While we’ve been banging on about this for years, it was gratifying to see an article in this week’s Time Magazine discussing the ways in which print media and the Internet are joining forces to create a wonderful new galaxy of magazines that exist in concert with—or sometimes because of—the Internet, rather than competing against it.

The Internet has been cast as print’s enemy, stealing readers and advertisers. But the digital revolution has also produced a generation of print publishing companies that is younger than Facebook. “With a few grand you can set yourself up with a digital camera, a decent computer and some software, and you’re able to make something using the same equipment as Vogue,” says Jeremy Leslie, creator of the magCulture blog and magazine curator for Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center’s current exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production.”

Pick up a copy in-store or, uh, check it out online.

One summer morning in 1958, a photographer working for Esquire magazine named Art Kane gathered together a vast group of jazz musicians on the street in New York’s Harlem for a photograph that would be published in the magazine’s January 1959 issue.

From Count Basie to Thelonious Monk to Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Gene Krupa over 57 musicians in total were represented in a photograph that would become emblematic of the golden age of jazz and go on to inspire the 1994 documentary A Great Day in Harlem.

Leafing through the pages of the brand new New York edition of T-world: The Journal of T-shirt Culture, it struck me that this new issue of the world’s only T-shirt journal sets out to do something equally ambitious and era-defining.

Across 196 lavishly designed pages, the gang at T-world seek to capture the essence of NYC streetwear circa-2011… visiting the people behind labels like Alife, Married to the Mob, Milkcrate, ONLY, the omniscient LA-based Hundreds (and their newly opened NYC store) as well as taking in pioneers like Ricky Powell (immortalised in an early Beastie Boys lyric, not suitable for a family friendly blog such as ours) and Milton Glaser (yes, the designer behind the ‘I Heart NY’ logo).

It’s like your streetwear crazy best friend went to New York, interviewed all the key players, took a bunch of amazing photos and truly surveyed the whole scene and wrapped it up in a lavishly hardbound book format magazine… just for you!

Still just $20 (plus postage for online orders, of course).. this is an absolute beauty and truly something special. Available online and in-store now.

Hold on a minute! Bottled Water Institute?! Is that like one of those shonky research bodies put together by the tobacco companies to promote the health benefits of smoking? Sure as heck sounds like it.

Anyway, we digress.

”If they are serious about reducing their environmental footprint, they probably need to ban soft drinks and coffee and just about every other commercial beverage other than bottled water, which has one of the lowest environmental footprints of any beverage,” Mr Parker said.

Unbelievable! We just have to call bullshit on this one. Sorry mate… unlike water, coffee and soft drinks don’t flow freely from the tap.

A quick little scout around The Age’s own website reveals a number of facts:

• Bottled water is more expensive than petrol; if you could turn petrol into water, you could make money.
• The total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a quarter of the bottle with crude oil.
• In addition to the water in bottles, twice as much water is used in the production process. Which means: every litre sold represents a jaw dropping two litres of water used to bring that water to market.

We’re so fortunate in this part of the world that we have really high quality, pure drinkable H2O piped to all of our houses and offices that it just seems ridiculous that we’re bottling water in crappy, thin plastic bottles riddled with Bisphenol A (really, it’s bad news!), carting them around in trucks, buying them at a ridiculous mark-up before at best recycling or at worst turfing them into landfill or the ocean… when we could simply be re-filling our own bottles!

We’re happy to announce, then, that we’ve just begun stocking the JoinThePipe water bottles in our AU stores.

Recently introduced to Australia by two of the guys that brought us Movember, it’s a worldwide initiative started in a Holland a couple of years ago that’s founded on the simple ideas that:

• Bottled water is wasteful.
• We have great tap water almost everywhere in the developed world.
• Billions of people in the Third World have limited access to drinking water and that’s a terrible problem facing humanity.

The Join The Pipe project neatly takes these three ideas and overlaps them like some kinda freaky Venn diagram: by selling a range of six great looking, functional water bottles and establishing a network of refilling points across the globe we can eliminate all the waste associated with bottled water and from each $29.95 water bottle sold we make a $7.50 donation to supporting water projects in the Third World.

And the bottles themselves? They’re super cool. Created in collaboration with the Dutch design agency DwarsOntwerp, they come in six different varieties from the straight-up-and-down pipe style to the freaky deaky Y joiner pipe. They’re BPA free, impact resistant and dishwasher safe and they look great.

We’re now selling them in all our Australian stores (and online at Nation State) and if you bring one in—or, indeed, any water bottle—we’ll happily fill them up for you!* We’re also pleased to say that we’re rolling back the sale of bottle water from our stores—as of today, there will be no bottled water sold in our Elizabeth Street stores and the others will soon be following suit.

Bottled water sucks. Buy a re-useable bottle, fill it up and help build wells in the Third World.

* With the exception of our Sydney store in which we don’t have proper plumbing. It’s a long story.

Like any e-commerce site, we get our fair share of fraudulent transactions.

Generally they’re pretty easy to spot as, in our case, nine times out of ten they’re for heavy metal magazines (Metal Hammer mostly, but sometimes Kerrang) sent to addresses in Indonesia and Malaysia. Why South-East Asian metalheads represent such a huge proportion of our fraud traffic, I really don’t know. It’s just one of those mysteries that makes me happy to be a part of life’s rich tapestry.

We occasionally get some ‘interesting’ orders, but even battle scarred veterans such as ourselves were amused, back in November, when we noticed Girls of FHM (a yearly best -of compilation of the UK lad’s mags choicest bikini shots) ordered for an inmate at a California State Penitentiary. Apparently prisoners aren’t allowed actual pornography, so FHM and the like are popular substitutes.

Curiosity getting the better of us, we undertook some Internet sleuthing and discovered that our prisoner is a recently incarcerated, serial armed robber with links to the notorious MS-13 gang (yeah, those guys with shaved heads and skulls and rude words written in Spanish tattooed all over their faces that you might have seen on 60 Minutes.)

Of course, we sent the order out as per usual, but we weren’t especially surprised on Thursday when we had a call from the bank querying the charge. Apparently the owner of the card had no memory of ordering any magazines from a website in Australia.

The plot thickens, today, when we received the package returned to us with a California Prisons, “Return to Sender – Not in Custody” sticker. I’d like to imagine that our prisoner escaped, but I guess we’ll never really know. As I said, life’s rich tapestry…