Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Good, The Bad, The WTF

Sometimes you get lucky. When I was searching for a new shirt to use for this week, I came across two winners from the same club. Bear with me as I present to you the horrors of Oxford United.

In the early '80s, Oxford United rode successive promotions up to Division 1 in the English tier, the equivalent of today's EPL. Today, they are not so good, sitting out of the league and mid-table in the Conference. I mention this as a warning. Terrible things can happen to your squad when you wear fantastically ugly shirts. You will drop divisions for this kind of thing.

So, there it is. No warning, I just dropped it right on you. Did it take a second or two for you to comprehend what you were seeing? Did the horror slowly dawn upon you that this was not just one bland, yellowy-fleshy color, but instead a collection of stripes? Do you see how the stripes are ordered? I see: White, Old Bubble Gum, Sunshine, Piss. Then it starts over. The picture above does not do complete justice to the pain foisted upon the OU support. No, for that you have to see the shirt with its sponsor.
Take it in, boys and girls, Wang Computers. I'm sure you can't read the 'Computers' part, so I filled it in for you. What you can read easily from a distance is 'Wang'. Wang Wang Wang. That's so fun to type, I'm going to make it a tag. What's not fun about Wang is wearing it on a shirt when you are an impressionable young lad. A lad who gets bullied by older kids for wearing a shirt that says Wang on it. Bullying that leads you to stop supporting the club because of embarrassment. Boom, 20 years later, your club is sitting four divisions lower because you lost a generation of support.

Okay, so that's a hypothetical scenario which leans heavily on a Slippery Slope argument, but I'm just going to move on. I promised you two shirts, and two shirts I give to you.
Dammit, this one hurts my brain. Whereas the Wang shirt could be classified as 'The Bad', this one gets all of the 'WTF' tag it can handle. And that W isn't just for What, I'd also use it for Who, as in "Who the fuck thought that this was a good idea?" You know what this shirt reminds me of? Galaga. I see both the player's ship and the eagle thing coming down to tractor-beam your ship. I like Galaga, I hate this shirt.

2 comments:

The NY Kid said...

Did everyone else intentionally let their first ship get tractor-beamed so you could shoot the eagle-thing and get a double-ship?
No, just me?

Jacob said...

Of course. It made the first bonus stage much easier.