"first came the universe, then came the university to explain it."

Get out the vote for Threadless T number 3!

"what are you doing right now?"

Threadless #2 pays homage to Twitter and Facebook status updates, and a question special enough to warrant submitting to Threadless for printing a t-shirt. So special, in fact, that someone had already submitted it. Boo. My next (and actual) submission forthcoming.

"it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there."

My first ever Threadless T. I've been racking up ideas for too long, and I'm finally submitting them. Submissions will be posted here, so you (my imaginary audience) can vote on them. It might be obvious, but just in case: this first one is joking about how dropping out of Harvard is almost becoming a virtue, an indicator of future success, something to brag about. It specifically references Harvard-dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but pays broader tribute to other fantastically successful college-dropouts, like Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Ok fine, and Eminem. So as part of your pitch, you'd tell the VC, “it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there.” A surefire way to get your startup funded. I was pretty amused, but it didn't do super well with the Threadless crowd. Heh.

New submissions will be posted on Sundays. (Another one coming tonight.) Vote here!

ping pong song

Dropping a shitload of ping pong balls on a resonant floor and waiting for mayhem to become total stillness would make a nice soundtrack for a dance, intense scene in a movie, or layer in a musical composition.

feeding tweets to the text-hungry

There's a whole heap of things that feed on short snippets of somehow-interesting text: fortune cookies, teabag tags, bumper stickers, Threadless T's, Better Place's 10-word minifestos, etc. Meanwhile, Twitter relentlessly spits out snippets that are 140 characters or less. (Not that all tweets are interesting, but some of them are designated as favorites.) So why not feed the latter to the former, i.e. use somehow-interesting tweets as fortune cookies, etc.? Create a feed of just favorite tweets, and you'll have a bunch of awesome slogans for Threadless T's.

functional condoms

In the past x years, we’ve seen a y% growth in the consumption of functional foods, which Wikipedia defines as foods with “health-promoting and/or disease-preventing property beyond the basic nutritional function of supplying nutrients.” So how about functional condoms, which help you lose weight, supply your daily dosage of anti-oxidants, and/or ward off that nasty flu while giving head? Yea but whotf gives head while the condom is on? Listen - if there’s a market for flavored condoms, there’s just might be a market for functional ones.

script your etiquette

While visiting my Lover-at-the-time in New York this past January, I took him to the Veselka Diner for a performance by the Foundry Theatre called Etiquette. It’s a performance for 2 audience members, in which the 2 audience members are the performers. We sat at a table for two on which were placed numerous props, and were given a set of headphones that gave us instructions. I was told to knock over the chess piece, and he was told to bring tears to his eyes with the liquid dispenser; he was told to write something on the piece of paper, and I was told to take the note and put it in my back pocket (…only to rediscover it days later, presumably part of the intention). It turned out he was an old man in Paris and I was a prostitute and I don’t remember the rest of the story but essentially we had a very personal, albeit scripted, interaction. And I think this could be applicable to couples therapy: script the interaction you need to have but are not having, and then have it.