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When I saw that the Homestar Runner Store was selling this shirt, I knew I should get it.  My original excuse was because I didn’t want to wear a costume for Halloween but I did want to do something special to acknowledge the “holiday” (although work didn’t count it as a “costume”, not surprisingly).  It’s in that spirit, of course, that I turned to the experts of Halloween, the folks at HomestarRunner.com for inspiration (and merchandise):

For those who are not so well-versed in the Homestar Runner canon, the Bad Graphics Ghost first appeared in sbemail 48, where Strong Bad’s old Apple II-style computer haunts him.  The ghost is replicated in beautiful blocks on the front of this shirt, with an amazingly simple BASIC program below it:

Let’s see… Geeky. Check. Homestar-related. Check. Halloween-related.  Check.

Another fun shirt, and if you’re not up to speed with Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, get into it.

Finally!  I’ve been a huge fan of Jars of Clay for over a decade and it took me until August 2008 to get a Jars of Clay T-shirt!  But it’s a beauty:

Plus, I got it during one of the best mini-vacations ever - a whirlwind weekend to Chicago to hang out with two of my sisters and see a bunch of my favorite bands!  In late August, my sister and I traveled to Chicago to meet my sister who goes to college in nearby South Bend, Indiana.  (We took the Megabus from Minneapolis, which is a very cost-effective way to get to Chicago from many places in the midwest.)  That evening, we caught a stop on the Music Builds Tour, which featured Jars of Clay, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, Switchfoot and Third Day, possibly one of the most amazing lineups in my rather short music history.  It was great to see the Jars guys rockin’ it onstage since the last time we’d seen them was in 2002.  Robert Randolph and hte Family Band rocked the place like only they can and brought a bit of Gospel flavor as well.  Switchfoot, of course, put on an amazing and inspiring show and all the bands came back for a synergistic encore.  Oh, and did I mention that it was outdoors on Lake Michigan on a beautiful August day?  That too!

The shirt, as you can probably tell, is gray and has the outline of the word “Jars of Clay” on it with some little bird figures.  It’s rock and roll and kinda pretty at the same time.  And now, I support one of my all-time favorite bands via my favorite art form: T-shirts.

Today’s shirt is a nice, black look at retro gaming.  And thanks to my terrible camera work in the bathroom mirror, it looks even cooler because the motion applied while taking the photo gives the illusion of a drop shadow:

Yes, the words “GAME OVER” are printed in a large, pixelated font destined to remind classic gamers of their favorite Atari or original NES games.  And then, it also says (in standard white text) the creators of the shirt: thinkgeek.com, the central place for all products geeky and cool.

For those who don’t know, ThinkGeek has lots of great products, although they usually are a bit pricey.  Back in the day, I outfitted myself with this shirt as well as a couple others.  Also, you can get ties, mini-copters, airsoft guns, marshmallow guns, action figures, knives, sporks, squids, lots of clocks, batteries, tape players, caffeine, phones, and much more.  It’s tons of geeky fun.

Today’s shirt is one of my favorites - the ILikeAndy.com T-shirt.  Most say that my shirts are pretty unique, but this one is probably one of the most unique, mostly because it was a limited-run shirt from an independent artist.  It’s totally rock ‘n’ roll.

Andrew Osenga is an independent singer-songwriter and is the former leader of the band The Normals, everyone’s favorite band from Normal, Illinois.  He also currently plays as a member of Christian folk super-group Caedmon’s Call, who I like to think of as the Main Street Singers of Christian music.  (I won’t keep the A Might Wind analogies rolling, because I think it’s a bit too early to call Amy Grant and Gary Chapman the genre’s Mitch and Mickey.  Just to clarify, if you get all those references, you’re too much of a Christian music geek, just like me.)

The shirt has an interesting history.  Apparently, a couple years before the shirt was made, Andrew Osenga lost a toe while mowing the lawn.  That’s hardcore!  And he had enough spirit to make an awesome-looking, random, “vintage” T-shirt out of it.

Half the reason I purchased this shirt is because I love supporting independent artists and I’ve always liked Andy’s music.  But, the other half is because I love innovative Internet marketing, and buying a domain like ILikeAndy.com and pointing it to your site is fun marketing.  Whenever someone asks what the shirt is about, I always direct them to go to the site and check out his music - there’s tons of free Andrew Osenga on there, including the free Letters To The Editor EP.  So, seriously, check it out.

Today’s shirt is the Switchfoot tour shirt:

It’s a pretty nice shirt.  I don’t usually buy those shirts with all the tour dates on them, because it severely dates the shirt.  However, this one was a bit better because it just lists the cities and not the dates, plus it had the coolest front of any of their shirts.

I got this shirt at last fall’s St. Paul, MN stop of the Appetite for Construction tour.  I remember enjoying this show alot because Relient K played for a good hour or more and it was so good that I almost forgot that I still had Switchfoot left to go.  Of course, Switchfoot brought just as much excitement, variety, and rock ‘n’ roll as Relient K, if not more.  It was a great tour and a great pairing of some of my favorite bands.

Also, it became another meetup of one of my friends, Kim, who works a lot on the inReview.net website.  Kim started helping out at what was then cMusicWeb.com in 2001 by doing our first interview with Switchfoot, and she’s been doing interviews ever since.  She was in town to visit family last fall when the Appetite for Construction tour came through, so she joined me for the concert.  It was fun to hang out and enjoy some live music again, something we hadn’t done since we finally met in person in April 2006.  Without Kim’s constant help, there definitely wouldn’t be a website.

Kim also encouraged me to get a really cool book of photos taken by one of Switchfoot’s roadies, and she even introduced me to the photographer and we got it signed by them.  Then, after that, i decided to go through the signing line after I found this hilarious poster and absolutely needed to get it signed:

For those who have not seen Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, this photo is a parody of a photo of the characters from that movie.  Throughout the photo, each member of Switchfoot is represented one or more times.  It’s hilarious!

OK, so I’m already breaking one of my rules for the T-shirt blog posts.  I’m not currently wearing this shirt.  But, this is one of my more rarely worn shirts, the delirious? jersey:

Just in case it’s not immediately apparent, this is an actual soccer jersey made by a company in Brazil.  (This is one reason why I don’t wear it often, because that type of fabric feels weird to me.)  It has a UK logo and a red stripe on the front as well as the “delirious?” and “d:” logos, plus a “DELIRIOUS?” and “5″ on the back.  This is one of my most prized shirts, partially because I bought it directly from the UK webstore for a bit more money than I usually spend on a shirt, and partially because it’s my all-time favorite band.  (I also don’t wear it much because it’s a bit small for me, to which one of my roommates remarked, “Dan, most of your shirts are a bit too small for you.”)

I mostly wear this shirts to concerts, mostly because those are special events.  I wore it last week to the Music Builds tour in Chicago, where Switchfoot, Third Day, Jars of Clay and Robert Randolph & The Family Band rocked the ampitheater.  (Incidentally, I also got another shirt which looks like it’ll be rather tight on me, my first T-shirt ever from Jars of Clay, who are one of my favorite bands as well, but that’s another blog post.)  The show was great, and I got to spend the weekend with my two youngest sisters.

However, today, August 30th, is also an important day on the delirious? calendar.  Here’s a clip from their biography on h2g2:

The next major event, although horrific, shaped the history and gave us Delirious? as they are today. On August 30, 1995, Martin was driving his wife Anna, and Jon (Anna’s youngest brother) home from a late night gig. They’d almost reached Littlehampton when they had an accident - as a result of tiredness from the long journey, Martin fell asleep and drove the car straight into a wall just around the corner from his house. Jon and Anna escaped with minor injuries but it took the rescue workers a few hours to get Martin out of the car, and it took a couple of months for Martin to rehabilitate in hospital as he had suffered a broken leg. During this period he spent a lot of time on his own thinking things through. He also read Bill Flannagan’s U2 at the End of the World, and this inspired him into a decision, to which the others agreed. They found a bassist - Martin’s brother-in-law Jon (In fact, he’s Tim and Stew’s brother-in-law as well. Confused yet?) - and on April 1, 1996, Delirious?, and their own independent record label Furious? Records, was born.

A song based on this part of the delirious? history is the song “August 30th” and is on their King of Fools album.  It is a rather terrible event to remember, but it’s likely that without that experience the band would probably never have became a full-time band and would have just stayed a church worship band.

Today, I’m starting off a new feature. Every couple days (or whenever) I will post a T-shirt that I currently own and am actually currently wearing. (The picture may have been pre-recorded, though, on account of not carrying around a good camera at all hours of my life.) I’ll post a couple comments on the shirt and then give you a little background on where it came from. And just to make sure I can outdo myself, I’m going to do one of my most boring shirts first! Without further ado, here’s the first one:

Yes, this shirt was purchased at my alma mater, the University of St. Thomas. Shortly before graduating, I received a gift certificate from my work-study employer for the UST Bookstore, so I figured I should by some UST merch (besides my uber-cool, limited-edition UST hat). Therefore, I purchased a couple T-shirts that just say “University St. Thomas” in big letter on the front. I usually wear these on pretty boring, low-key days because I’m not that huge of a fan of my alma mater, although I made the best of it.