Jersey Bore

For the past month everyone has been talking about MTV’s new show Jersey Shore, which follows a bunch of young Italian Americans spending the summer at (surprise!) the Jersey Shore. The general buzz was that Jersey Shore took MTV’s stupidity and debauchery to new heights. Having never seen the show, I believed the hype because why else would everyone talk about it so much?

I recently saw a few episodes however, and I was wildly disappointed.

Sure everyone is selfish and stupid. Yeah they drink constantly. Of course they hook-up a lot. But none of this is new. It’s exactly like MTV’s The Real World, just without the token angry black cast member.

So when Italian American groups call Jersey Shore racist for depicting negative Italian stereotypes, they miss the point. Jersey Shore cast members aren’t acting stupid because they’re Italian, they’re acting stupid because that’s what it takes to get through an MTV casting call. MTV isn’t racist. It’s ageist. Jersey Shore, just like all their “reality” shows, creates the stereotype that all 20-somethings act like idiots.

As far as I can tell, Jersey Shore is wildly popular for the same reason new Woody Allen movies are popular. Woody Allen made the same movie for decades and people eventually got bored. Then he started setting them in Europe and the new location and accents made the old formula seem new again.

All that being said, the one thing I like about Jersey Shore is that they work at a novelty t-shirt shop. So in that vein here are two shirts I made to reflect the MTV ethos.

I’m With Stupids
Printfection
$25

I’m Up Here
Printfection
$24

Nerd Shirts

Having been challenged to come up with the nerdiest novelty t-shirts imaginable, I gave it my all.

To be or not 2.0 USB
Printfection
$20

6.6.6 the IP of the Beast
Printfection
$25

Come on baby light my Firewire
Printfection
$20

What’s <3 but a second hand emoticon?
Printfection
$25

We the People Survived The Bush Administration

A friend challenged me to improve upon this T-shirt.

As a fan of challenges and improvements, I had to give it a shot.

And, why not make it a print on demand shirt?

We the People Survived Bush..barely
$17

Because bashing Bush should never go out of fashion (pun totally intended).

Hobbits Are Real

For those of you who don’t have a Google Alert set for “Indonesia + Hobbit,” boy do I have news for you. According to this article, scientists found an 18,000 year old skeleton of a 3 foot tall hobbit. Apparently these little munchkins had brains smaller than a chimpanzee’s yet could make fire and hunt primitive elephants with their sophisticated stone tools. If that’s not cool enough, after analyzing the skull, scientists decided that no matter how awesome hobbit-love-making would be, we could not produce fertile offspring with them–i.e. they are a different species!

Of course my first thought was, “What a fantastic scientific discovery.” And my second thought was, “How can I make money off of this?”

So ladies and gentlemen, I present to you.

Forget dinosaurs, woolly mammoths or your dead cat, we need to get to work on cloning hobbits pronto. Woolly mammoths and cats are lame and on top of that I’d probably be allergic. Dinosaurs are cool but a bad idea because they are dangerous and have an insatiable appetite for Jeff Goldblum. But hobbits are cool and if they escaped, even with their “sophisticated” stone tools, they couldn’t do much worse than give everyone a case of the adorables.

Don’t believe me? Maybe this YouTube clip I made will convince you.

And that’s worst case scenario. Best case scenario, one throws some jewelry into a volcano and rids the world of nuclear bombs.

I never believed science should do something just because it can, but this is making me reconsider. And I’m not naive, I know the task ahead is difficult and will cost tens of hundreds of dollars, which is why I’m opening the gift shop a little early. So support science and amusement parks (Sciemusement parks? I call trademark) by purchasing this lovely shirt.

Hobbit Park
$25

So now that safety and funding has been taken care of, who has a PCR replication kit at their home? Let’s get started.