The highly litigious atmosphere of modern-day America makes me wonder how good of a name Insanely Great Tees is for a store. I mean, yes, their tees (which happen to cater to a Mac-friendly audience) are great. In fact, they are very great. I would go as far as to say that they are fantastically great. However, have I actually been driven to madness by the sheer greatness of their tees? I think not! Indeed, each day I roll out of bed with the giddy hope that maybe—just maybe—this is the day I snap; the day that I realize I’m being hounded by some secret conspiracy, perhaps masterminded by an unholy race of sentient toaster-ovens, or the abstract concept of “impermanence”, or the color green.
Anyway, my point is that anyone who hasn’t been driven insane by their tees has a ready-made lawsuit to go, based upon the pretense of false advertising! And anyone who has been driven insane… well, they’re probably too busy doing insane things to bother buying a shirt. This, my friends, is what we call a Catch 22.
Putting those concerns aside for the moment (because as concerned as I am, it’s for the friendly folks at Insanely Great Tees to handle—not me), I would like to direct you to the two new offerings being served at their store. On the one hand, you’ve got The Formula:
It’s a simple, lovely little homage to the creative process. After all, who isn’t intimately familiar with this formula in one way or another?
On the other hand, you have Apple Timeline:
Whereas the former shirt caters to pretty much anyone who’s ever had to create or invent under a deadline, this one probably only appeals to a very specific demographic—namely, die-hard Mac users.
I personally started using my PowerBook a little over two years ago, and although I’ve had some unfortunate hardware issues with it1, I’ve been quite pleased with the Mac experience as a whole. I’m by no means exclusively sticking to Macs for the rest of my days, but I do plan on keeping a Mac somewhere in my life for the foreseeable future. Now, wearing an Apple timeline across my chest might be stretching my own brand-loyalty a little thin 2—but I just know there are plenty of people out there who would wear this shirt, and proudly.
Oh, and did I mention that they’ve also got a “Buy Two, Get One Free” holiday sale going on right now? Because they do. You can use the coupon code “giftpack” to take advantage of it!
Link: [Insanely Great Tees]
Expensiveness: $17
1 One of my RAM slots turned out to be busted, and my display got all banged up—erm, I mean, it’s built character
2 Though I have, from time to time, been know to wear vaguely similar t-shirts as a means of demonstrating my support for companies I love.
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The secret ingredient in the formula wouldn’t happen to be hot chocolate would it? Otherwise I’m doomed to an inspiration-free life.
Can you not have chocolate? If that’s the case, then don’t worry—you’re really not missing out on much. Chocolate happens to be the Most Overrated Foodstuff Ever.
At any rate, my natural inclination is to say it’s coffee, and by metonymy, caffeine. Thus, you can look forward to a happy and inspired existence.
Sorry I didn’t make it clear. No coffee enters this temple –well, except for the occasional social sip.
But this mug of hot chocolate is really hitting the spot right now.
BTW — had to look up “metonymy”. Great word!
Yeah! I learned the word in my high school Latin class. It’s pretty sweet.
And now I see how I misinterpreted your comment. Oops. I am a non-coffee drinker as well, so I sympathize.
I think caffeine is synecdoche for coffee, in the normal use (i.e., non-Terence Turner) of the word. Part for the whole and all that, right? Metonymy for coffee would be… brew, perhaps? Or cup? Since you brew coffee, and it is served in a cup.
My point was that coffee may be metonymy for caffeine (or perhaps more accurately, caffeinated beverages in general). I checked it out on Wikipedia, and I feel like this usage is fairly analogous to some of the examples they give at the bottom.
Have to agree with Greg on this one. A synecdoche for coffee (or, more than likely, tea) would be the British term, “cuppa.” Or, in America, we might say, “Can I pour you a cup?”
So did you both have the same high school Latin teacher?
I’m not smart enough to participate in this comment session.
Other British slang for tea: brew, cha, builders. Cuppa is almost never used to refer to coffee, “Fancy a cuppa?” would always result in a tea. Not that I’m biased against coffee.
Eden: we actually did have the same Latin teacher! I agree that ‘coffee’ would be metonymy for ‘caffeine’, but ‘caffeine’ would be synecdoche for ‘coffee’. I think the most interesting one so far is ‘cup’ or ‘cuppa’ for something, because not only is the cup actually contiguous with the substance you’re referring to, but in English (and lots of other languages) you use ‘cup of…’ to chop up what would otherwise be a mass noun (’coffee’) into countable units (’10 cups of coffee, please!’ but not ‘10 coffees, please!’ under most circumstances). So I guess you could argue that the cup is actually an intrinsic part of the coffee?