Ask DB1: Ed Hardy Quandry
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Oh wise one, we beseech thee with a question for the oracle of douchebaggery.
Can an Ed Hardy shirt, worn without irony, by a decidedly non-douchebag fellow, ever be acceptable attire? I ask this because the fellow pictured is a great guy, a good chef, and the father of the gal in the picture.
Together they run one of Las Vegas’ best off-Strip restaurants — serving kick-ass Bulgarian, Czech, Russian and Spanish(!?) food — to certain louche-lounge-lizard types, who may look like Eastern Promises extras but are genuinely nice blokes who appreciate the hand-tooled food of their homelands.
But the Ed Hardy shirt does give one pause.
What say you DB1?
– Choad The Douche Sprocket
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Hardywear = autodouche.
I don’t care if Mother Theresa and Jonas Salk had a kid who just cured jock itch using only chocolate HoHos massage techniques and a large vibrating eggg. If that child wears Ed Hardy, he must not pass.
There are no exceptions.
Well, maybe homeless children in Africa receiving rejected merchandise from America, who need to clothe themselves. M’Buke gets a nottadouche for wearing unsold 2006 Von Dutch shirts while scouring the garbage pile for aluminum foil. Other than that, autodouche.
This guy only gets a pass if he doesn’t speak English and he bought this shirt from the thrift store. Its like my friend’s Mexican maid who only spoke a few words of English arriving to work in a shirt that said “SHUT THE FUCK UP BITCH!” that she got at a garage sale and had no idea that it might be offensive to my friend’s opera glasses dropped in cup of tea-style mother. Or its like the time my other friend’s mom (a recent transplant from the Phillipenes) sent her young Phillipino son to a predominantly white school with a shirt that read “Viet Cong is Coming To Get You!” Sure we laugh about it now (mainly me doing most of the laughing) but it was pretty traumatic for him.
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So yeah this dude only gets a pass if he’s totally out of the loop.
Ultimately, one must explore the hyperdimensional physics of cultural propagation in order to understand the dynamics of Ed Hardy taint. If you will, compare Ed Hardy to a cultural BP oil spill. BP is the douchebag culprit, Ed Hardy is the addoucherement oil slick, but there are also plenty of hapless wildlife who get caught in the muck.
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This man is such a species of Vegas Wildlife. Running an off-strip diner, he’s an ordinary guy. But being in such proximity to the gusher that is Vegas taint, he will necessarily be tainted.
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So just give him a strong bristle brush, some decent t-shirts, and tell him to clean himself up. Then call PETA and ask them for a medal. So you can show it off to his daughter when you ask her out.
Oh, and FIRST.
Or second. Whatever.
Sorry Mr. Second. I believe I am first. Third!
Dammit Fourth!
What if the shirt is a gift? Aren’t you obligated to wear it? Like that Garfield sweater my grandma made me in 9th grade…
Or those Patriots19-0 shirts
Or those “Vancouver Wins in Seven!” T’s
Or those Gore/Lieberman shirts
Oh and Nancy, I think this guy is safely out of the loop. Or strip, if you will. At worst, he’s buying what he feels is the norm for his city. At best, it’s all the thrift stores in Vegas have.
Or this:
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Or those fucking organic cotton shirts I have stacked in my basement from 20 years ago when I tried to cash in on early enviromania. Fucking moths.
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I would try Yorgi’s beet soup and kosher pickle special with a side of perogies and Natasha from behind over the kraut barrel.
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Marxmen.
Take the Ed Hardy lettering off that shirt and it looks like a nurse’s scrub at my mother’s rest home
My 87 year old Uncle Leo is Bulgarian. His diet consists of pickled sardines, lamb anus-stuffed grape leaves, goat’s head soup and ox tails, washed down with cheap brandy. Needless to say turn your head and hold your breath when he talks to you.
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Comrades
My grandmother was Czech, her cooking was fucking poison. Flies would die when they attempted to lay eggs in that toxic shit. Her cooking killed three husbands, the entire congregation at the Eastern Orthodox Church and several dogs.
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She only wore Ed Hardy when she was horny or drunk.
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Which was often.
Nothing beats the delicate flavor and texture of grass-fed alpaca.
Get Some!
Rules are rules after all….once you start making exceptions, it becomes a slippery slope to universal ‘baggery.
Yep, even if it was a gift- BAG! by Association.
I tend to think that he’s nottabag. Why? Well, let’s look at the permission, as discussed by DB1:
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maybe homeless children in Africa receiving rejected merchandise from America, who need to clothe themselves. M’Buke gets a nottadouche for wearing unsold 2006 Von Dutch shirts while scouring the garbage pile for aluminum foil.
OK. Now, let’s look at this angle:
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Let’s call him Sergei because he seems to be Eastern European. So, Sergei here is in his late 50s. He’s from Bulgaria and came to the USA in the early 1990s when the whole fucking shithouse was on fire over there. They move West because that’s where the growth economy was – you could buy a huge house for a can of tiddlywinks and a ball of string in Henderson NV back then. Now, this was what was in his head:
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“In Olda Cuntry, we like fashion. Fashion say you no peasant focker. We come to America. We go to Vegas where Americans throw money away. They can throw money away at me, too. So, I open restaurant. I worka hard to raise my malka kukla, my daughter, Bisera. you see her in picture? Lovely, no? She is my little doll. From Bisera, she knows many American boys. They wear these shirts, because to wear these shirts makes you “hip”. In olda cuntry, there was no “hip”. There was hunger and firing squads. So, one day, she brings boy, his name “Brad”. And Brad good boy. Hair is greasy, and he smells like the chemical plant that gave my father cancer, god rest his soul, but he speak nice to me, and he respect me and he wears this kind of shirt. And he likes my malka kukla, Bisera. He works croupier at Belagio. Makes crazy money. Drives Benz. So, I think – I wear his type of shirt and I am hip too. Customers laugh, say to me ‘Aaaah – Sergei – you so very trendy boy!’ This makes me laugh and be happy, because happy me makes for happy customers who buy food. So, I don’t know who this Ed Hardy guy is, and frankly, after wearing this in the hot kitchen full of flames and grease for six months, it will be cut rags for to clean glasses, so it no matter who Hardy is. Now, Bisera – she is beautiful, no?”
THAT’S what’s going on in his head, and that’s why he’s nottadouche.
I would souffle his daughter out behind the kitchen dumpster with my Bulgarian man-sausage.
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At the moment of sweet release, I would exclaim, “BAM!”
Troy Tempest FTW!!!, Well said sir, well said
I’d eat her head cheese and bacon fat sandwich.
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Meatheads
@Et Tu – thanks!
I still favor that there must be intent behind the signifiers. Since I don’t see kissylips or a mandanna on Mr. Proprietowski, I’m gonna venture a guess that he was given that shirt by some misguided but sincere relative, possibly his hot daughter.
For if we succeed with our mocking, Ed Hardy will be relegated to the extras bin, and will end up at TJ Maxx; who won’t be able to sell it and will donate it to Goodwill, where it will rot until it is given away to homeless people, who simply need a shirt. Ultimately, all the purveyors of Ed Hardy will go bankrupt and the attire will be a stigma of economic hardship.
Of course, at that point the hipsterbags will be wading through the rubbish heaps for those rare, homeless person smelling shirts that aren’t made anymore, but we’ll deal with that problem when we get there, possibly involving bear traps.
This guy has no visible hair implants, so I’m gonna give him a notta and a goin and probably head to Vegas for some Bulgarian food and surreptitious waitress ogling.
Snow White (suffering from some serious combination skin) poses with Gimlet, the lime and gin flavored dwarf.
we’ve seen neckless douchebags, we’ve seen ed hardy shirts, we’ve seen neckless douchebags in ed hardy shirts, we’ve seen fire, we’ve seen rain, we’ve seen shitty songs that i thought would never end. we’ve seen lost items that we thought would never be found, its just a free shirt coming his way this time around. notta see you notta see you fire and rain.
notta. like james taylor says, if you do enough cocaine, you will see everything, fire and rain,
singer-songwriters.
Christian Audiger’s cruelest joke: epilepsy inducing unintelligible Chinese characters and tiger heads frolicking madly across a life-jacket orange landscape. In XXL.
Al Bundy can sure still pull some tail.
Dammit, Bigphatnotadouche beat me to the Al Bundy riff.
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I’ll have to fall back on my “Mark Knopfler? NOOOO!!!!” bit.
Mark Knopfler? NOOOO!!!!
that Ed O’niell sure can pull some tail!
DS & bigphat…eat a jelly dong!
giant… floating… head…
i’d hate to be this guy’s neck.
@ Troy–Awwwww…..that made me homesick for the old country. And by that I mean my kitchen table. Because that’s what I listen to every time I sit there. “So, today I’m-a gonna go to da Wal-a-Mart, I have cooponz, I get free can of corn eef I buy too for one dollars. Holy crappy, America is like-a da place for da good shopping.” And I don’t have the heart to tell him the story of Wal-Mart’s destructive world conquest and slave wages yet again. I just sigh and let him go enjoy himself and write home tales to the old country, tales of how the streets in America are paved with three dollar T-Shirts and Wrangler jeans. I tearfully give Sergei a notta. And request some of that food, too. I loves me some goddamned blini.
Nottadouche,old man doesn’t even know what the word douche bag is.It had to be a gift from an asshole friend.
Troy Tempest FTW – I’m all choked up here.
nottadouche, goinpeace.
Definite ‘notta. He’s been working his butt off in the restaurant since he got to this country. He still has the first dollars he earned there hanging above the pickle jar, for crying out loud. He’s one of the few reasons that Las Vegas has not been wiped off the earth by a vengeful God. He spends sleepless nights worrying about how to keep his cute daughter safe in the primordial soup of douchebags that surrounds her in LV. He wears the Ed Hardy shirt to attract attention to him, only to keep the occasional douche that wanders into the restaurant from noticing her, much the way some nesting birds feign injury to protect eggs in their nest.
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At least that’s what I imagine.
Bad enough that it’s an Ed Hardy shirt, but one with a kind of “polka dot” design motif? THAT’s the douchebaggery of it.
Only a friggin’ clown wears polka-dots.
Jeesh.