The Earth is Not Uranus

When I was down at the Byron Bay Writers Festival recently buying some books in the festival's bookstore, a magazine I had never seen before caught my eye and luckily the line for the cash register was moving SLOWly and I had a chance to flick through the magazine and decided to buy the latest edition and the one before it.

Some magazines look good until you get them home and start reading them to find out they are all gloss and no substance, but not SLOW magazine.

The stories and articles I found as interesting as the photography, and I found them both cerebral and visual works of art and information. 

As I worked my way through the latest edition of SLOW last night (and yes, I am a slow reader) I had been working in my Zazzle store, which I wrote about in this post recently -
'Canberra Bashing'?
putting a few of my old designs on new products, since I felt I had neglected that store, as I had many old fun designs from a while back which haven't really seen the light of day, so I thought I would put some of my old favourites onto some new products.
More for fun than for the thought of making any money out of them.

One of those designs was the one above, which I made as an attempt at environmental humour, as in Australia we pronounce Uranus as "your anus", which is always bound to bring a snicker in science classrooms across the country.
Although my joke is probably lost in translation when it comes to American audiences, as I have heard them pronounce the planet's name in various TV shows as "urine ass" or "you're an ass", although at speed like one continuous word like "you'reanass". 

Uranus in 2005

Either way it's still rather potty mouth sounding stuff no matter how Uranus is pronounced I think, but my design only works properly with the Australian pronunciation. 

I put the design on mainly environmental friendly type products and hesitated at putting the design on a thermos, because I thought who would buy one anyway?
I then read the "An Ode to a Thermos" article at the end of the latest edition of SLOW magazine and found out that they were more popular than I thought.
SLOW even mentioned a Steve Martin song called 'The Thermos Song' from the movie 'The Jerk' in that article, which I didn't recall until I looked up a clip on You Tube.

Although my favourite Steve Martin sketch is still pretty much the "It's pronounced "azaleas"" scene in the movie 'The Man with Two Brains'.

And on the subject of Uranus ... depending on how you pronounce the word that is ... I saw the above article about poo-lution and how some countries in Europe were running public transport on fuel made from human and animal excrement.
"No s#it!" I thought to myself when I read it;-)

And I thought I was doing my bit for the environment by using toilet paper made from recycled office paper. 
Surely there is a market here for recycled marriage certificates and divorce papers, as well;-)

Anyway, if you want to grab some merch with Uranus on it then click here to go to my Zazzle store and who knows, if enough of you buy something I might just make enough from Zazzle to buy a newspaper, or two.
I wish that was a joke, but has anyone opened a Zazzle store thinking they would make some pocket money only to realize that you would make more money setting up a lemonade stand in front of your house?
And if you want to read a good little magazine ... and no, I'm not getting any kickbacks from the magazine ... then click here to get the latest copy.

And what do you know, there was even a chook on the back of the latest magazine -
Feeding the Chooks in the Year of the Cock?