Five With Flores

Disaster averted! Santa Claus is Coming to Town! … and The World’s Greatest Tee Shirt returns!

I came home tonight and my wife was at the computer.

“Don’t come any closer!”

This time of year those words can only mean one thing: Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

It was an involuntary reaction but my eyes shot down the hallway to the light beaming from my desk. I could see the black outline of a tee shirt from around the silhouette of her brown hoodie sleeve.

Of course I smiled.

“I know the tee shirts are back in stock,” I told her.

…

If you guys haven’t figured it out yet, The World’s Greatest Tee Shirt is back in stock!

I was alerted to this happy fact by good man Thanatos6, in the forums from yesterday’s Decepticons / Thundercats discussion “Not Available at Any Price!”

And now you have been alerted, too.

Ever the good man, thanatos6 said he was on the same wavelength as my Mrs. and procured some Optimus Prime tee shirts as gifts.

Truly ’tis the season.

Wish me luck tomorrow!

(I only wish I had this shirt for tomorrow… Can you imagine how Prime-unstoppable you would be at Magic with this shirt? It might as well be the Mithral Coat of Corellon.)

LOVE
MIKE

MichaelJ is sick! Also some things are not available at any price. Others are available for between $4.99 and $24.

First of all, sorry for the few / lame updates the past week or two. I am back in New York and have been in I think five cities in three days (Cleveland, Richmond, New York, Ft. Lauderdale, New York again) between Thanksgiving and now. Most recently I flew down to Florida for less than 24 hours to do a speech, back in the office the next day (today).

I am wiped from traveling and the speech / presentation.

Millionaire copywriter Dr. Harlan Kilstein let me do a presentation at his Tactic7 seminar which was daunting. I have done presentations about being awesome at Google before but… like… only at Google or at seminars talking to Googlers. So yes, it’s a big honor to be one of the few online marketing experts to actually present at the epicenter of the online marketing universe, but the stresses are very different. Sure it can still be intimidating, but when you are speaking at Google, you are sharing with a room full of professionals who basically get paid to be there.

Presenting at Harlan’s made me nervous because the situation was reversed: Entrepeneurs and students were paying to hear me speak. Yes it was Harlan’s event and I was just a guest speaker for the day but the people present paid a deep four figures to sit in that packed room so it was important for me to do a good job.

Luckily I aquitted myself quite adequately.

Unluckily — and if you know me in real life (instead of just listening to my videos) you can probably imagine this — I spent a lot of my speech shouting at the top of my lungs. Specifically I repeated THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR five or ten times, Gregorian chant style (if Gregorian monks, you know, shouted THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR at the top of their lungs).

So I have no voice now.

Which is kind of horrible because I am going to do a video on my Star City Blightning Beatdown tonight. I kind of have to. I did the footage more than a week ago, intending to do the video while I was home in Ohio, but wall to wall family stuff came up for a week and the raw files have been sitting on my computer for however long. But the Star City $5K event is less than two days from now… So when you get to see the video (which will be later tonight, getting back to the “sorry for the few / lame updates the past week or two” bit up top), you will have to deal with my non-voice. I am the equal and opposite of Blackagar Boltagon. My voice is THAT un-powerful at present.

So what does this have to do with this blog post’s headline ["Not Available at Any Price!" if you forgot]?

While I was at Tactic7 I met up with fellow presenter, quality human being, and Career Renegade Jonathan Fields, an imminent Amazon.com best seller and expert in social media (you know, like this blog). Jonathan turned me onto Twitter. So if you want to follow me on Twitter (no one is following me on Twitter, please follow me on Twitter, I want to feel popular), I am unsurprisingly FiveWithFlores, that is, Twitter.com/FiveWithFlores. Apparently I previously registered my Madmanpoet self some time in the distant past, but I have since forgotten the password to Madmanpoet’s account. Poor Twitter.com/Madmanpoet. You are alone forever. Long live FiveWithFlores!

Jonathan pointed out the agile use of “not available at any price” in a sales letter he showed me, and I just found something also not available at any price (though my use is dramatically less agile).

I was perusing 80sTees.com, home of The World’s Greatest Tee Shirt (sorry… still not in stock in M, L, or XL… did anybody bug them yet? I didn’t [yet]), and came upon this Decepticon belt:

I am not sure if that Decepticon belt is cool or lame; only that it is bright purple. However I have the following little mice turning gears in my noggin:

1) It’s only $4.99 (meaning that if it turns out to be lame, I blew less than a latte), and
2) It fits up to 38 inches (meaning I’m good… Is there anything more embarrassing than buying a belt you can’t fit into?)

So I’m thinking to myself, “Self, there is a reasonable possibility this belt is lame. Maybe there could be some other belt that is definitely cool, or at least not lame?”

So I came upon this belt:

IT IS NOT AVAILABLE AT ANY PRICE.

Zero dollars?

Really?

I had to double-take.

This Thundercats belt is $0… You know, like my lifetime winnings in individual Pro Tours.

Yet it is in stock.

How can this be?

When price = $0, that throws the whole cool / lame cost / benefit matrix completely out of whack. Free things are basically automatically cool, or at least not lame.

Then I read that you actually have to buy a Thundercats tee shirt to get the NOT AVAILABLE AT ANY PRICE belt “for free.” Oh, that’s how they get you. Actual commerce and product purchases. The arrogant bastards. You have to pay them before you get goods and services. How gauche. Maybe they should just let me buy The World’s Greatest Tee Shirt instead of it being out of stock. Did I mention “bastards”?

Anyway, I was leaning towards this one, because then I can pretend that I didn’t know there was a double entendre (my life is more or less non-stop shenanigans, and pretending I didn’t know I was committing a faux pas is basically my favorite scam):

The only problem is that if you have a daughter and you want her to be proud, independent, free-thinking, and strong, you have to at least THINK ABOUT / consider certain ridiculous actions and intentional unintentional double entendres, especially if you want to dodge the ire of the Mrs. For the unmarried among you, there is a high benefit to relatively low cost in dodging the ire of the Mrs.

So what is a man to do in order to shotgun a free Thundercats belt?

There is the Underoos-looking route:

Or alternately the hipster “I found these Underoos crumpled under my bed” route:

Personally I like the second one more, but I am worried the Mrs. will mistake it for a ratty old shirt and will accidentally throw it away.

This is more difficult than “Figure of Destiny” or “Tarfire the Birds of Paradise” on turn one.

So long story short, video + Magical post later tonight.

Thanks everybody for continuing to love what Mike Flores loves. If I can get my free Thundercats belt in time for the Star City $5K, it will match my deck of choice (Blightning Beatdown, obv).

LOVE
MIKE

Firestarter:
What is actually more difficult? Figure of Destiny / Tarfire the Birds of Paradise on turn one or Underoos-looking Thundercats shirt / “distressed” Underoos-looking Thundercats shirt?

PS
Dont forget to follow me on Twitter!

How can the world’s greatest tee shirt and Optimus Prime, iconic leader of the Autobots conspire to such an unmitigated disaster? This Black Friday, there is only one way to find out, sadly.

So I found the world’s greatest tee shirt.

When I say “THE WORLD’S GREATEST” tee shirt, I am not kidding.

I created some of the game’s most inventive strategies and sideboards — meaning I have a pretty decent imagination — and I can’t begin to imagine a tee shirt even one per cent as great as this one. It is nostalgia, inspiration, art, and coming-of-age all rolled into one piece of clothing.

Go ahead and look:

(You can click that and get one yourself… maybe.)

I mean there is so much stuff going on. Me, I can actually visualize Optimus cruising towards Autobot City, with the instrumental gearing up behind him as he starts rolling over hapless Decepticons. The first 20 minutes or so of Transformers: The Movie is one of my favorite cinematic experiences ever.

The sheer ridiculousness of Optimus with speakers behind him, axing an electric guitar is… Sublime. It truly transcends genre, goes beyond animation, speculative fiction, meta-fiction… can only exist on the greatest tee shirt of all time.

The vendor even says “If you feel like you’ve lost The Touch, this shirt might just be the way to regain it.” Yes! Please help me regain The Touch! Please let me buy this tee shirt!

So… disaster?

The disaster is that they are all sold out of my size. In fact, they are sold out of M, L, and XL… Though if you are a small, 2XL, &c. you can still get one (provided they are not all sold out of everything on account of it being Black Friday). Check here if you have any taste at all.

I think I am going to call the company and complain and / or ask them if they are going to print another large. This is an exclusive and therefore there is no other place to get this tee shirt!

If they reload, I will keep you updated.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Perhaps if you put on too many extra pounds, you can upgrade to a 2XL or thereabouts and obtain The Touch.

LOVE
MIKE