking of proper colon function... well, not really, but let's just pretend that transition works, I have created a shirt design starring the father of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan. It's a well documented fact that I find old Dutch to be the single most hilarious President of the modern era, and the second most hilarious President of all time trailing only William Howard Taft. Were it not for the famous bathtub incident, Reagan would likely carry the all time vote for me as well.

I have no real reason for finding Reagan so funny, especially considering the numerous poxes that his tax policies have brought upon this country, but I do. He's the presidential equivalent to Abe Vigoda for me - whenever someone brings up his name, I laugh. I can't help it.

Anyway, I was screwing around with an image of Reagan's head that I'm currently using for another project (that one should be arriving on Good Rubbish in the next couple of weeks), and ended up designing a t-shirt that made absolutely no sense, but as far as I can tell was still irrefutably hilarious:



Now obviously I could never get that printed on a shirt, as it violates about 897 different copyright and trademark regulations (but don't be surprised if my neighborhood Kinko's finds themselves printing that on a vinyl poster in the next couple of weeks here), but I still felt like there was potential for a really superb shirt here, so I played around with it for a while and came out with this:



A lovely piece, but unfortunately I realized shortly after finishing this up that the addition of that Republican elephant to his sweatband might have caused this image to actually have a message (that message probably being "vote for Republicans"). This simply would not do - I will not have cogent messages of any sort appearing in my meticulously pieces of crapwork, let alone messages that would lead innocents to the bosom of the GOP - so I nixed the elephant, leaving us with this lovely little ditty:



I will not lie to you, my reader: I adore this design. I adore this design so much that I might try to figure out how to get it printed, though I'm pretty sure using the phrase "just do it" is still treading pretty heavily in a gray area of copyright laws, but if you look on ebay for shirts featuring that phrase you'll see all sorts of janky non-Nike merchandise, so I might be in the clear here.

Naturally, if I figure out a good way to get my designs printed, I'll let you fine folks know. If you have any suggestions on how to get shirt printing done, please send me an email at goodrubbish@gmail.com

ALERT THE MEDIA: I HAVE DESIGNED AN UNDESIRABLE SHIRT

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He hasn't been a presidential candidate in weeks, but there's one title no one will ever, EVER be able to take away from Representative Dennis Kucinich: Original (muthafuckin) Gangsta.



I was thinking about running a couple hundred t-shirts with that design on them, but then I realized that I'd end up sitting on roughly 198 shirts. Aside from that, I don't have enough money to buy 100 shirts, let alone have shit printed on them. Really, this was just a poorly thought out scheme from the word go.



Something tells me this one has more marketing potential, as the public and media have blown the hotness of Kucinich's wife WAY out of proportion recently (I have no doubt that 15 years ago she was an absolute bombshell, but I'd need to down a lot of Geritol before I'd consider her a sex symbol in the here and now). Even so, I cannot argue against the fact that the man is a pimp in every sense of the word, excluding those senses that involve his managing prostitutes, mercilessly beating women, murdering Johns who fail to pay for sexual acts, and wearing over sized fedoras with peacock feathers in them. I just feel that the whole "so and so is a pimp" thing is beyond boring at this point, so I'm sticking with O.G. as my quasi-caption of choice.

Here's to Kucinich in 2012 and, time permitting, 2016! Give 'em hell and socialized medicine, Dennis!