Probably the best and easiest way to tell you where we're from and how clever we think we are is to just reprint our first press release.

UPPITYSHIRTS TRIES TO SMARTEN UP THE WORLD. LITERALLY.

Recalcitrant, incorrigible, and sarcastic (as well as a few other choice adjectives) fit 'Mr. Write' to a Tee.

Weston, Connecticut - If you don't know what recalcitrant means, I wouldn't bother reading any further. Seriously, Timothy Cataldo was walking into Clark's Dairy in New Haven, Connecticut one day recently when he bumped into a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, simply, "ho". His first thought was ho means "good" in Cantonese. His second: how could such an obviously intelligent (and educated) Ivy-Leaguer wear something so trite and demeaning? He decided to start a company right then and there to dumb t-shirt humor up, and save the world.

Thus Uppityshirts (UP-i-tee shirts, get it?) was born, mostly as an antidote to what Cataldo sees as today's pervasive and persistent sophomor(on)ic humor and lame p.c. posturing. The first Uppityshirt, a tongue-in-cheek ode to that lost lovely, "Yalebait", was an immediate hit and soon sold out. Uppityshirts.com now has a Baker's Dozen, including "caffiend", "I'd Rather Be Grammatically Correct" and "Old's Cool", as well as some other smart-alecky stuff in the new "Smarten Up!" product line like "Comeuppance - Just Desserts in a Can." and "Smart Pills - The Perfect Cure for Stupidity."

Cataldo, raised in Wrentham, MA, became an English major in college "mostly because it took the least amount of work", but fell in love with words and became a journalist, then a copywriter, (it paid more) before finally becoming a full-time father. While watching his children grow up he has noticed, or thinks he has anyway, the decline of literacy and level of basic language proficiency i.e. the vocabulary/spelling/grammar of most Americans, especially the young. "I really think people are intelligent and clever and hungry for knowledge and want to show it" says Cataldo, "and that they're tired of the unoriginal, trendy, moronic p.c. mush that at the end of the day doesn't mean anything."

Shortly after moving from New York City to white-glove Connecticut in 2005, Cataldo, a stay-at-home father of three was looking for a business to start out of his home when he literally bumped into the wrong person. He came up with the name uppity, which means "rebelliously self-assertive; not inclined to be tractable or deferential" because it unfortunately suited his personality perfectly, and embodied the old-school attitude he wanted to figuratively get off his chest. Also, subtlties.com was already taken.

Uppityshirts has been growing slowly and steadily and has allowed Cataldo to continue his domestic (and connubial) duties, and still have a successful business. Orders are shipped out of a small cottage he has in back of his house, and his 3 children, Jane, James and Cate all help out after school. His wife is an executive at a major publishing company and commutes to New York City every day. She's so important "she doesn't even return my phone calls anymore" Cataldo deadpans.

He plans on expanding to about 25 or so designs, and has been introducing a new one every month. The response so far has been almost universally positive. Almost. "When I asked my daughter Cate (pictured above, left, with her friend Lauren) what she wanted for Christmas, she said "for you to go into New York and mom to stay home'" Cataldo laughs, but for now he's going to continue saving the world, one smart-alecky design at a time.

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