Some Notions

Jack's thoughts on t-shirts seemed to us to be a bit disjointed. He uses this subject matter to cobble together quite a few not very related personal grind-axes of his, like Mindy's weight loss, different pom-poms he saw on chicks, and Nintendo.

(Which reminds one: we had a great idea here at Somenotions to make a movie about the rash of suicides that no doubt broke out among 6 and 20-sided die makers around the time that Nintendo came out and put paper D&D out of business. Two other good ideas for movies: (1) at an elite 1950s girls' school, a clean-cut young man, a veteran, is hired to be the new Dungeonmaster. He teaches the girls quite a bit about D&D and, indeed, themselves. The fancy girls learn what it's like to be a loser because the monsters are always shitting on them. (2) in the '70s, five kids are really in to D&D. But one of them moves away mid-quest. Now, 20 years later, they meet up as grown men to finish it. Think "Big Chill" meets "Mazes and Monsters.")

But back to the subject at hand - "Mikey, Your Mission..." reminds one of George Plimpton's review of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. in the New York Times Book Review in 1961, which we read because our dad had a collection of old-timey book reviews and we as a child were really a monstrous nerd, like a whole other category of nerd. Anyway, Plimpton says that there's a rash of novels that follow a rake's adventures, which is a good form for a novel from the writer's perspective because it allows him to stitch together a bunch of short stories, which in themselves aren't very marketable.

This seems to be what Jack has done - stitched together a few only tenuously related thoughts under the vague rubrick "t-shirts." Which is all well and good, we had some laughs, but frankly we look to him to make more cogent, coherent posts, meditations on a theme, rather than a gaggle of overbaked riffs. But perhaps, having gotten these ideas off his chest, he'll be less distracted in the future?