ulo.tricho.us

Note: I do not hate books. I like books. I doubt that even the high school kid I saw on the bus wearing an ‘I Hate Books’ tshirt really hates books, even though he was listening to an iPod and texting at the same time, which probably doesn’t put him on the Reader’s Digest mailing list. However, there he was, the face of the future, and he thought that a good way to express himself, and possibly attract the attention of his preferred sex, would be to wear a t-shirt that declares his intense dislike of hard copy.

The real question about this guy is, where is he on the curve? If he’s an outlier, libraries should be ok for a while, yet. If he represents the mainstream, things could get ugly fast.

I wanted to see if this shirt was available online anywhere, in hopes of seeing what other shirts were being sold alongside it. For example, finding a shirt that reads “Does it look like I care” would confirm the ‘outlier’ theory, while finding it alongside a shirt that reads “Proust is a Yenta” could be one dead canary of a discovery.

I didn’t find the shirt (although I did find a cell phone wallpaper), but I did find 14,000 hits for “I hate books”. To put this in context, I searched for “I hate tuna” and “I hate pickles”, two phrases which ought to spill out of Google’s index like so many grain-fattened tribbles, and found, to my dismay, that books are hated an order of magnitude more than tuna or pickles.