I found this dramatic t-shirt while poking around Google images. It was a shirt that was available for purchase to participants of the 2007 Terry Fox Run in Kuala Lumpur. It’s got an incredible black and white photo of Terry during his Marathon of Hope run across Canada.

If you’re unfamiliar with Terry Fox, I encourage you to read his dramatic and inspiring story at Wikipedia. Terry ran the equivalent of a marathon every day for 143 days in a trek across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. He did this all on a prosthetic limb after losing his right leg to bone cancer.

Terry wasn’t able to complete his journey as he lost his life to the disease at just 22 years of age. Around the world though, organizers host an annual run in the fall in Terry’s name to raise money for cancer research. The run has no winners or losers, and everyone is free to go at their own pace.

I haven’t seen anywhere to purchase this tee, and the Kuala Lumpur event seems to have a new t-shirt each year, with 2009′s tee being a closeup of Terry’s face on a black shirt.

Nevertheless, I thought it was a really interesting t-shirt with a cool story behind it and wanted to share it with you.

So here’s a story of a t-shirt hunt with an almost-perfect ending. The other day I got an email from Liz, check this out:

Hello!
Stumbled across your blog, loved it, realized I had found a shirt a week ago that I loved but, unfortunately, it was too small (I was thrift-store hopping, they only had one). So I was wondering if you couldn’t hunt it down seeing as you seem to enjoy that sort of thing.

I looked for it online because the brand of the shirt itself was on the tag but it turned out that someone had simply silk screened it after buying plain shirts in bulk from that company.

Anyways, the shirt was black and it had an outline of Texas on it with the words, “Let’s Mess With Texas” written over top. It was pretty funny at the time.

Thanks in advance if you can find it. If you can’t, no worries, just thought I’d give it a shot.

Liz

This sounded like a tall order simply because of the sheer number of items you can buy with “Don’t Mess With Texas” plastered all over them. I also wanted to weed out as many print on demand (POD) items as possible, since Liz indicated in her email that the had been silk-screened by someone.

I got lucky, and I think I found the shirt:

Hopefully that’s the shirt you were talking about, Liz. I found it on Storyville Times, from a post dated Oct 1, 2007. The post tells me that the shirt was designed by a group called “Metro Three.” Some Googling brought me what looks to be their homepage and Twitter account:

Metro Three Homepage

Metro Three Twitter

I half-expect a tumbleweed to roll across that Twitter profile, it’s been deserted for so long. Nevertheless, Metro Three seems to be active, though that shirt doesn’t appear to be for sale right now. I’m thinking your best bet, Liz, is to contact them and see if they can’t make one appear in your mailbox one way or another.

If they can’t, here are some alternatives:

That’s Mess With Texas from Threadless, currently sold out but you can request an email notification for a reprint.

Here’s "Please Mess With Texas" from Protoculture Apparel. It’s a bit pricy IMO for the amount of print that’s on it, but it’s available in blue and green.

I also found this one on Cotton Factory, "I Messed With Texas." This one’s more reasonably priced at $16.

Hopefully you found something here you can run with with, Liz! Thanks for shooting me a message about this shirt you’re looking for. If anyone else has a shirt they’d like to see, hit the submit button up there on the right and let me know about it!

Sometimes indie designs are just the best. Here’s a tee from Alive and Well, a small t-shirt line from the south of England. I can only imagine this colorful shirt was inspired by the classic tootsie pop ad that’s been playing on TV since…well, probably the Nixon administration. I’m sure we’ve all seen it by now:

While the shirt is cool (like the rest of the designs Alive and Well has) and the price point is right at 13 quid…what really sold me was the video of the shirt being made. I think it does a lot to sell the shirt, seeing the tee being born. It serves to remind us that there are people on the other end of the shirts we get in the mail. It humanizes the whole process to see the screen printing in action. Check it out:

Owl is £12.99 (about $19.50) at Alive and Well. (Check ‘em out on Facebook too)

I hate captchas. Half the time you can’t read what they say; then the other half of the time you’re trying to figure out if what you’re typing is really a word. I understand the point, proving you’re a human and not a bot, but come on. With all the smart people out there working on software, on security, this is the best we can come up with? Seriously guys, this is the best way to tell a person from 472 lines of code? I’m not saying I have the answer, but I do miss the time when things like captchas weren’t necessary.

Anyways, the above rant should serve to illustrate how funny I found this shirt from Rizzo Tees. “WTF does that say?” echoes the thought process exactly! Ever notice how captchas have gotten harder and harder over the past few years? I understand they need to make captchas harder to outsmart the latest um, captcha-reading software, but dammit, they’re starting to outsmart me. This just reinforces that we are (or at least I certainly am) dumber than a computer, and that the machine/robot apocalypse is coming to assure the destruction of humankind as we know it. Or something like that, anyways.

I honestly don’t know what that says on the shirt. Windolph Gossh? Windolph, Gossln? Stupid Human? Eh, I don’t know. the “Gotcha, this is not legible” bit in the corner is brilliant too, it looks so natural I’m willing to bet some people will miss it when they see you wearing this shirt. You know, probably the same people that can’t solve captchas.

While there’s not an image of a person wearing it posted on the site yet (maybe uploading photos to Rizzo Tees requires a captcha?), Chris from Rizzo Tees tells me it’s 10″ wide and chest-centered. Perfect! This shirt is awesome and has universal appeal, since we all have to deal with this crap online everyday.

Zip over to Rizzo Tees and grab Captcha for $14. You can’t go wrong at that price.

See the rest of the Rizzo Tees collection, complete with a chick not wearing pants and a shirt making fun of Detroit

You may have heard that authorities in Colorado spent the better part of the day tracking down a 6 year old boy they thought floated away in a homemade hot air balloon that looked like a flying saucer. I can’t make this stuff up, folks. After rescue teams tethered the balloon to the ground and pitchforked it like a…uh, like a thing you stab with a pitchfork, they opened the hatch to find (gasp!) no boy inside.

Eventually they locate the boy in the house at home, safe and sound. At least there’s a happy ending. People wasted no time drafting up t-shirts, so I just thought I’d point them out. Found via Mashable.

Read the Mashable article on Balloon Boy tees and stuff
Make yourself cooler than everyone by being first on the meme bandwagon for once