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Blod asked, and through the auspices of Pom Named Brian Enterprises I am happy to provide.  Go buy one and tell me what you think!

Crossposted from fLog.

I’m thinking this would make a good t-shirt. What do you reckon?

Crossposted from fLog.

Got this email from CafePress just now:

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), "rights in gross" (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the "Olympic Rings"), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to "pending status" which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.

Sure enough, the WWTFSMD? shirt is no longer available. (Don't worry, madradish! Your order is in production, according to the report page, so you won't be affected. But you might have a limited edition (of one) collector's item on your hands!)

So I wrote a quick email to Bobby Henderson, reassuring him that I don't intend to make any money off his work, and I do appreciate the value of intellectual property (even though I think it's generally implemented an arse-backwards way in most of Western society) and I'll willingly take the thing down if he can't bring himself to allow it -- and asked him for permission to use the design. If he says yeah fine, that's great; if not, no hard feelings, and I'll take it off, and come up with something else.

Because you asked for it (where "you" is approximately equal to madradish) I did up a white-on-black version of the WWTFSMD t-shirt. Go buy!

If I want to keep this up, I'm going to have to consider charging a slight markup. The CafePress rules for a "basic" shop, for which the shopkeeper doesn't have to pay anything, don't allow more than one design for each type of merchandise: one green t-shirt, one dark stretchy baby-doll shirt, presumably one monogrammed chocolate manhole cover, and so on. So I had to shuffle some products to fit the extra one in. I can always reshuffle if anyone asks, but I think if I sell a couple of shirts here and there with a very slight markup, I can upgrade to "premium" and it will pay for itself.

All of which means: if you want 'em cheap, get 'em now and beat the rush!

Years ago, I called up the Eric The Fruit Bat t-shirt and novelty shop in Perth and asked how they'd come up with their name. This was three or four years after I'd named myself Eric the Fruitbat (note: different spelling), but only a year or so after I first heard that someone else had a similar name. The explanation given by the bemused shop girl was this: Eric The Fruit Bat, the company, was started by a Pom named Brian who wanted "something that sounded nicely English". As far as I know they're still going, which means that if I wanted to sell t-shirts and knick-knacks myself, I couldn't use my own name.

Therefore, through the power of CafePress and the intertubes, may I introduce:

Pom Named Brian Enterprises!

Get in early if you fancy buying either of the two shirt designs I've invented so far: there's no markup, so it's going at cost. After all, it's not costing me anything but time (which I have more of at the moment, since I'm off sick with this &$@&* sore throat). I'll add more as I think of them - or feel free to comment with your suggestions. Just don't expect timeless art of a Louvreable quality, ok?