5/31/16

Mr. Orange. - "This is also orange."

Well, meet Mr. Orange. He doesn't have a messy belly wound, but even if he did, we may be hard pressed to notice. It would just be an area of slightly richer orange on his shirt. Guess who likes orange! Mister Orange! That's who! "How is such orange possible?" you demand indignantly. Not just through the magic of polyester. Also cotton, stupid!

You know how you're always walking around saying "Cotton is nice and all, but it certainly can't be woven in different ways, and it certainly can't be dyed a variety of colors!" Well, The cotton Producers Institute is here to set you straight, with the help of Mr. Orange.

Of course, you've got to understand where the CPI is coming from. This was 1969. Polyester was the new miracle fiber setting the world on fire... and melting it into a puddle of acrid-smelling plastic. There were ads for wonderful, glorious polyester, marketed under different names, depending on which company was trying to make you think they invented the stuff. For those who find this hard to believe, or just millennials who think the universe began in 1990,  links to our own hard-hitting polyester exposees from the past are here, here and here.

So, understandably, the Cotton Procurement Instigators felt a little threatened by the advance of this near-perfect fabric of Polyester. "What", they surely wondered "will become of us once everyone in the world wears nothing but polyester? It never wears out, never wrinkles, never retains body odor, and absolutely does not form gross fuzz balls when rubbed against itself! It's the perfect fabric!" So, the Cotton Pickin' Insiders called upon their marketing people to remind humans that cotton could also be used to make garish, unsubtle clothing, perfect for toddlers, such as The Seventies would demand.

For another ad in this informative, industry-preserving series, don't miss the Flowerpants advert here.

So, enter Mr. Orange, or rather, Mr. Orange enters. "See my orange hair?" He seems to say. "My shirt is also of an orange color." Yes, we see your shirt, Mr. O. We can see it from way over here. "You may have noticed that my eyebrows are additionally orange." Yep. They sure are.





He hastens to point out "Something else is also oran-" YES, THANKS. We guessed as much. Thanks for spelling it out, Mr. Orange. You're the real orange deal, for sure.





Click for 1000 px avatar.





5/27/16

Doctor lessons.


 Joke #1 - "So, as you may have surmised from the distinct odor, abdominal distention and overall pallor, the patient not only cannot be helped, but also represents a total waste of our time, is a stupid jerkwad, and probably won't live out the week. Please take note as I gently break the news in such a way as not to upset him."

Joke #2 - In landmark fourteen-hour procedure, with the combined skills of six surgeons, man undergoes world's first Total Excision of All Monies. Three months later, the treatment was deemed a success when he was re-examined and found to still be completely money-free.

Joke #3 - Patient requires six doctors to explain to him why he cannot afford the services of any of them.

Joke #4 - "This patient's volume desperately needs up-pumping. Doctor Christian Slater, I believe you have some expertise in this area?"

Joke #5 - "Hm. The patient seems to suffer from 'manic almond joyosis'. It is my professional opinion that, sometimes, this man feels like a nut.  By way of contrast, let us examine a Mounds, which don't."

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]


5/25/16

Love & Romance Comics, Nov. 1973 - "Not His Type".

The Phil Are GO! Rummage Sale and Antique Store Assault Squad returned from a mission over the weekend, having suffered the loss of half their team, but it was worth it. Those brave grenadiers will not have died in vain, because we can now bring you this sizzling hot issue of Love & Fucking People Over Love & Romance from 1973. There are three smoking tepid stories in this comic, but just like always, they put the burning moist cover story way in the back, to make sure you read the whole thing.

It's the positively throbbing story of a young Tommy James on a doctor-ordered solo vacation in Hawaii, without any of The Shondells to cramp his style. Sure, he's under the assumed name of Jonathan Dolman, a mild-mannered accountant whose whole life seemed to be planned out for him. He was the perfect target for a brazen hussy and her partially weaponized black bikini! What mayhap? Don't not read this flaming limp tale of infidelity and secretly being Tommy James! We now present for you the entire seven-page account of one milquetoast undercover Tommy James, and temptress Gina Shaw's diabolical plot to milk his toast! Read - Yes, read! - with your very own eyeballs "Not His Type"!

[Plot analysis and Graphic Gifts posted after the comic.]

Cleverly disguised! Could this scorchingly turgid story be the inspiration for Tommy's much-covered-by-wedding-bands hit "Mony Mony"?














So there you have it. The lesson is this: If you're an undercover Tommy James who flies to Hawaii with the sole purpose of writing postcards while wearing a ski sweater, you will definitely have a determined, horny blonde climb into your pants, forcing you to dump your girlfriend over the phone. And thereby will you find lasting happiness, and you will definitely not instantly leave that woman for the next woman who shows you her bikini.

The other lesson is that if you're a determined, horny blonde and you wear a swimsuit, the most mild-mannered Tommy James will absolutely betray his girlfriend to nail you. Also, you will be happy forever, because he will never dump you just because a different woman puts on a bathing suit. Ever.

This comic book is rich in copyrighted useful graphics! Please enjoy these 1000 px square avatars of Tommy and Gina, for use in whatever chat forum service application board you kids tend to use these days. You're welcome!

Also enjoy the prancing lady who may or may not be fleeing from a giant heart. You're still welcome!

Click for 1000 px.

Click for 1000 px.

Click for 1200 px.



5/19/16

Know Your Orchestra - Saxobone Majorette



Original image found at shorpy.com. We hope they don't mind.

5/16/16

Day's Sportswear - Why so serious, Kerchief Man?

Aah, 1969. It was a simpler time when a man could wear a brightly colored kerchief around his neck and, at the same time, could squint into the middle distance in a hairily manly way and no one would wonder whether he was Living His Truth, or Being So Brave.

According to Day's Sportswear, you could "change your image in only 5 days." How? By wearing clothes of mostly the same color that, for all the world, look like Garanimals.

"Wait. What are Garanimals?" you say? Garanimals were are clothes that kids could pick out and match up themselves, based on what cartoon character is on the tag. This also works splendidly for clueless adults... who happen to be thirty inches tall. So, there's a problem right there, unless your Tyrion Lannister.


Enter Day's Sportswear! By buying five outfits that are all blue and yellow, you could "change your image". Well, they definitely weren't lying. Nuff said.

Since this ad ran in Esquire magazine (the journal of the financially carefree, romantically whimsical and probably virulent), Day's Sportswear knew how to sell the lifestyle of the furry gent who wore only two colors. Check it out. The legend indicates where you need to wear each plaid. Kerchief Man is dressed for "lazy days", but not so lazy that he would forget to accessorize his look with a coordinated neck napkin. You never know when someone will lazily offer you some saucy ribs, and you wouldn't want to get red on your nice yellow pants. He looks super serious, doesn't he? "Don't make fun of my special napkin." he warns us.

Anyway, despite looking like he means business, the rest of the week for the blue and yellow man consists of "villa", "casino" (which we can assume requires a leisure suit with the blue and yellow plaid of square #3), "harbor lights", and "oasis". Oasis? Maybe Kerchief Man likes to hang out in highway rest stops? - which is fine, so long as he doesn't take his wide stance all the way to his office as a Senator of Idaho. It could be bad for the career.

So, a full week for Kerchief Man consists of lazy, villa, casino, harbor lights, and oasis. Shew! Busy busy! By the time Saturday rolls around, Mister Kerchief needs some rest form all that doing-not-much-of-anything. Hey, maybe he's a senator after all?

This leisurely fella still has lots of work to do! Your hard drive has a Senator Kerchief-shaped hole that we're about to fill. Let Mister K add some seriousness to nearly any graphic. Wedding invitations. Yacht-themed divorce parties. Some kind of mitsvah.

Here he is as a PNG with a transparent alpha channel. Also, you know what? You deserve a 1000 x 1000 avatar of him, too, cropped all special to fit in his unforgettable kerchief. Everyone on whatever social media thing you use is going to know you're a person of super serioius leisure, for sure. So much the graphic gifts! How do we do it? I dunno, but you're welcome!

Click for full size.

Click for full size.

Click for full size.


5/13/16

Ultimatum in 2050 A.D.

Well, the Phil Are GO! Antique Store and Garage Sale Assault Squad suffered terrible losses to bring to you this Ace Doubles science fiction pulp book, Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. You'd better appreciate their sacrifice.

Click for 1600 px.
Ace doubles were a series of "two in one" books, where the books were sandwiched together to save on printing costs. So, the books have no backs. Both sides of the book are covers. This says something about the target audience for the novel, as well as the liquidity of the readers' assets. The 1965 Ace double Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. was backed with Our Man in Space, which we'll feature in some later post. Hold your horses. Sheesh.

Anyway, these books are valued for their cool/corny cover art. Some people say you could open one up and "read" the "words" inside them, but there's almost no way to verify this. It's probably just a rumor.

Pulps typically have brilliant cover art that is delightfully reuseable as a poster for your band, or a flyer for your church rummage sale. In case you're having trouble knowing when you're looking at a pulp novel, there are a few red flags to know that you've got ahold of a real gem...

1. For starters, ask yourself if the book has another book stuck to its backside. Very few Pulitzer prize winners' first runs were duplexed with another novel in the genre. You won't find a copy of Wuthering Heights backed with She Killed... and Loved It, for example.

2. Does the title seem very excited about the time period? Consider the title of the classic Warner Brothers cartoon Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. If a large part of the author's excitement for writing the book stems from the fact that it's in a particular period in time, he or she may not be a volcano of compelling ideas. Confidential Detective in 10,000 B.C., for example, is not a real book, but if it were, one may have reason to doubt the maturity of the story. It's also worth noting that I would absolutely read the hell our of Confidential Detective in 10,000 B.C.. It would also have an amazing cover painting, I promise you that.

Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. ticks both of those boxes with a sharpie the size of your leg. Done and done. Good work, Phil Are GO! Antique Store and Garage Sale Assault Squad! Your men will not have died in vain.

Now it's time for the P.A.G! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade to make this cover painting slightly more "repurposeable", which isn't a word. Get in here, stat! I need you to do a standard text wipe on this here book cover. Get on it.

Does your phone need a new wallpaper? Does your cookout need a flyer? We've got you covered. Please enjoy a slightly blanker version of this book cover, for your amusement. If Jack Sharkey or some domey-looking robo-aliens show up at your door asking what's up with your copyright infringing ass, I don't know you. You're on your own, miscreant. You're welcome!!!

Here is a serving suggestion for this painting. What will you do with it? The world may never know.




Click for 1600 px.

5/12/16

Up Your Decor - Rooms for improvement!




It's almost the next time of year, decorators! You know what that means! That's right! Time to re-decorate your house  to match the rejuvenation of whatever season is about to happen! Let's fancy!

Those colonials. They were really super at making governments and burning witches, but when it comes to fabulizing an interior, they could be a little boring, right? I mean, swirly furniture is a nice start, but where's the fun? Where's the color, mister whoever-that-is-on-the-twenty-dollar-bill? We updated this classically colonial bedroom by adding lots of color! We covered all the bases of the primary colors by using bright blue, red, and yellow to make this a bedroom that you and your special someone would be proud to legislate each other in!

It can be hard to make a tiny space seem wide, so we used horizontal stripes to make this little room feel like it's miles across! No, that's not a ping pong table, but you'd think it was, because we wrapped it in the same stripey wallpaper! That bookcase isn't really a post-modern arcology. Thank our striped wallpaper again for making it seem simply architectural! Those chairs feel like they're ready for your wide load too, because this wallpaper has matching fabric! Aren't your eyes lucky? This little room seems like ten miles of big, bright excitement!

Thanks for your tasteful garden pavilions, Ancient China! Now get the heck out of the way so we can bring them up to date with an exuberant spurt of color! Hel-looo, yellow! The faux tracery on the walls may require an artist's touch, but don't let your artist start slacking off once that's done! He or she still has your sky to paint! Then, there's the mural of some Chinese people floating around on a slab of rock, just like they did back in history! Once that's done, then the artist can slink off to a dark corner with the opium jar. You know how they are!


5/11/16

Know Your Orchestra - Piccolo Timpani


Original image found at shorpy.com. We hope they don't mind.

5/10/16

Sceptron! - 1963' newest electronic brain!

Shudder in fear, pathetic humans! As of 1963, The Machines have the power to understand your voice! Behold! Sceptron can understand a word! Woe unto all who wish to say the word "five" in secret without illuminating the lamp!





Sceptron! So, in 1963, this was voice recognition. It barely qualifies as electronic, but it was an "electronic brain", as all machines capable of even the crudest logic were called back then. In a nutshell, it relied on a little bushel of quartz fibers of varying length that vibrated in response to different frequencies. Think of the harp inside a piano... or just a regular harp, if you want to be that way about it. Use the light disturbances produced by the vibrated quartz fibers (which are like little light pipes) to record a specific pattern on a photo negative, effectively recording a pattern of frequencies onto film. Then, have a picnic while Fotomat works on your slide, and use the resulting slide to only allow light to register on a light sensor when the exact same sound pattern is heard again.

Simple, right? No way. One can easily imagine how flawless your diction must have needed to be in order to get a match. Presumably the accuracy required could possibly have been adjusted with some kind of sensitivity potentiometer (knob or slider) attached to the photocell triggering the "result" switch, but that's just conjecture. Then there's the fact that the machine needed a photo slide of every sound it wanted to understand. Cleverness and clunkiness, 1963 style!

Did it catch on? Well, the P.A.G! Research and Googling Team only found other news articles from 1963 about the new curiosity of the Sceptron. No recently declassified writeups about how the Sceptron was being used to listen in on spies or anything. If the Sceptron found widespread use protecting our shores from invasion from the number five, those historical events must be better kept secrets than Watergate's Deep Throat and Monica Lewinsky's mouth combined.

I will prefer to think that the Sceptron failed to take the world by storm due to the machine's bogus name the creators' promiscuous understanding of how acronyms work. An acronym should be the first letter of every (or nearly every) word in a name. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Light Amplified via Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Industrial Light and Makingshittyprequels.

Here is Sperry's explanation of how acronyms exactly don't work:


WRONG! The acronym for Spectral Comparative Pattern Recognizer is SCPR. So, it's the "Skippertron"! You can't just think up a cool sounding word and cherry pick letters arbitrarily from anywhere in the description of your invention as an excuse to use your cool word!

Using Sperry's sultty acronym theory, here are some names for their invention that are every bit as valid as Sceptron:

  • Pooptron
  • Spaaaztron
  • Crapptron
  • Smegtron
  • Pitztron
  • Rapetron

Interetsingly, when the demonstrator's haircut was used in place of the tufted quartz fibers to create a photomask and inserted into the Sceptron, the machine only responded to the word "virgin".


5/5/16

Nutrilite - Curing confusion.

Vitamins! You don't need to eat if you take vitamins! They can give you energy and fix everything you're doing wrong in your life! Just listen to the salesman!

This poor couple. Their heads are swimming with scary words like "phosphorous" and "D". How should they make sense of it all? Just listen to the salesman selling them vitamin supplements door to door! He has "facts"! And, he has a suitcase full of easy answers!

Unless you either A) live in a third-world wasteland or B) eat nothing but Doritos for every meal, you probably don't need to take vitamins. As a rule of thumb, if you ate some kind of plant today, and some kind of animal, you're probably not doing too bad, nutritionally speaking. But, people without real problems love to invent tiny little problems they can pretend to solve by buying something, and thereby make their generalized anxiety go away a little bit. This has been true ever since humans stopped spending all their time hiding from lions and searching for a bush with a few berries left on it.

Do you have any reason to believe you are malnourished, or are you spending money on supplements because “you never know”? You never know when a giraffe may dent your car. You’d better take out a special giraffe policy. Is it smarter to spend money solving problems you know you have, or ones you can't be sure you don't have?

Mom always made us take vitamins. It made her feel like she was covering all the nutritional bases with her kids. As a grownup, I almost never take them. Then, I found a bottle of multivitamins in the cabinet from last winter, and spent a few months eating one every morning, just because I hate waste. I felt exactly the same as when I didn't take them. But then again, I'm lucky enough to live in a developed civilization where only the truly determined person can avoid getting enough vitamins. This is a data point of one. Purely anecdotal. Do not change your life just because of this story.

Things that call themselves "dietary supplements" may not even have actual vitamins in them. In fact, they probably don't even contain what the label says they do. The dietary supplement industry isn't regulated at all, and they don't have to do what they claim to do. They're accountable to no one. It's a wild west kind of situation. They tend to appeal to humans' deep love of logical fallacies, usually these two:

Appeal to ignorance: Argument from ignorance (in which ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that: there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four,
1. true
2. false
3. unknown between true or false
4. unknowable

In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used in an attempt to shift the burden of proof.

Appeal to antiquity: An appeal to antiquity is the opposite of an appeal to novelty. Appeals to antiquity assume that older ideas are better, that the fact that an idea has been around for a while implies that it is true. This, of course, is not the case; old ideas can be bad ideas, and new ideas can be good ideas. We therefore can’t learn anything about the truth of an idea just by considering how old it is.

Anyhoo, do you have enough pictures of confused mid-century honkies on your hard drive? Probably not! Your hard drive needs to be supplemented with the baffled couple from today's ad. Are they any use to you? You can't prove they aren't! Therefore, you need them. Man, if only I made money doing this. Also, 1000 px avatar versions of each, for your online chat service or whatever. You're welcome!







5/4/16

Meatish Swedeballs


5/3/16

Chicken Problemo