Wednesday, July 1, 2009

A shirt not suitable for airports...

But that is where he wore it, my son (LA). We did get some strange looks...

The shirt design is a spoof on a WWII era government poster from the UK, with the original stating: KEEP CALM and CARRY ON! Now Panic and Freak Out seems to be more suitable for our times...

The story of the poster is interesting:
"Back in the spring of 1939, it was an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace should, heaven forbid, the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel.

This was the third in a series. The first, designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril.

From August 1939, both posters began appearing all over the country, on billboards, in shops, on railway platforms. The third, though, was held back. This one was for the real crisis: invasion.

... For 60 years, the poster had been forgotten. Then, one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw "A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That's quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that's where it all started." (link to full story)

The reprinted poster is now everywhere, and tens of thousands of copies of it has been sold.

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