So we were thinking about how “Chutes and Ladders” used to be called “Snakes and Ladders,” but then they changed it, maybe because a lot of people get kind of a creepy feeling about snakes. The fact is, most snakes are pretty harmless. It’s just one of those deep biases that must be hard-wired in our brains, to get the willies about snakes. Maybe it’s a Biblical thing, because of that whole fruit-of-the-Tree-of-Knowledge debacle. Or maybe it goes back further than that, and the reason they made the bad guy in the Garden a serpent is because serpents give folks the fantods.

Anyway, there’s no real good reason to get freaked out about snakes, but people do anyway, so you can see why a board game manufacturer would eliminate them in favor of chutes, about which people seem pretty neutral, with no strong feelings one way or another.

We at Woot aren’t scared of snakes, particularly, though we might be scared of ones that were big enough to slide down, if we were sliding down them, which seems like the sort of thing these gigantic snake-slides would not appreciate.

Anyway, the only point is that even a longstanding institution like the Snakes and Ladders board game is subject to change, and maybe this shirt design shows us how it might change even more dramatically, if they decided to try to market it to young graphic designers instead of small children. Maybe that’s what this image is. Probably not, but we don’t know what the heck else it might be about.

This shirt was designed by: Rob Dobi, who we think was named after a fragment of Ella Fitzgerald’s scat. No, like scat singing! Ugh, you’re so gross sometimes. Anyway, Rob’s got a site with a shirt shop and a photo portfolio both, which is his way of trying to make you feel bad about how little you’re getting done in your life.

Wear this shirt: to the Church of the Ladder Day Saints, ha ha

Don’t wear this shirt: to actual, non-pun churches, it’s not dressy enough

This shirt tells the world: “You have to climb the ladder to get a head.”

We call this color: It’s All Over Your Torso, Baby Blue

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