Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves; this election season, it’s time to wear your voice on your chest!

Today marks the launch of the “Sport Your Support” t-shirt design contest, wherein your creative voice can win you a trip to the 2008 Inauguration bash!  Other groovy prizes include a Gibson guitar and a signed Shepard Fairey print.

Rock the Vote will get a portion of the proceeds for every contest t-shirt sold, so your one-of-a-kind creation can help get other people out there to vote.

For official rules and all the fine print and other groovy instructions, please visit the Sport Your Support contest page.

And don’t worry – if you have great ideas but you’re compu-design challenged, we’ve made it easy for you with a WYSIWYG designer.  So anyone can get out there and sport your support.  Even, perhaps, those without opposable thumbs…

(Legal note: we don’t know that the Inauguration party allows the canines, so if Fido has strong opinions and can hunt and peck his way to contest victory, we suggest you take the grand prize and give him a nice steak as a consolation.)

He has a slogan.  He has a seal.  And now Obama has his own salute.

Some are calling it The Big-O, some are calling it The Obama Salute.  And some are calling it a gang symbol, a Nazi salute or a cult phenomenon.

Other critics are comparing it to a Star Trek salute made famous in “The Way to Eden” episode.  Hmm.

Whatever you want to call it, Rick Husong’s creation is raising eyebrows and headlines this week as people from both sides of the political fence voice opinions as to how they feel about it.

As of today, supporters of the salute can go hands-free with official Obama salute t-shirts, relieving salute-happy California drivers everywhere.  And if you like to keep your salutations private, you can always start a thongversation.

I spoke with the salute creator today, and he explained that he created the symbol out of a desire to do something inspirational because this is a “moving time in history,” and that after the last 8 “despicable” years he feels that it’s high time that America is inspired by politics.  He also, for the record, has not seen “The Way to Eden.”  But perhaps he might watch it now…

One interesting point in the debate behind the salute is that this kind of debate didn’t arise with Nixon’s double-handed V, Phil Jackson’s trademarked “threepeat,” or even George W. Bush’s prong-fingered inaugural contribution to the custom salute.

(Well, not this debate specifically, i.e. the debate of gangs and cults and Hitler and Star Trek.  Apparently the Norwegians misinterpreted the Bush salute as a nod to Satan, but hey.  That’s Norway.  Norway has, however, thus far not commented upon the Obama salute.)

Coincidentally, we do publish official Star Trek scripts.  So out of curiosity I took a look at the “The Way to Eden” script today to determine whether the salute in question was specified by the writers, and whether the Big-O might be one in the same.

It seems that this episode is about a bunch of space hippies cruising around the galaxy.  It would also seem that the symbol in question means “One,” which is interesting given that the script seems to call for an egg shape rather than an “O.”

Indeed, the Big-O may have been more appropriate for this episode than the actual symbol demonstrated.  And Leonard Nimoy seems to have taken some artistic liberties with an egg shape, unless Vulcan eggs are in fact triangular.  Hmm.

So: pop culture phenomenon?  Inspired contribution to political history?  Worrying evidence of despotism, a cult following or gang mentality?  Or a sign that Obama’s popularity reaches beyond our atmosphere and into the realm of intergalactic hippies?

That, readers, is for you to decide.  And some good homework to do on the matter is reading some “Star Trek.“  Or, if you prefer…

While I was off at cowboy camp falling off horses and such, John McCain raised eyebrows with a 30-second anti-Obama spot called “Celeb.”  The ad, as follows, brings up energy policy and taxation issues, and suggests that Obama is merely a celebrity who’s as ready to lead the country as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

This spot underwent great criticism and seems to have been pulled.  One thing worth noting is that millions of people seem entirely ready to embrace Obama as a celebrity – and that many don’t think it’s a bad thing.  One look through the Obama designs, created by millions of fans, would indicate that Obama is viewed by many as a political rock star.

Another indication of the Senator’s pop culture magnetism is the crowds he assembles, even when abroad.  Whether his celebrity is masking a lack of experience or whether it’s simply a juggernaut indicative that America has found the right candidate is up for the voters – and history – to decide.

Hilton, for her part, wasted no time in crafting her own campaign ad as a response to McCain’s original spot.  Her spot discusses her own energy policy and, on the subject of offshore energy, also guides America to the travel spot most likely to afford you the best tan:

Indeed, the debates should be interesting…

I don’t know if y’all know this, but thanks to our industrious group of Shopkeepers CafePress has – as far as we know – the largest online retail catalogue in existence.

Yep, it’s bigger than a breadbox fer sure.

As of today we had around 165,000,000 products for sale in the Marketplace catalogue (meaning there’s actually a lot more than that, what with private shops and all). 40,000 new products get added every day, which means that by the time you read this post in its entirety around 150 products will be added to the system.

Thing is, 165,000,000 (and upwards) is a gargantuan, colossal and otherwise ginormously huge number. It’s of the “gozillion” caliber and is pretty hard to conceptualize. So today with the help of a mathlete-type engineer who enjoys these kinds of puzzles, I did some fun math to try to put that huge number into perspective. Here’s what we came up with:

• If you laid all the products in our catalogue end-to-end, you’d go around the world 2.5 times.

• If you laid all the t-shirts in our catalogue end-to-end, you’d go around the world twice.

• If you stacked all the products in our catalogue into a nice towering pile (that’s T-shirts laid flat and mugs standing up – we’re assuming the mugs don’t break; come on, humor us), you’d be able to bridge the Grand Canyon. Depending on where you bridged it would determine the width of your Merch Bridge.

• If the desert’s not your thing, you could create a Merch Bridge that runs parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge that, from the water, sits at the height of the cars and is 5 lanes wide. (We might suggest building a dock first so the bridge doesn’t sink.)

• New York City has 8 million people. We have almost 7 million mugs. This means that you could give every person in New York a one-of-a-kind cup of coffee – because kids shouldn’t drink coffee. Even New York kids.

• You could drain Raging Waters with the mugs in our catalogue.

• If you filled all those mugs with gas and then filled up a Prius, that Prius would run for 62 years straight. You could also drive that Prius to Venus (or maybe farther – we didn’t take into account that zero gravity would save enormously on gas), or you could drive the Prius around the earth 1000 times. Alternatively you could have 1000 people race a lap around the earth, if Toyota saw fit to make the Prius an aquatic vehicle (and if the gas mileage stayed around 50MPG as such).

Interesting political numbers:

• The number of anti-Bush stickers in the catalogue would cover the entire Washington Monument, with enough left over to wallpaper the Oval Office and the rest of the West Wing.
• Worried about redecorating in November? No problem:
  • The Obama stickers in the catalogue can cover the Washington Monument, the Oval Office and still get a room or two in the West Wing. (And we still have some time to go until the election, so we may be able to add the rest of the West Wing eventually.)
  • The Hillary stickers almost cover the entire Monument – we’re a little short, but who can read anything at the top of that thing anyway?
  • The McCain stickers only get a third of the Monument, but there’s always posters…

Now, even those numbers are pretty huge and hard to wrap one’s head around, so we came up with a couple easy daily figures:

• The products added in a day would stack as high as the Eiffel Tower.
• The products added in a day, laid out end-to-end, stretch 15 miles. So you could go from the Eiffel Tower to Versailles, and still have enough stuff left over to lay a path through the gardens.

So we learned a few interesting things in this exercise, and the most obvious is this:

You can’t compete with Mother Nature.

Sure, we can bridge the Grand Canyon with a pile of merchandise (er – I suppose that makes it a dam, on second thought) – but we’re nowhere near to filling it in. And just when we felt impressive about draining Raging Waters, we realized that pouring out all the water in those 7 million mugs account for a single second of water going over the crest of Niagra Falls.

But hey, keep checking back. As motivated as our Shopkeepers are, we won’t be at all surprised if – laying out our product collection – they lead us to beat China to the moon.

P.S. – If you want to come up with your own fancy math and interesting measurements, please do! Comment here or send to blog@cafepress.com. We’re especially interested as to whether anyone can figure out how large the catalogue in pile form – think dumping-out-the-duffel-bag pile – would be.