I began reading a story called "Loosing Google's Lock on the Past" in the New York Times this morning and was amazed when I scrolled down to see a picture of Anil Dash wearing a Goatse t-shirt. Holy crap! How could such a thing happen? Doing a quick scan of the blogosphere to see who else noticed (everyone, duh) I found one early post proclaiming Anil's stunt "one of the greatest accomplishments imaginable." Here's Anil's take on the issue.
It reminds me of editing photos for the Groton School yearbook as a senior. I had to shoot all the guys' dorms, and one dorm (Hrasky's I think) decided that everyone would give the shocker (into the the air, of course, not to each other) in the photo. I stopped laughing long enough to snap the shutter a few times, but the pics were snubbed by the deans, and I had to retake them. Later I learned the deans hadn't protested 25 guys doing the shocker (they would not have been alone in overlooking its significance) but because of one guy holding a sub roll in his junk area to simulate an engorged phallus. Minus the misguided leavened largess, the posse's premier pose would have been preserved in print in perpetuity. D'oh!
Of course boarding school shenanigans extend to t-shirts as well. At Groton, each dorm designs its own t-shirts for field day in the spring. When I was in 10th grade, Mr. Berger's dorm had a lot of testosterone and liked to refer to themselves as Berger's Beef. To complete the theme, they illustrated their shirts with a giant cartoon of a beaver riding a bull. Oh lord. Somehow it made it past the deans. (The dorm heads, Mr. Berger included, had nothing to do with the shirts—or yearbook photos—mind you.)
I believe someone received some flack and the deans tightened their focus after that. But the artist behind those shirts was in my dorm (Gemmell's) the next year and produced a subversive masterpiece. There's one large design on the front. Down the left it says "Gemmell's" and across the bottom it says "great scandal." The bulk of the image is an abstract swirly pattern. The deans, of course would look for something hidden in the swirls. Indeed, the hidden message is not hard to find: words reading "la casa de los toros" (the house of the bulls). BUT… Fold the shirt over onto itself, like the inside back cover of Mad Magazine, and a huge erect cock appears in the center. At the bottom, "great scandal" becomes "grundal." SWEET. And as if there were any doubt, the "a" becomes "#1." my friend's cocky concoction truly made me appreciate how few works achieve that venerated hat trick of being ornate, cryptic, and vulgar at the same time.
