“The band t-shirt has been a staple of our casual wardrobe for a while — really, ever since that one Deerhoof show — but that’s because rock stars are cool. Bloggers, not so much. But as in many things, Andrew Sullivan is the exception. The combination of an awesome beard and a balanced understanding of new media make him the closest our tribe has to a rock star, so he’s teamed up with the nautical experts (and Provincetown residents) at Rogues Gallery for a trio of screenprinted tees.”
 — Andrew Sullivan has a t-shirt? Why don’t we have a t-shirt? Oh, right, because it would probably look like this. Carry on.

“The latest figures issued by the World Economic Forum are alarming. In the organization’s 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 74th among 134 countries, below Colombia and Venezuela. In no other European country do so few women work outside the home (only 44 percent), and those that do earn half as much as their male counterparts. They spend 21 hours a week doing domestic chores, longer than any other European woman. Only five percent of Italian men have ever operated a washing machine.”

As we promised: Nine in Bagel Suits Are Arrested at AIDS Protest.

If your index finger is longer than your ring finger, you are more likely to develop prostate cancer, says Science. (Science is assuming you have a prostate here.) Fingers! What can’t they tell us about ourselves?

“The Hungarian companies get all of ___’s international income, which flows in from 13 different salespeople in ten different countries and which, since it’s international income flowing to a Hungarian company owned by a Cayman Islands parent, is basically pure profit which never comes close to being taxed in the U.S. The result is a company where 130 U.S. employees eat up the lion’s share of the U.S. revenues, resulting in little if any taxable income, while the international income, the franchise value of the brands, and the value of the technology all stays permanently overseas, untouched by the IRS.” The answer may surprise (and/or bore) you.

Holy cripes, whois going to read the bailout docs? Today brings a Wikileaks-style (kidding — it’s totally sanitized) dump of “more than 21,000 individual credit and other transactions conducted to stabilize markets during the recent financial crisis.” I call “not it.” I can’t even tell my TAF from my TALF.

The folks from Free Darko and Tablet team up to bring you the Choose Your Own All-Time Greatest Jewish-American Basketball Team Game. It’s fun and educational! What more could you ask for?

The Poynter Institute preemptively discourages you from complaining about today’s new redesign of the wonderful Jim Romenesko’s blog. (But seriously now, if I wanted to read these embedded tweets by Howie Kurtz and Jeff Jarvis… obviously I’d follow them on Twitter, right?) So? Whatever could readers be complaining about? Let’s take a tour of Romenesko throughout the decade!

It also seems important to point out the most notable thing on the page as of today. What is that super-giant word on Romenesko? The word is “Poynter.” (The period is part of their “thing” now. Just like “Aol.”!)

(Note: the broken images below are due to the imperfect, if wonderful, storage by Archive.org.)

November, 2002:

November, 2004:

November, 2006:

August, 2008:

The archive from August 2008 to the present is unavailable, but the intermediate redesign was a progression towards the current. (“[O]n all four sides the site wants to zip me away from Jim’s space,” is how Jay Rosen described that incarnation.) Jim Romenesko said at the time that “our stats show that the majority of people go to my part and don’t move off of it, and obviously we want people to explore the other parts of the site.” Well, it’s a little over two years later and we pretty much still don’t care what else is on Poynter.

Let’s see what’s here:

Key:

Blue: Actual editorial space.

Grey: Related editorial space.

Green: Other people’s editorial space.

Orange: Poynter promotional crud.

White: A whole load of whitespace.

What readers are complaining about is that what’s happening to newspapers and journalism sites is pretty expertly summarized by what’s also happening to Romenesko’s web presence. Which should be, it seems, the wrong message for a pro-journalism site to be conveying.

Howard Jacobson, this year’s Man Booker Prize winner, has an op-ed in today’s Times complaining about the lameness of Hanukkah. He’s right. Hanukkah is so the Mets. That’s what you get, I suppose, when you elevate a minor holiday to major-league status. Sure, it’s nice to try make Jewish children feel less bad about living in a world that hates them, but how are you going to compete with Christmas? It’s like scheduling Chuck against Dancing With the Stars. “So what’s to be done?” Jacobson writes. “Either Hanukkah should merge with Christmas — a suggestion against which the arguments are more legion even than the Syrian-Greek army — or it should be spiced up with the sort of bitter irony at which the Jewish people excel. Instead of the dreidel, give the kids their own cars for Hanukkah, in memory of the oil that should have run out but didn’t. Maybe we should also dedicate each candle to one of the more recent narrow escapes of Jewish history. The Spanish Inquisition candle. The Russian Pogroms candle.”

I think he’s on to something. Let’s finish the list.

3) The Lender’s Bagels candle
4) The success of The Passion of the Christ candle
5) The Madoff scandal candle
6) The Roger Waters candle
7) The other Jews candle
8) The global warming (and even more important, the attendant increase in humidity) candle

Who needs Christmas?! Let the Yankees have Derek Jeter! We’ll make our trumped-up holiday a jolly day for every girl and boy! Jews are survivors! Wolverines!!!

Hey ladies, if you are dodging your dad right now you may very well be at your most fertile, says Science. Apparently, you are afraid that you’re going to fuck him. “Martie Haselton, a UCLA associate professor, said: ‘Women call their dads less frequently on these high-fertility days and they hang up with them sooner if their dads initiate a call.’ … [R]esearchers believe that, like females in other species, women have built-in psychological mechanisms that help protect against the risk of producing less healthy children, which tends to occur when close genetic relatives mate.”