Good (if fuzzy) memories associated with this one:
Another fantastic sold-out KWOD show, with Cake, Alien Ant Farm, Sum 41 and Tantric. I have no recollection of Tantric, but that’s more than likely entirely my own fault.
This was a weird show, due to it being the first big event we put on post 9/11. The attacks had only happened three months beforehand, and you may recall, almost everything scheduled for the Fall was cancelled. Bands stopped touring altogether, and everyone just went home to regroup.
Still, the geniuses in the KWOD promotions department thought what we all needed was a big-ass show, and a big-ass show is what they put together. Friend of the morning show, Wil Wheaton, came up from LA with his wife and son, as he is one of the world’s biggest Cake fans.
The real beauty of the deal, though, was that Mrs. Wheaton was wearing this shirt:
Of course Wil is best known for his roles as Ensign Wesley Crusher from Star Trek, and Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me. Now, even though Wil has been in lots of other stuff, and also writes one of the best blogs on the intarwebs, he’s got something of a nerdy image, which he rolls with. His wife told us she bought the shirt with that in mind.
We were kind enough to point out the other possible meaning of this three-word sentence. She was mortified.
While the show was being soundchecked and put on, I was running around with a huge backpack stuffed with liquor bottles, and functioning as the mobile bartender. Never, before or since, have I felt so useful.
Now, I’m under a lot of pressure here to really just nail this blog entry, because when Wil notices the dozen or so page hits he’s sure to get as a result of my readers clicking through, he’s going to come back to the source, to see what the hell is going on.
My good friend Bob gave me this one a few years ago, knowing as he does that I was born and raised in Ohio. The question remains, is the shirt a finely crafted piece of sarcasm disguised as a gift? Let’s examine this more closely.
Ohio is a fine place to grow up, and I have no complaints about it as an environment in which to come of age. That being said, even Buckeyes like myself rarely refer to it as “paradise.” Now, that probably owes itself more deeply to the fact that we are stoic, understated people not prone to boasting. True salt-of-the-Earth types. But I don’t know if Bob knows that, he’s Canadian.
Secondly, the drawing of the monorail passing in front of what looks like a housing project seems a little less than bucolic. I freely admit to there being abundance of housing projects in Ohio, and no small number near where I grew up. But I don’t recall ever seeing a monorail near one, and I’d like to think that I would have noticed.
That’s kind of a wash. So, let’s examine Bob, and maybe we can divine his motives.
Okay, he’s Canadian, not sure from what city, or even if they have cities there. Other highly suspect traits:
Lakers fan.
Yankees fan.
Michigan fan. Unforgivable.
Now, I know you’re thinking, “You’re friends with Hitler, and he calls himself ‘Bob’ now?”
Bob is a great guy, a true friend, but I’m guessing that like most immigrants from Canada, he got off the boat to America speaking no English, grew up in an awful neighborhood, and saw a lot of other immigrant Canadians slinging the rock, and wearing their completely cliche’ Lakers jerseys and Yankees hats. (Even drug dealers wouldn’t be caught dead in Michigan stuff. 3-9? BWAHAHA!)
I don’t think it’s Bob’s fault, is what I’m saying. He’s the product of an awful environment, and I’m hoping he’ll outgrow some of his degenerate tastes before he turns 40.
Not sure when this one arrived, I’m guessing maybe 2004.
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if Sobe still sells this product, but it’s not really my business to know. I do remember it being quite good, though. So, what I’m saying is, that if Sobe still makes it, I would gladly accept a free case of the stuff.
Hard to believe that I don’t have a bunch of paid endorsements, isn’t it? OK, this is my big chance.
Do you have a business that needs shameless pimping by one of the top 100 radio personalities in Sacramento? Could your product benefit by the heartfelt endorsement of Sacramento’s Most Trusted Local Celebrity™ (according to a survey due out next year, maybe)? Look no further.
Andy Sims is your guy.
I have the honesty and integrity to call myself out for being an a-hole for just having referred to myself in the third person. It is exactly this sort of “realness” that allows me to communicate with everyone from jaded Gen Xers, to corpulent Baby Boomers, brain-damaged teens, and everything in between and beyond.
Couldn’t your business benefit greatly from associating itself with a never-once convicted, married, father of two reasonably well-adjusted children? (No, you may not meet them.) Of course it could!
Here’s the thing: I’d like to buy a house some day. And even though home prices and interest rates are at a low for the decade (amirite Pro City Mortgage?), I could definitely use a little help in the old income department. The kids might want to go to college after they graduate high school. I’m not going to go so far as to say I’m desperate, but I honestly can’t think of a thing that I wouldn’t gladly lend my weighty credibility to. You think I’m lying?
I fully endorse this hoodie! It’s 100 percent cotton, and some wool. It has a hood and drawstrings so that you can close it so tightly that you don’t notice that you’re married to a snowmobiling douchebag. It will not function as a contraceptive device for your promiscuous daughter, but it will hide a teen pregnancy through the 5th month.
Yay, Sarah! You’re hot! And it’s neat how your state gets more money from the federal government than any other! When you are president, I hope you will do for all states what you’ve done for Alaska, such as make them non-contiguous, like and, such as.
See how good I am at this? For more information about how to hire me to sell your product, contact:
Andy Sims’ boss, 916.334.7777. And be cool, he gets 20% of everything I make.
How many shirts do I own promoting movies that I haven’t seen? Gotta be dozens:
I don’t even know what this movie is about to be honest, but the title reminds me of something that happened back in 2004. I wrote thusly:
This morning, for the first time in nearly four years, I went to the doctor for a physical. The reason for the delay, naturally, is that I spent most of that time as one of the 45 million uninsured citizens of the world’s wealthiest nation, which is run by people who claim to be attempting to be Christ-like. Still trying to get that one to jibe. Anyway…
I made this appointment three months ago. That was the delay, three months. But I figure, it’s an initial visit to a new doctor, and it’s going to take a little extra time, which is good. Any number of things on me may be failing, and I am prepared to take the time to see what they might be. My appointment was for 8am.
I arrive at 7:45, like a reasonable human being. I pay up front (naturally), and I sit my ass down. At 8:05, a fat old guy walks in, exchanges pleasantries with the receptionist, and breezes straight back to see a doctor. After all. he had an 8am appointment, too. Same thing with an older woman that wandered in. Well fine, they seem healthy, but maybe they really have a more urgent problem. Go ahead!
At 8:25, I am summoned back by a pretty Asian lady, who I believe was a resident doctor in training or something. So, I get weighed and measured, and head back to the little room. She checks my blood pressure and pulse, which incidentally were not relayed to me, the f-ing patient. The doctor finally comes in and we exchange brief pleasantries.
“How ya doing?”
“Fine, I guess. You tell me.”
“When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
“Dunno. Guess it’s been too long, then.”
“Ya want one?”
And she’s looking at me the same way you would if you were asking someone if they wanted a Coke or something.
I opt for the tetanus shot.
She tells me to get undressed, but to leave the underwear on. I’m not old enough yet for the really fun part of a physical examination, apparently. So, I change into a nice blue gown thing, and sit down on the table and wait.
She and the pretty resident return, and she gets out the scope thing with the light that they use to look in your ears and mouth. She’s complaining to the resident about how small some of these rooms are, and about some other person that I don’t know. She looks in both ears with the scope, then into my mouth. Let me correct that. She stuck the scope in my ears and mouth, but she was bitching the whole time, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually look at anything. Having been to the doctor before, they usually look at your pupils too, but not today. She keeps moving, and asks if I have any moles on my back. I resist the urge to ask how the fark I would know if I had anything on my back, but I just shrug. She takes a look, and I infer that I am mole-free.
“Lay down.”
So, I ease back onto the crinkly paper, and she starts pushing on my feet, right along the big toe. That’s a new one for me. In the past, I have always preferred to use internists, as they seem to be better trained, but for some reason this time, I have a general practitioner. But at least she’s pushing on my big toe.
She moves up the leg to the abdomen, pressing down in spots, which at least is a familiar procedure. I don’t know what they are looking for, but they all look for it. Next, feel around the neck and jaw for lymph node issues, but I guess I’m clean.
“Stand up.”
I stand up, and it’s hernia check time, also known as turn-your-head-and cough. However, I still have the drawers on as directed. She yanks them down to my knees and manhandles my nuts to the extent that I am still sore. I turn my head and cough, amused at the idea of the pretty Asian doctor in training having to get a good look at my junk. In retrospect, she couldn’t have been too hot, because my doctor was in no danger of having her eye poked out or anything.
Ten seconds later, they’re barrelling out the door.
“You doing any blood work today, Doctor?” I ask.
“Have you eaten today?”
“A little bit.”
“You’ll have to come back.”
Now again, I made this appointment THREE months ago. They called me yesterday to remind me, and no one mentioned fasting, or I’m pretty sure I’d have done just that. Why visit twice?
So, she heads out, mentioning that someone would be back in a minute to give me a tetanus shot. I look at my watch, and it’s now 8:35.
So, I change back into my clothes and wait. Apparently, my visit with a medical doctor for a physical is over. Now, I had mentioned up front that I had not had a physical in at least four years. In spite of that, I get no chest X-ray, no EKG, no EEG, and of course, no blood work. Frankly, I got as thorough of an examination when the team doctor checked me out before baseball season. There was no inquiry as to whether anything was bothering me, or if had any pain or anything else that I might be concerned about. Honestly, it was a complete waste of time.
So finally, at 9am, someone notices the door has been shut for awhile, and asks if anyone had been in to give me a tetanus shot yet.
“Why would I still be sitting here if I had been given a shot and summarily dismissed?”
Five minutes later, a nurse comes in and asks me which arm I want the shot in. I reply that at this point, I really don’t care. The left arm is closest, so in goes the needle. I am thrilled, because I finally feel like I have had some sort of medical procedure. It occurs to me as she slaps on a band-aid that I could have gone to the free clinic to get a tetanus shot and a hernia check, and I’d have saved a fifteen dollar copay, and possibly some time as well.
Maybe I just picked a bad doctor this time, or maybe things have just gotten a lot worse since I was last able to afford medical care. I know that the doctor makes less money if they do more tests on patients, but I honestly believe that most people get into the medical field because they want to help people. I have no problem with doctors making a lot of money. Who should make more money than doctors and teachers? I can’t think of anyone. But this doctor was not interested in treating me at all, only getting me in and out, having someone file the paperwork, and on to the next meatbag. It’s pretty discouraging.
So, that’s what this shirt made me think about today.
The Murmurs were two chicks from the Village who made music in the 90s, and had a small amount of success with a song called “You Suck” which was pretty much every bit as good as you imagine it.
The video for the song was forgettable, but I do recall watching it and thinking, “I wonder if they’re lesbians?” But then I lost interest again. And here we are.
There is nothing like a new free shirt to get the juices flowing:
And not creative juices, either.
You may recall that our first attempt at the special holiday edition KWOD t-shirt was highly successful, although it did have a typo on it. We wanted to have it say “KWOD Party SKWOD” and they actually read “KWOD Party SWOD.” Now, while we freely admit that “SKWOD” isn’t a real word, it serves as a delicious pun on our name. And as you can see, we have corrected it for the Cinco de Mayo edition.
Unfortunately, we decided to make the SKWOD “offical” this time, with similarly disastrous spelling results.
We will be out tonight, cruising around, stealing your food, dropping off these extremely limited edition t-shirts, and just enjoying fun and fiesta here in Sacramento.
This is another one I recently found buried away, that I’m pretty sure I haven’t worn in 5 or 6 years. Cleaning up is a real goldmine when it comes to turning up free shirts. But what the hell is it?
I’m assuming this is a band t-shirt, but the only artist I could find is some outfit from London, and they don’t use the umlaut in their name, so I don’t think it’s them.
So, the larger question here, “Is there any t-shirt that you won’t wear?” Let me tell you about my personal holy grail.
To this day, one of my all-time favorite music videos is “Hold It Now, Hit It” by the Beastie Boys. It looks like it was shot on a handheld camera one afternoon while the three of them were hungover as hell, and it’s just spectacular. But the real nugget of joy in the video is Mike Diamond’s t-shirt.
It’s tough to see in this crap-ass screen capture, but his t-shirt has a bottle of Tide detergent on it. How cool is that? I’m assuming that it was one of those free promo items that his mom probably got back in the 1970s for mailing in 5 proof of purchases for Tide, powder or liquid, now with color-safe bleach. And as bitchin’ as it is, and as badly as I want one, it got me to thinking:
What would be even better?
I am confident that at some point, the Wyeth company, first formed as American Home Products in 1860, must have kicked out some free t-shirts for one of their products. Specifically, I am interested in one that first hit the market in 1935:
Oh, sure. I could just buy a box, go down to Old Sac, hit one of the t-shirt shops, have them scan it and put the image on a t-shirt for me. BUT THAT WOULD GO AGAINST THE VERY PRINCIPLE OF THE THING.
I would also probably end up with some taffy and a parking ticket for my trouble, but no, I say! NO! A t-shirt must come to me organically, or not at all. I am not going to play God, and just make a t-shirt! If The Island Of Doctor Moreau has taught us nothing, and it hasn’t, because I never saw it because it sounded really stupid, it’s that Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando probably made that movie just for the dough, and that Fairuza Balk is hot.
Anyway, The Craft had a pretty good soundtrack, but I never saw the movie.
I dug deep in the t-shirt vault, and found one I don’t think I’ve worn in at least five years:
This one dates all the way back the the Fall of 2002, when Boomer from the old KWOD morning show decided that we needed to adopt a local high school football team. And not one of the perennial powerhouses like Nevada Union or Grant. We wanted a team that was winless on the season, and the team we settled on was the 0-5 Dixon Rams.
Boomer did a little research, discovered that the Rams were being coached by the legendary Tom Crumpacker (CRUMPACKER!), made a few calls, and KWOD started rallying support on the air, and organizing listeners to join us at Dixon’s games.
A few more losses piled up, but in the 8th or 9th game of the year (I forget which), the Rams went out and kicked the asses of some other Nor Cal team, and a celebration the likes ofwhich hasn’t been seen since the days of Caligula ensued. To be honest, I don’t remember what happened after that.
It was a lot of fun getting into the spirit of high school football after so many years, and we may have to try that again in the fall. I’ll be needing some more t-shirts by then, I figure.
I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot to say about this shirt, but at least I know exactly when I got it:
400k refers to “wafer moves” which has to do with…
You know what? It’s not interesting, and wouldn’t live up to the high quality you’ve come to expect from this blog about free t-shirts I’ve received since attaining adulthood. I briefly considered taking the shirt off and taking a high-res shot of my nipple, but I haven’t worked out since attaining adulthood, and it ain’t pretty. Well, they aren’t pretty, stated more accurately.
