Beauty and the Beer: A Hopeful Osaka Fashion Report

Heading off into the vast suburban wilderness on the outskirts of Osaka, One Woman spotted the most awesome of beer-themed shirts on the Osaka monorail. The cardigan: a GENIUS appropriation of Guinness imagery!

From 'Guinness 1759' to 'Hopeful-ness 1789'? I'm hopeful. (Click on image to enlarge) 

Notice her Guinness foam-colored bag too. Simply amazing!!

In keeping with the spirit of bizarre appropriations of hope, the musical pairing of the day takes us from Guyana to London to South Africa, and then back to UK. Eddy Grant's "Gimme Hope, Jo'anna" is a song that reggae-calypso-popstar Eddy Grant wrote in response to apartheid in South Africa in 1988. Later on, Yop, a yogurt drink sold by Yoplait (primarily in the UK and parts of continental Europe adapted the song for its remarkably weird commercial:

All this gets me feeling that "hope" is such a weird state of being. It's not exactly an emotion, and much less committed than prayer. There's not much conviction in hope, and statistically, it's horribly irresponsible. The Ancient Greeks considered it a great evil. But it's also the stuff of dreams, the possible future, prolonged pain, the last chance... Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."