Paul Anderson - Let him help you gain a body.

The Legal and Not Getting Sued by People team has just told me that the headline for today's post might be a little alarming or misleading or make-you-getting-sued, depending how you read it. Today's post is about an ad in Popular mechanics in 1957 by weightlifter and World's Strongest Man Paul Anderson. If you're looking for the ad by Graverobber and World's Creepiest Man Paul Anderson, advertising corpses, that's a different guy and I'm told that we apologize and would like you to never visit our site again, and to please shut of your computer and throw it away, because you'll only use it for purposes of evil.

Nope. This is an ad for Paul Anderson, non-graverobber, World's Strongest Man At That Time, and Owner of World's Weirdest Hand. He was also the World's Worst Photo Retoucher, which was a task probably performed with his cripplingly malformed hand. Good thing "photo retouching" is not one of the check boxes in the "I'd like help with..." section of the ad.

"Gain a Body to Brag About!" is the general thrust of the ad. Implied in that sentence is tha promise that you'll "Become the kind of guy that brags about his body!" And so, it's well that the ad goes on to say that you can be "the admiration of particular girls", because it is a very particular type of girl that admires a man who A) can't put his arms down B) brags about his body and C) is dependent on inner-thigh-lube.

T shirt: "High Five World Championships, 1955".

But the real attraction here is the world-beating job of retouching his hand. Wowzers. Look at the state of that thing. He seems happy about it, so I guess he's not in any pain. He's not ashamed about it, either. In fact he's waving at someone with his catcher's mitt-sized hand. One thing's for sure, when Paul Anderson waves at you, you stay waved at.

Paul Anderson, World's Strongest Man At That Time was not humble. His left bicep, when flexed, would form a boy who would then express amazement at the muscle of his own birth. The hard part was, as you'd expect, getting the shirt part to look like real plaid. Come to think of it, Paul was pretty humble after all. He never bragged about being the World's Greatest Innovator in the Art of Muscle Puppetry. In the twilight of his career, Paul would resort to drinking a glass of water while his arm-boy sputtered and garbled. He rather missed the point of that trick.

If you checked both the "less weight" and "more weight" boxes, you might as well go and check the "mental control" box as well.