When Internet critic Steve Johnson was reporting his first-ever “50 Best Web sites” last March, it led to a “Predicament.” That was the title of the Threadless T-shirt he purchased for his fisherman father’s 67th-birthday present. It featured a man, fishing alone on an island, who fails to realize that the island itself is a fish poised to seize his bait. “This was,” says Steve, “the least hokey fishing-related item anyone in the family has ever given him.” And so this week’s cover story, “Printing money,” was born.
Steve, one of the most unhokey people around here-as is evident in the photograph here-is a T-shirt kind of guy, though he did flirt with a break in style. “I went through a phase where I thought suburban dads should probably stop wearing T-shirts,” recalls Steve, “and I tried to switch to polos for a while, but I couldn’t do it. Too stuffy and uncomfortable.”
T-shirts are walking billboards, and collections of them may come to be regarded as cultural artifacts, with explorers rifling through basements and attics in search of T-shirts just as their predecessors looked for arrowheads and dinosaur bones.
Aside from the wide assortment in his drawer, Steve has another three dozen in his attic-but he’s still upset that he lost the one Lynda Barry designed for FitzGerald’s American Music Festival.
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etaylor@tribune.com
