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Now You can have Nicolae Ceaucescu on your First Class Stamps!

The Smoking Gun used the USPS's new personalized postage stamp service to create a bunch of stamps featuring infamous figures including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ted Kaczynski (twice), Romanian ghoul Nicolae Ceaucescu, and Monica Lewinski's stained black dress.
They seem to think this is a big deal:

.... (the image, of course, must not be deemed objectionable by the folks at Stamps.com, the online firm handling the trial run of Uncle Sam's postage gambit). But since objectionable is such a subjective term, TSG sought to determine what kind of interesting stamps we could actually create. While the image censors rejected our request for stamps featuring mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald, Salvatore "Sammy Bull" Gravano, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, they did green light other equally, um, distinctive postage.... TSG, of course, will not actually be using our personalized postage. This was just an exercise to point out that the only people truly worthy of stamps are statesmen (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin), civil rights leaders (Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall), and cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote, Jiminy Cricket).

(AHEM. Do I detect a bit of tounge-in-cheek mumbling?)

I say, let 'em put on whoever they want. Better than than having a Stamps.com censor (or a Postal Service censor, for that matter) determining that George Bush is a-ok, but Bill Clinton is lewd and unacceptable. Or vice-versa, for the paranoid conservative crowd out there. I think the college/high school photos of Kaczynski are kind of poignant, for that matter.

Think of the marketing potential: The RNC can raise funds by selling Reagan stamps to the suckers at a healthy markup; obsessives and stalkers can creep out still more effectively by putting the object of their, er, affection, on everything they send by post; grandmothers everywhere will be getting flats covered with images of their grandbabies; midlife-males will be showing off their Vettes and Harleys. It's brilliant marketing....


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escoles's personalized stamp?

What would you put on your stamp, if you were ever so inclined to personalize one, escoles?


Sam Colt, maybe?

Or maybe Mikhail "I wished I'd invented a lawn mower" Kalashnikov. As statements about our fascination with firearms.

Maybe fellow U of R alum Cabell Calloway III. (He sang "Minnie the Moocher", a capella, at my graduation in '93...) But he's already got a stamp, I'm pretty sure.

I dunno. I'd probably just leave it blank.


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