Designing artist t-shirts is good, mkay

OK, slow week, been insanely busy with mundane office stuff … still, have a few pieces of local idocy to report … never any shortage of mouthbreathing here.

“I get in more trouble in my front yard than in a beer joint.”–local man, requesting the Council to “do something about” his “white-trash neighbors.”

Said in open meeting, soo, it’s fair game.

This is an old one, but it’s (former chief justice and all-around dipshit) Roy Moore, so it never goes out of style.

“A person is never biased by abiding by the law,” (Moore) said. “The law in Alabama says that sodomy is against the law.”

–Chief Justice Roy Moore, quoted in AP story. In addition to being poorly put, the above statement is wrong. “Sodomy” between consenting adults has been legal in Alabama since the mid-1980s.

Though someone else did point out:

Actually, it’s legal between married adults. If you are not married, you are breaking the law — but only if you get caught. Also, keep in mind, the great state of Alabama defines sodomy as just about anything fun — pretty sure slip-n-slides and beer fall under that category. The state also legally defines several people in a room with their shoes off and being in an orgy, go figure.

Still, why should anyone care what two consenting people do in the privacy of their own home. Again, the government is spending way too much time — and tax dollars — worrying about what is going on in people’s pants.

This is another outtake from one of our local council meetings:

“He’s basically a butthole.”

– Mayor talking about an engineer for the Department of Transportation who has given the town a hard time in its past attempts to get traffic lights, signs and lowered speed limits on a highway here. Hooray for Robert’s Rules of Order. Also for the court rulings making just about anything said in a government meeting public domain.

Now, just a shout out to all the spammers eating up my time and space on the Art Life Collective custom t-shirt designer’s forum: I hope you all die on my birthday.

Oh, and here is the Art Life Collective t-shirt design for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Boston Bomb Farce

It’s a basic rule of being a petty criminal — or any criminal — don’t sign your name at the crime scene. Again, it’s basic sense — just like don’t eat yellow snow.

However, as I ahve mentioned here again and again, we have a special brand of stupid infecting local criminals.

First up, we have someone — actually several someones — who have taken to defacing public property. The city, as part of a revitalization and renewal project, has been pouring new sidewalks all over town. About a week ago, someone started writing their name, nothing creative, more a Billy Bob loves Jo Ellen, sort of thing, framed with gang symbols in the wet cement. They have been doing it in the afternoons, so by the time the work crews find it the next day it has already set. That requires that the cement be ground down and repoured, no small task.

Unfortunately for the criminal, he used his real name and that of his girlfriend. But wait — just to make things easier on the investigators, it’s also the name he has on the vanity tag on his car. Police had no trouble finding him. He made their job even easier since, the second day he went out to leave is wanna-be tag in the cement, he did so only about a block down from where the street crew was pouring sidewalk in cement they had just put down.

Dude gets to go to jail. Even though his crime is a misdemeanor, he will probably get some real time here, at least a few months, since he is already out on probation for something else.

Now, we have several copy cats doing the same thing, on the same street. Even though the local paper has pointed out the city is going to prosecute for this, the new crowd learned nothing from their retard tagging idol. They too are using their real names.

Moving right along.

In a more serious crime, a couple of years ago, we hade a double homicide, a sort of driveby type crime that involved shooting into a car. Now, Alabama has made it a death penalty crime when a murder is committed by firing into or from a motor vehicle — this is an attempt to stem drive-bys and car jackings.

Investigators quickly had a suspect, but it took some work to get him here, since he fled to California. Eventually he was caught in a really basic manner, something like a traffic stop, and extradited back to Alabama. Now, word on the street is he may have sealed his fate. While on the West Coast, he put down an amature hip-hop album … where he bragged, in some detail, complete with names, about committing the murders.

Needless to say, there is something amazing about that level of stupid. Does it count as a Darwin award if the individual in question eleminates himself from the gene pool by getting the death penalty for something like this? It should.

Now, it’s time to make fun of Boston. I saw the photos, lots of them, of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads that caused all the bomb scare rucus. What a bunch of crap. The things looked like Lite Brites. By the description the district attorney and other law enforcement and government gerbils are using, I would be afraid to throw out an old VCR for fear of bringing the city to a standstill. Everyone says this is a post 9-11 era and things have changed.

Well, that’s just a huge pile of crap. Sept. 11, 2001 did not turn Americans into pussies. Sorry. It just did not happen. Though apparently, a lot of people in Boston seem to be way to tightly wrapped. There was no local angle to the story, so, as much as I wanted to, I could not justify writing that editorial.

Still, I’m a constitutionalist (tend to piss of liberals and conservatives on an equal basis, sometimes just for fun). So I came home and created a couple of custom shirts for our Art Life Collective project that should piss of exactly the right kind of people. The first shirt points out that people in Boston who raised such a fuss are a bunch of mouth-breathers. The other, an ATHF Bomb Squad shirt, should take care of anyone else I missed.

Just an aside, I’m sorry Anna Nicole died. I also don’t think it is news and am not going to let it run on our front page unless told otherwise by my superiors. Some news outlets still have integrity.

Ok,

My dad said, when he found out I was going into journalism, “You are not going to become one of those cynical reporters, are you?”

I just looked at him. Have to admit, after dealing with some of the smegma that passes for humanity, I do find myself getting a bit frustrated. Cynicism is the least of my worries, misanthrope is more like it.

And, though it appears to be more rampant locally, corruption and stupidity are becoming a genetic component of our species everywhere.

For instance:

‘‘We can’t go through a whole year of misery for the sake of accountability.’’ — Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, at news conference outlining priorities of Legislature’s Black Caucus for remainder of regular session.

Love those politicians.

But now I have found a way to vent. I have a wonderful collection of anti-warm and fuzzy phrases on some of our  custom designer shirts now at Art Life Collective, www.artlifecollective.com. My favorite is Save the planet, kill yourself  followed by Too much stupid, for obvious reasons. I find creating such antisocial products keeps me from actually becoming antisocial. Plus, around here, they are guaranteed to piss off exactly the right kind of folks.

Still, there are a lot of people out there who could die on my birthday.

Sorry about the long break. Being a journalist in the run-up to election time is both exciting and tiring. Worked about 15 hours Tuesday and still playing catch-up on sleep — the deprivation of which apparently causes a build up of brain chemicals with effects similar to LSD, but not as fun.

And now for something completely different.

This does not fall under dumb criminals, but maybe mouth-breathing politicians needs to be a sub section of that. Just a hint: When you are a minority Republican candidate seeking election in an economically depressed area,  “income tax should not apply to the wealthy” probably does not need to be part of your platform. So far, this guy has managed to lose two elections by landslides to a candidate who does not campaign and rarely talks to the media. Go figure.

On the Art Life Collective front, we have gobs of new custom designer t-shirt artists on board. We have topped 110 artists with just shy of 500 pieces of work on the site. We have also moved operations from Miami to Orlando — for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which involves cutting down on overhead by half. There are a few bugs on the site right now since we are adding code to increase the search engine and create a section of text-only shirts created by myself and the other dark minds behind ALC. So far, “Your dog is licking his balls again” is my fave. That section appears under the ALC Shop artist page and will soon have its own tab on the front page. Don’t look for too many vomitously cut sayings there … We’re not that kind of people. Also a heads up, because we are doing so much coding, the site is a bit buggy right now. We should have all the glitches worked out soon … hope, hope.
As for artists creating works for the site or doing any sort of shirt designs: If you are  looking more to make money than to just showcase your work … try tapping into pop culture icons. Again, our Juggernaut, Bitch shirts and similar creations tend to sell in glowing numbers. What we also see is that artists that have one or two such designs tend to sell other stuff off their pages better simply because they are attracting more traffic and getting their name out there more. Just a though for any artist looking to draw attention to their stuff online. Think about designs that will get indexed in the search engines fast or that hit on a particular cultural trend, then use them as bait to hook viewers to your work. From what we have seen at Art Life Collective and in the Art Life Collective Forum t-shirt discussions, that’s the way to go right now.