Author: Dana Gibson

The shirt says, in block capitals, NOT FRIENDLY. Below that, DO NOT TOUCH. Beside the words sits a yellow caution triangle, and inside the triangle a hand is crossed out. That is the whole design. No illustration of a person, no winking mascot, no softener. Just the visual grammar of a hazard placard applied to…

There is a period at the end of the word. That is the first thing I notice. The second is the scale: the letters are so small that from across a room the shirt reads as a dark rectangle with a faint smudge at the sternum. The word is meh. — lowercase, centered, and punctuated…

The shirt reads LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW, printed in a ring around four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — each drawn with its roots visible in the soil. The vegetables are cartoonish, the smiles are wide, and the roots are the…

The shirt reads I WEAR THIS SHIRT PERIODICALLY, and beneath the sentence sit four tiles in the visual grammar of the periodic table: 53 I, 74 W, 22 Ti, 16 S. The symbols spell I W Ti S. That is not a literal spelling of the sentence. It is a diagram joke, and the gap…

On the shirt, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit in white capitals above a white curved ramp. At the upper left ledge, a dashed empty circle. At the lower right, a solid ball resting on a flat ledge. The ramp descends between them. That is the whole design. No arrows, no equations, no labels. The…

There is a white goose-like bird in an orange prison uniform. It holds a black mugshot board. Above it, in plain block letters, the shirt reads GOT TOO SILLY. That is the whole design, and it is enough. The joke lands because the image borrows the visual grammar of official accountability — the intake photo,…

The shirt does not show a teacher. It shows a notebook. A black-and-white speckled rectangle sits on the chest, a dark binding strip runs down its left edge, and inside a white ruled label headed COMPOSITION there is an outlined ghost and an outlined pumpkin. That is the whole design. No slogan, no apple, no…

Every winter, emergency rooms across Quebec fill with a predictable pattern: middle-aged and older men, often sedentary, who went out to clear the driveway and came back with chest pain. The popular explanation — that cold weather and heavy lifting are a dangerous combination — is true as far as it goes, but it misses…

On a dark shirt, four lowercase letters sit in large bold white type: meh. The period is there, small and final. No animal, no mascot, no gradient, no speech bubble. Just the word, scaled up until it takes up the chest the way a band logo or a team crest would. The design is not…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The design is blunt before it is funny. Across the chest, in the visual grammar of a hazard placard, the words NOT FRIENDLY sit above DO NOT TOUCH. A yellow caution triangle frames a hand with a diagonal slash through it. The lettering is…

The patient — let’s call him Marc — first noticed the bleeding during a particularly brutal February. A 52-year-old office worker in Montreal, he’d spent the winter commuting by car, sitting at a desk for eight hours, then driving home to sit on the couch. By March, the hemorrhoids he’d managed intermittently for a decade…

Late August … Let me do it fully.{“title”:”Why Wisdom Teeth Are a Remnant of a Jaw That Shrank Too Fast”,”html”:” Late August in Quebec has a rhythm of its own: one last trip to the chalet, the school-supply run, and a quiet spike in third-molar extractions booked before the rentrée. Ask any oral surgeon in…