 The embittered Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman has finally been decided in the Minnesota Supreme Court, which definitively declared Al Franken the winner by a 5-0 vote.
 The election, which originally showed Coleman ahead by 215 votes, has been subject to a recount which and various legal challenges. (The recount put Franken ahead by 225.) Coleman’s main bone of contention presented to the high court was that 4,000 absentee ballots that were ruled invalid should be counted. Despite the appeal, the court’s ruling noted that “Al Franken received the highest number of votes legally cast,” and that he’s therefore entitled to the election certificate needed to fill the MN Senate seat that’s been sitting vacant since November.
Norm Coleman accepted the Court’s decision and has officially conceded the race, saying that any further challenges would be a detriment to Minnesota’s unity as a state.
Part of the GOP’s concern over this race stemmed from Arlen Specter’s departure. With Specter as a Democrat and Franken filling Minnesota’s seat, Congress is now a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. (Well, sort of – Democrats disagree with each other all the time, and assuming that all 60 will vote together is like assuming that a roomful of dog trainers will agree on methodology.)
And so we award a Fantasy T-Wearer Award to Al Franken today, with the “Sorry to have kept you all waiting” T-shirt, at left.
Wear it wisely, Senator.
 The saga of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion pyramid scheme came to a close of sorts in federal court today. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin threw the proverbial book at Madoff with a 150-year prison sentence – the maximum sentence on all 11 charges against him.
 The announcement was met with cheers from courtroom spectators, some of whom were his victims.
Madoff’s attorney had sought a 12-year sentence, but Judge Chin was not moved. Said Chin of the sentencing, “Here the message must be sent that Mr Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil and that this kind of manipulation of the system is not just a bloodless crime that takes place on paper, but one instead that takes a staggering toll.”
 And so, lacking a T-shirt in prison jumpsuit orange, we award Bernard Madoff a Fantasy T-Wearer Award today with the “Don’t do the Crime” lime green T-shirt, at left.
 American entertainment suffered an unlikely trifecta of superstar passings in a single week. The loss of three significant pop culture icons had led to an outpouring of mourning well beyond Hollywood; today we pay tribute to these three memorable performers.
Ed McMahon
 Comedy legend Ed McMahon died at 86, his best-known gig being a 30-year run as the straight man for Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” His classic “Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!” intro was a magical moment for so many late-night television fans, who came to understand that two-word cue as a promise of the comedy greatness that would follow.
McMahon will also be remembered for hosting American Idol precursor, “Star Search” – an 80’s phenomenon that gave America its first taste of talent show reality television (no, we’re not counting “The Gong Show“) and introduced us to performers like Britney Spears, Dave Chapelle, Justin Timberlake, Rosie O’Donnell and Alanis Morissette.
 Farrah Fawcett
 Best known as Jill Munroe on Charlie’s Angels and for a pin-up poster that adorned the bedrooms of countless teenage boys in the mid-1970’s, Farrah Fawcett lost her long battle with cancer at 62 on June 25th, 2009. She had been battling the disease since 2006.
That memorable poster (at right) – first published in a 1976 issue of LIFE magazine – remains the best-selling pin-up poster of all time, with 12 million copies sold.
Fawcett’s long-term partner, Ryan O’Neal (himself a leukemia survivor) was at her bedside when she died. Their stormy relationship engendered many a tabloid headline, but with her diagnosis it seemed that he and Fawcett took on her cancer fight together. O’Neal summed it up by saying, “It’s a love story. I just don’t know how to play this one. I won’t know this world without her. Cancer is an insidious enemy.”
Michael Jackson
 The King of Pop died at age 50, just before he was to take the stage again in a worldwide comeback tour. The cause of death and the circumstances around it are still unclear. News reports originally stated that Jackson had died, then revised to say that he was in a coma, then re-revised to confirm his death.
 Michael Jackson’s many contributions to Motown and pop music will always be remembered, and despite his controversial personal life his fans are mourning his loss worldwide. With a lifetime of iconic imagery, music and dance left as such a significant legacy, it’s safe to say that the world won’t soon forget Michael Jackson.
And so it is that June 25th, 2009 will be remembered by some as the day America lost a King and an Angel, and by others as the day the Moonwalk died.
UPDATE 6/29: Billy Mays
Boisterous TV pitchman Billy Mays died suddenly on Sunday, June 28th. The man who made us all want Oxi-Clean and Orange Glo (”Long live your laundry!”) was in good spirits on Saturday after a harrowing landing at the Tampa airport, as he noted on his Twitter page. He was found in his home by his wife on Sunday; the family is awaiting the final determination of death.
 …the truth is I never left you…
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford can’t sing the same song to his South Carolina citizenry, as the Governor recently went missing for about 7 days.
Sanford most recently made headlines for refusing to accept stimulus package money, due to butting heads with President Obama on its intended use.
Sanford’s office originally stated that the governor was hiking the Appalachian trail (thus introducing a new and colorful euphemism to the public discourse), then revised to list his travel itinerary as Argentina.
Whether or not Sanford took a hike during his time in Argentina hasn’t been confirmed. What has been confirmed is his affair with an Argentinian woman, thus engendering the requisite press conference and public apology becoming somewhat commonplace for straying politicians these days.
Sanford, who had been on a short list of potential GOP Presidential candidates for 2012, has not stepped down from office. He did however make a public apology to his wife and four sons with the assertion that he’d ended the affair and promised to step down as the head of the Republican Governor’s Association.
What the future holds for the South Carolina Governor is unclear, though most agree that his chances for a 2012 Presidential bid are now over. For our part, we’ll award Mark Sanford a Fantasy T-Wearer Award today, with the “hiking the Appalachian Trail” T-shirt, above.
 The violence and everyman suppression of post-election Iran was crystallized to the world when student Neda Agha-Soltan was shot in the chest and killed by one of Ayatollah Khameini’s Basij paramilitary officers. Neda was on her way to a protest march.
Despite Iran’s best efforts to keep news of the ongoing protests contained, this incident has proven that the Internet’s facilitation of citizen journalism is more powerful than the constraints of traditional press. Which is to say that you can boot all the foreign journalists from your country, but amateur video combined with the broadcast and sharing power of the Internet can lead to worldwide awareness of whatever you’ve been trying so hard to keep on the down-low. And the more you try, the bigger the backlash.
Video of the killing (and it’s very graphic, so be prepared if you seek it out) circulated quickly. Commentary and reaction began spreading virally via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, websites, e-mail and – as we’ve come to expect when people have something important to say – CafePress, where those touched and angered by the assassination began in earnest to design protest T-shirts to share their message of outrage. This is one of those events wherein the merchandise is primarily a symbolic creative outlet for its designer, rather than a “this is a funny headline” somewhat entrepreneurial T-shirt event.
Neda has become a symbol of all that the protestors are rallying against in Iran – and the more the Iranian government seeks to silence the voice of the people, the more they’re empowered to use alternate forms of communication as a broadcast system. This is not a new phenomenon in cultures where neither press nor elective process are free from government intervention; having lived in South America in the mid-90’s, one of the things that immediately struck me was the graffiti. And it wasn’t the amount of graffiti that caught my attention – that’s nothing new to anyone who’s lived in big urban cities – but rather the content. The graffiti in Quito wasn’t, as most American graffitti is, vanity tagging. By and large these were hard-hitting political statements, brought to the streets by an oppressed people looking to find the most accessible public of places to make their voices heard.
 And so it is with Neda. No longer is this kind of government-chafing message necessarily constrained by the locality of a public wall. No longer is there as much personal risk when you can trade in your can of spray paint for an Internet connection. Getting online from half a world away can get the word out, and get it out fast. You can tell your story. You can influence people. You can use the almighty T-shirt to get it off your mind and onto your chest, and you can empower an army of grassroots participation. You can even get a message to the foreign journalists denied access to a first-person vantage point, and they’ll write your story anyway.
Or, as President Obama put it: “No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness.”
And so, while the Iranian government prohibits Neda’s family and friends from having memorials in her honor and tries to locally silence the voices mourning her, the world is talking. And from our end, a T-shirt is worth 1,000 words.
 Photoshop master Scott Kelby’s second annual Worldwide Photo Walk is on July 18th this year, and it may certainly be coming to a location near you. Over 1,000 walks are already scheduled – and if you’re a photography professional who lives somewhere devoid of an already-scheduled walk, you can apply to start your own next time around.
For those of you not familiar with photo walks, the organizer sent us a nice explanation:
 A Photo Walk is a fun, social event where photographers gather together at a specific place to walk around and take pictures. Afterwards, they hold a “chimping” session. This is where they all sit down in a café or restaurant, look at the photos in each others digital cameras, point and say, “Ooooo! Oooo!” a lot (hence the name).
Affectionately dubbed “A Day in the World,” July 18, 2009 is actually Scott Kelby’s Second Annual Worldwide Photo Walk. Last year, NAPP had over 250 official walks take place in 236 cities of 47 countries around the world. Over 8,000 photographers participated and it is safe to say that nearly 1 million photographs were taken that day. This year, we already have over 1000 walks registered and we are aiming for participation (representation) from every country in the world. With the event still over a month away, we are confident that we have created the world’s largest social photography event in the history of… well, in the history of photography itself!
 If thousands of photographers taking a gozillion different pictures in global synchronization wasn’t cool enough, this year the walk has a charity component: the official Worldwide Photo Walk T-shirts, the sale of which will generate $5.00 to the Springs of Hope orphanage in Kenya. The orphanage was started and built by readers of Scott Kelby’s blog, proving that photographers are just as capable of contributing to the world in 3-D as they are in 2-D.
So dust off that camera and put on your walkin’ shoes.
 Did you run out and buy paper masks when the swine flu scare hit the headlines? Does every bugbite make you wonder whether you’ve contracted the flesh-eating disease? Do you avoid Australia entirely due to its large population if poisonous flora and fauna? Are you convinced that your neighbors are covert terrorists? Do you plan your vacation around color-coded terror alerts?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’ll be happy to know that today is International Panic Day – so if someone you know tells you to relax, you might remind them that panic is appropriate on such an esteemed international holiday.
Speaking of panic, we shall now panic about the fact that our groovy poll decided to blow up. That being the case, we’ll just share the results:
So there you have it. Zombies are more reason to panic than the swine flu or the Taliban’s proximity to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. In the “other” category, Obama beat out unemployment.
Since people are using today to panic about zombies, we’d like to remind everyone of the ever-useful zombie safety guide made by one of our Shopkeepers.
Be safe out there. If you do panic, just remember tip #2: always aim for high ground. You will be more difficult to eat.
 The drug trade is a well-known problem across our Mexican border, and we’ve all heard stories of smugglers swallowing balloons, using religious statues (it’s not just a “Lost” plot point), giving coyotes a second job, and otherwise using creative ideas in order to get their wares across the border.
With human body cavities being so small (and so unpleasant as a storage and inspection vessel), it seems that the Mexican drug smugglers have turned to a new, larger and legally-frozen body cavity: the shark.
Yep, the Mexican Navy found an entire ton of cocaine hidden inside frozen shark carcasses. The sharks were loaded onto a U.S.-bound container ship on the Yucatan Peninsula. Apparently, the crackdown on the drug trade by the DEA and the Mexican government is leading smugglers to think outside the box (or, in this case, inside the carcass) with their storage vessels.
And so we award Mexico’s Naval Commander Eduardo Villa a congratulatory Fantasy T-Wearer Award today, in honor of this huge bust. May he enjoy the “Wipe Out Substance Abuse” Shark T-shirt, above.
With Fathers’ Day this coming Sunday, everyone’s looking for that perfect gift for Dad.
The editor of “Details” magazine found his unique Dad gift choices in our system, and wore his favorite on the Today show. Here’s the clip:
And if you want to add something a little extra to Dad’s gift, there’s always the remote-control beer cooler.
Here are the featured designs:
  
 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s (alleged) landslide re-election victory has led to disbelief and unrest in the streets of Iran, where hundreds of thousands gathered in a protest demonstration that led to security forces opening fire. One protestor was killed and several were injured.
Despite the appearances of democratic process, most speculation is that the radically conservative President Ahmadinejad (with his military support) was kept in office by rigging the election. Of course, in reality Iran’s political power doesn’t lie primarily with its President – Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini is the one with the most influence over the country, and he now sits center stage as the referee of Iran’s highly disputed election. Some note that the practical theocracy in Iran would indicate that nothing’s going to change anytime soon in Iran, and with Ayatollah Khameini openly endorsing Ahmadinejad and calling the election results a “divine assessment,” it’s pretty easy to assume that any investigation into election fraud will be short-lived.
The challenger, reformist ex-Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, reacted vitriolically to the reports of Ahmadinejad’s alleged 63% vote and vowed to fight the results, saying “I will not surrender to this dangerous charade.”
President Obama said that it would be wrong to stay silent on the matter, and that the Iranian people had a right to feel that their votes mattered. He also stated that he hopes Iranian officials will take the election investigation seriously.
Many have noted that this election has proven that Obama doesn’t have the magic answer to form strong alliances with countries that traditionally, as John McCain put it, don’t like us very much. With the highly-disputed results securing an ongoing foothold of radical Islam over the governance of Iran, it would seem that the focus of undesirable global nuclear programs will now be split between North Korea and Iran.
The T-shirts have taught us that an image is indeed worth 1,000 words, so if you’re interested in Iran’s governance system we thought this graphic was a nice alternative to Wikipedia:
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