You see, kids, way back in the pre-WWW days of the early 1990s, if your fandom interest in a topic grew too deep to be contained within a Usenet newsgroup, you could join an e-mail discussion list (like Vandelay Industries, home to devotees of the Seinfeld program).
As it turned out, one of the Vandelay Industries participants owned an apparel store, which led to a bonanza of unlicensed merchandise. In addition to the T-shirt supporting a candidate whose campaign slogan was pulled from the friends-with-benefits-themed second-season episode "The Deal" ("He stands for This, That, and The Other!"), I also bought a collared shirt bearing the eponymous phantom employer of George Costanza.
