"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Sure, this "10 Kittens" T-shirt is cool. But did you know it comes in Quintuple Extra-Large (5XL)? That's awesome. (Via.)

Slouching Toward Saks Fifth Avenue

Who's going to buy a Prada handbag during a recession? Not me! To get around this problem, Saks Fifth Avenue took two steps.

1.) Sell cheaper "slouchy bags."
2.) Hire Shepard Fairey (the artist who designed the Obama Hope poster) to get consumers fired up about slouchy bags.

The result is this ad campaign, which mixes Soviet kitsch with, uh, slouchiness. Now who wants a slouchy bag? (I do, I do!)

The ad reminded me of the 1940 promotional poster below that the Children's Book Council commissioned from Maud and Miska Petersham.
"Comrade! You will find the books on our recommended reading list educational and enlightening. Read, so that a new social order may be born."

Bagels and Bongos

Inasmuch as it has no competing titles, And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl is destined to become a classic of its kind.

Authors Roger Bennett and Josh Kun were recently interviewed on NPR about their journey collecting and annotating their book of album covers. It's particularly worth listening to for the clips from the albums themselves.

While these images may suggest a certain kitschiness to the project, the book seems to be a legitimate labor of love. As the authors note, they were searching for answers to questions about thorny topics like their own Jewish heritage and why so many of these vintage records were available in Boca Raton.