When I saw this my first thought was: that's what's uppity!

We picked a winner from the thousands(!) of entries we received for the "Topical Toponym" Contest: Tripp from Newport, Rhode Island sent this excellent effort in -

Anchorage - to be married to someone who drags you down. Usage would be something like: "He's not going to come golfing with us tomorrow - he's in Anchorage."

While we're at it, we thought we'd have another contest, this one kind of topical too. We're trying to rebrand our state "Connetiquette" - if you were to rebrand yours, what name would you come up with? We got the inspiration for this challenge from Stirling Greenlee, who already set the bar high with this gem: "TEXIST."

Send all entries by July 4th to: "State Your Name Contest." Winner will get their choice of 2 Uppityshirts - and FREE SHIPPING anywhere in the world!

Took the kids to visit their cousins down in North Carolina over spring break, and on my way back home pulled into "Fast Stop Number 2" to pick up some "Thunderbird," which you can't get around here. Picture this: it's 7 a.m., I've got 5 home-made Easter Bonnets in the front seat with me (we stopped at the parade in New York on the way down), 60 pounds of pork sausages (my brother has a catering company), luggage, 3 kids and 2 Great Pyrenees "puppies" that I had just bought the night before from a breeder in E. Treestump, Tennessee. Felt kinda sorry for the state trooper who stopped us in West Virginia.

So I go into FS#2 (which was also the Greyhound bus station) and there are 6 bottles of Thunderbird left, along with a pint of Night Train, and I'm standing in line with my arms full (they also had a 3-cigars-for-a-dollar special), when the brother behind me mutters something like "that's what I'm talking about (whitey)."

Fast forward to the other night - we're having dinner with some friends and the wife, let's call her "Bunny", tells me "Preston is going out tonight and I've got a great movie I want to watch." I said "I've got some company for you." and gave her the bottle of Night Train since I had just given the last bottle of Thunderbird to the dishwasher repair guy. She said thanks, I'll just curl up on the couch and get all cozy when I get home.

I happened to talk to Bunny yesterday - she wanted me to pick up her daughter from tap dance - and I asked her "Did you get on the train the other night?" She said "What train?" "The Night Train." Long pause. Long. "Oh." "My." "God."

I'm just going to conclude this unfortunate digression with a quote from bumwine.com - "Don't let the 0.5% less alcohol by volume fool you, the Night Train is all business when it pulls into the station. Some suspect that Night Train is really just Thunderbird with some Kool-Aid-like substance added to try to mask the Clorox flavor. But the night train runs only one route: sober to stupid with no roundtrip tickets available, and a strong likelihood of a train wreck along the way. All aboard to nowhere - woo woo!"

Notting Hill is a real charmer (and a great script), and I was watching it for the first time in a long time the other night when I came across this scene, which is the perfect illustration of "staircase wit." It's not the cleverest exchange or subtlest punchline in the film, but at least it has some relevance to the task at hand, i.e. dumbing (humor about) t-shirt humor up:

We've got another brain challenge going on at Uppityshirts Worldwide HQ, the Topical Toponym Contest. The idea is to come up with a contemporary word derived from a place, such as Shanghai (abduct by force, from Shanghai, China), Paisley (design, from Paisley, Scotland) or Timbuktu (metaphor for a distant land, from Timbuktu, city on the Niger River in Mali), along with a definition. We're looking for originality and humor. Our attempt:

Chicago - to railroad (someone) INTO office.

Send all entries by Valentine's Day to: "Toponym Contest" in the subject line. Winner receives a year's supply of "Smart Pills" - so go ahead and fire up the synapses!

I finally got to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in real life. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced. And the Lincoln Memorial too - "I will keep the country united whether or not I free all the slaves. Or none." And Obama being sworn in this week, all brought thoughts of Keats's 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time' to mind: "So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,/That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude/ Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,/ A sun, a shadow of a magnitude."

I think the monument speaks for itself, but I also think words matter. Here's Maya Lin's description of the wall from her original design entry:

“Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth - a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial’s walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying those individuals into a whole. For this memorial is meant not as a monument to the individual, but rather as a memorial to the men and women who died during this war, as a whole.

“The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it; the passage itself is gradual, the descent to the origin slow, but it is at the origin that the meaning of this memorial is to be fully understood. At the intersection of these walls, on the right side, at this wall’s top is carved the date of the first death. It is followed by the names of those who have died in the war, in chronological order. These names continue on this wall, appearing to recede into the earth at the wall’s end. The names resume on the left wall, as the wall emerges from the earth, continuing back to the origin, where the date of the last death is carved, at the bottom of this wall. Thus the war’s beginning and end meet; the war is “complete”, coming full circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle’s open side, and contained within the earth itself. As we turn to leave, we see these walls stretching into the distance, directing us to the Washington Monument to the left and the Lincoln Memorial to the right, thus bringing the Vietnam Memorial into historical context. We, the living are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths.”

“Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each 200 feet long, and 10 feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending towards ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing. The actual area is wide and shallow, allowing for a sense of privacy, and the sunlight from the memorial’s southern exposure along with the grassy park surrounding and within its walls, contribute to the serenity of the area. Thus this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.

"The memorial’s origin is located approximately at the center of the site; its legs each extending two hundred feet towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The walls, contained on one side by the earth, are ten feet below ground at their point of origin, gradually lessening in height, until they finally recede totally into the earth, at their ends. The walls are to be made of a hard, polished black granite, with the names to be carved in a simple Trojan letter, 3/4 inch high, allowing for nine inches in length for each name. The memorial’s construction involves recontouring the area within the wall’s boundaries, so as to provide for an easily accessible descent, but as much of the site as possible should be left untouched (including trees). The area should be made into a park, for all the public to enjoy.”

Flying in the Face of Convention, II

Here's another piece to the puzzle, this one a dead giveaway:

Flying in the Face of Convention

Apropos of nothing in particular except that I just came across it and thought of a challenge: if I showed you the sketch below and asked you to tell me what it is, would you be able to do it?

Elemental

3 Uppityshirts to Tricia Backelin for sending in the winning entry in the "Periodic Tableau" Contest:

Tricialadium - A sweet-smelling (though tangy), highly resilient and flexible heavy metal. Highly reactive in the presence of dense gases. Combines well with certain usually stable liquids to form uncommonly beautiful bonds. Atomic Symbol: Ta-Da

Thanks for all your entries, but we still haven't gotten the right answer for the "Flying in the Face of Convention" challenge. Anyone want to start the new year off right with a free Uppityshirt?

Periodic Tableau

Every once in a while we try to get to the heart of the matter, to the core of our audience so-to-speak, for R&D purposes of course, but also for fun. So we came up with the idea for a "What Are You Made Of?" Contest. The rules are simple: come up with a new element named after yourself (or one of your heroes), along with a brief description and chemical symbol. The winner will receive 3 Uppityshirts of their choice, and complete vindication for that D- in Freshman Chemistry.

Here's ours:

cataldonite - a tasteless, colorless, amorphous and totally inert gas with the atomic number -270 (absolute zero) and the chemical symbol Lb*. Found naturally-occurring in nature. Not known to interact well with other elements; sometimes confused with Ironicum.

If you can't think of one, or don't know who you are, try one of these:

joeschmoenium

obamite

You've got until the end of the year. Please send all entries (with contact information) to: What Are You Made Of?

Initiation

We thought the best way to get started was to tell you about some of the people we think incarnate "uppity" in life and art. There are the usual suspects; Diogenes, Montaigne, Washington, Emerson, the Wright Brothers, Churchill - but we wanted to kick off with a 21st Century guy who in our opinion is a particularly recalcitrant and clever underminer of the highest caliber.

Wonderful Things

James Sanborn is an American artist whose sculpture "Kryptos" stands in the courtyard of the CIA building in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos means "hidden" in Greek, and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering" but it's really about Sanborn having fun, and the last laugh.

As you can see it consists mainly of a piece of copper about 10' high and 15' long that resembles the Microsoft Windows logo, divided into 4 sections, each encrypted with a different code. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, and despite the best minds in the field staring out at it every day, in what can only be bewilderment, it still has not been completely solved.

The ciphertext on the first half of Kryptos contains 870 characters, while the other half is a Vigenere encryption tableau with 869 characters. Sanborn has said that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle - solvable only after all 4 passages have been decrypted.

James Gillogly, a computer scientist from California was the first person to publicly announce (in 1999) that he had solved the first 3 sections. The 4th section, comprising the remaining 98 characters, however, had stumped him. After this announcement, the CIA revealed that their man David Stein had already solved the first 3 sections too, using pencil and paper, but was also unable to figure out the last one.

Here are the first 3 sections, decoded:

1st Section - Keywords kryptos, palimpsest

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

2nd Section - Keywords kryptos, abscissa

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

3rd Section

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)**

Even though there is an online community, The Kryptos Group dedicated to figuring out the puzzle, the fourth section remains unsolved today - so get cracking!

?OBKR UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

*My wife's initials. Genius!

**This is a paraphrased misspelling of Howard Carter's account of the opening of Tutankhamon's tomb in 1923. The question that ends the passage was posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter famously replied "wonderful things".