a sort of faulty parallelism

I know, I know they're just supposed to be "cute," but this whole line of thought—yes, it's a line of thought—always drives me just a little crazy.  The starting point is the classic "I [heart] NY" T-shirt, and at some point in the last few years it became popular for T-shirts to "riff" on that with different places and different symbols...the problem of course being that the heart is not just some random symbol: it happens to mean love in our society, so if we allow the use of a kind of ideogram, then it's actually a totally coherent message.  But so then we wind up with shit like the above: "I cupcake NY"?  My personal favorite is "J' Eiffel Tower Paris."  These are not symbols that communicate love—they don't even communicate verbs.  I just found this one online:

I Red Hot Chili Peppers the Red Hot Chili Peppers?  Hard to argue.  Reminds me of what someone pointed out (I think in an e-mail forward): that since "La Brea" means "the tar," "The La Brea Tar Pits" are the the tar tar pits...

Part of me disagrees with myself on this, figures there's some kind of creative, almost poetic thinking in it (you know, non-1:1)...but that doesn't mean it isn't funny.  A couple more:

I record-player vinyl?

I John McCain McCain?*

* This one is particularly amusing because the web site where I found it identified it as not even an "I love McCain" T-shirt but—wait for it—an "I heart McCain" T-shirt.  Work that one out.