Phil Are Go!

Chevy II - Red vrum. Red vrum.

2012-02-01T07:37:00.002-06:00

This ad features the 1966 "Chevy II", which was available in a special sporty trim that was called the "Nova". The names are confusing. To a reasonable person, "Chevy II" makes it sound like Chevy only made two models that year, and this is half of them. It's not true, but this is why the name was poorly chosen, if you ask me.

The Nova is still massively popular among hot rod guys because the car was affordable, compact (for the time), and could be had with a pretty huge motor. It was also available in red.

When you're featuring a photo of a red product, you can go one of two ways: make the car the only red thing in the picture, so it pops out, or show the red thing in a red studio, knowing that "more red is better". This Chevy looks like it was shot in an orange (-ish) studio, with a girl in a pink dress. What's the plan? Analogous colors. Some basic color theory is needed to explain, but it won't be too painful.

You may remember the "color wheel" from grammar school. The primary colors - red, blue, and yellow - are arranged in a triangle, with the combinations of those colors placed inbetween them, forming a circle. The Chevy is red. Ad men know that red means excitement, danger, violence, and fun - everything young people want in a car. The art director for this ad included colors that are neighbors to red on the color wheel (analogous). This keeps the ad nice and "hot". Orange, pink, red.

Starting with red, moving counter-clockwise around the wheel gives you oranges. Go the other way from red and you get pinks and purples.* Since the car is red, the pink dress and orange floor "frame" the car, who is the star of the show. All these colors make your brain feel excited.

Does this influence car sales? Probably not, but artists really get off on it, and it helps the art director justify his/her sky-high fee for designing the ad. There. Now you can skip the first semester of art school. You're welcome.

Click for the big.

*These colors result from mixing paints or inks in this way. Mixing colored light works by a different set of rules, which is why your TV has a set of RGB (reg, green, blue) connectors and not RYB (red, yellow, blue) connectors. Understanding this is quite a kettle of fish, and requires a degree or two in physics.

Philadelphia Electric Company - Heeeey youuu guuuuyys!

2012-01-31T07:29:00.001-06:00

So, if a huge utility company runs an ad promoting an entire metropolitan area as a great place to be, what's in it for them? Maybe they owed a favor to the mayor? Maybe they were hoping to smooth things over after a few environmental "whoopsies"? Maybe they're hoping to grow the residential population, thereby growing their own customer base? Maybe they want people in The Future to have a hilarious jpeg of a misconceived notion of what science looks like? That's my working theory.

Let's begin by applauding the generally beautiful painting. I imagine the first meeting where the client is describing to the artist the concept for the piece they want him/her to create. Three scenes, portraying life in Philadelphia, each is kind of like a panorama, with multiple focal points. Science and research, an elementary school, and suburban domestic quietude. Also, we need it in a week. *Gulp*.

The backyard scene has some interesting features...

Who's playing with the dog? Who threw the ball? Err, nobody. The little girl is a few yards downstage of him, and she's not paying attention to him. She's busy putting her hands in the air like she just don't care. Maybe the ball rolled off the roof, or is stuck in the window?

Junior's got lunch covered. How thoughtful! He's made enough wheelbarrow pizza for everyone.

Grandma can be seen knitting a sweater for her driftwood collection. Philly winters are pretty cold!

Little Girl deserves to be distributed on transparency as a PNG. Coming right up.

Lastly, here's an extra-wide crop of the William Morris All-Stars pretending to be sciencing around. They're staring at various colored juices and writing things down. "Nineteen hundred hours. Juice is still colorey. Still tastes like hell". All men and women under forty look like Fred MacMurray and June Lockhart, respectively. The one older guy in the background, talking to the June Lockhart replicant looks like J. Jonah Jameson, who kind of seems to be in charge. Maybe they're trying to formulate a web solvent, to stop that wall-crawling crusader once and for all?

Great news, everybody! I didn't give any of you gonorrhea! Party at my place!

Crane Plumbing - Anything Goes.

2012-01-30T07:02:00.001-06:00

"Hmm - Nancy's new bathroom. Good for her! it's nice to see her bouncing back and doing something fun, after that retinal surgery in Mexico. What was she thinking, dropping her keys in a tank of jellyfish and diving head first after them?

I think I'll take a look around while the rest of the Wednesday bridge club think I'm merely eliminating."

"Wish I had all this space. The lack of any frosting on the windows really opens up the room, and helps the neighbors admire my boobs. What's the point in cosmetic surgery if your neighbor's children can't see you naked?"

"My what a beautiful lavatory! Of course it's really a sink, but calling it a lavatory helps me fantasize about desecrating it with my waste."

"These faucets are so smart - so easy to turn - much easier than my sink, which requires captcha verification to be sure a bot net isn't washing it's hands in my bathroom... whatever that means."

"Such a lovely color for fixtures! I wonder when she's going to replace the tile to match them? Then she can look forward to tearing it all out when Pepto Pink goes out of style in six hours. That's our Nancy - never thinking ahead.

Click for bigness.

Hires Root Beer - Grayscale food challenge. Challenge complete!

2012-01-27T07:34:00.001-06:00

Trying to get food to represent well in grayscale ranges from hard to impossible. This Hires Root Beer ad from 1963 shows us how it's done. Now I want a float.

Food needs color to look appetizing. This is almost always true. What I think Hires did here is take a photograph of a root beer float, and then have an artist paint over it. In the process, the artist was able to idealize the image, emphasizing the positive. All in all, it looks really good, especially considering it's a black and white halftone image.

I'm pretty sure the bubbles at the rim of the glass are fictitious. Also, the highlight on the glass was probably touched up to make sure it looked extra shiny. The striations in the ice cream dome ( from the scoop's scooping action) have clearly enjoyed some attention from the artist, too.

Wanna know a secret? Glass is usually transparent. But not the soda bottle. See where it overlaps the giant root beer glass? Ah well. These things weren't that easy to do in '63. The version of Photoshop available at the time was really primitive.

By the looks of the slogan, there must have been a jingle to sing along with the ad. No joy in digging that up, I'm afraid. But, here's an old FaceTube video for Hires root beer that must have run in theaters at roughly the same time. Different lyrics. Same rhyme. "Desires" and "Hires".

Check out the super cute root beer pixie! She deserves new life as clip art. Get your rude finger ready to right click her into your heart in a few seconds. Also, because you got an honest face, you can have her in JPEG and PNG flavors, with the PNG on a transparent background. You're welcome. Big and small. left and right. Coming right up!

Lux Soap - Workin' for the man.

2012-01-26T07:14:00.000-06:00

In Advertising Land, everyone is a jerk or an idiot - hopefully both. This lady's husband (who kind of looks like Jimmy Fallon) is yelling at her because a run in her stocking is ruining his career. Jerk or idiot? Don't make me choose!

Apparently, John's boss is a big enough prick that he'd make career-effecting decisions based on his wife's stockings. Naturally, John is a big enough prick that he can forsee this and is wise enough to bitch out his wife for making her stocking tear. "You WOULD spring a run!" he says. Why? Does she have a history of jeopardizing his career with scandalous stocking mishaps? His choice of words implies that this is not the first time she has humiliated him in this way. More to the point, this is not the first time he's humiliated her like this in front of other people.

According to the narrative of the ad, Unnamed Wife naturally wants to make a good impression on the CEO of Prick Incorporated, just as her prick husband does. Totally overlooked is the idea that anybody needs to make a good impression on Unnamed Wife. That would just be crazy. After all, this is 1937 and she's just a menial servant. The farthest thing from John Gordon's mind is that he may be making a bad impression on his prick boss by treating his wife like a prick.

How humiliating would it be if Wife took the opportunity to tell John she was divorcing him and grabbed a cab home, locking him out of the house? He can sleep at the office, or maybe he can sleep with his prick boss, if he really wants to get ahead. Then, John could look forward to being served with papers right at his desk the next day while he's looking for a room to rent "while this blows over".

Video Pro Glove - It must be gone for!

2012-01-25T09:32:00.000-06:00

Video Games magazine, 1983. Gamers receive a glimmer of hope for their sore, blistered palms: the Video Pro Glove.

Designed by mother and video game outsider Carmel Delaney, it was meant to protect the tender palms of 1983's game addicts. Clearly, the obvious need for such a product is demonstrated by the widespread use of gaming gloves we can observe here in The Future. Wait a second. I've just been informed that nobody wears gloves to play video games. Oh well. People aren't always ready for The Next Great Idea.

This is not to say that people have stopped trying to sell us video gaming gloves. Far from it. However, Delaney was so far ahead of her time that those whose time she was also ahead of are still ahead of their time. That's a lot of time-aheadness. She was a visionary.

Video Pro's primary off-label application: beating up Daniel-San.

A year after the Video Pro Glove was released to a baffled public, the gloves found a home on the hands of Johnny Lawrence, noted Prell user and super-mean leader of the Cobra Kai gang. Their motto was "No mercy... except perhaps for your blistered hands! But definitely no mercy for split ends!"

The metal edges underneath a standard banquet table are rarely de-burred.

After losing to Daniel Laruso in the All Valley Karate Tournament, Johnny became Greg Tolan and took up competitive food spilling (ESPN 3, most Wednesdays at 2:30 am.), eventually locking horns with Rick Morehouse in the cafeteria. Again, he looked to the Video Pro Glove for protection during Critical Bullying and Narrative Exposition Events (CBNEEs).

So really, just like the iPhone, duct tape, and electric scalp massagers, the Video Pro found a role in society beyond the original intended purpose. This is the sign of true genius. Carmel Delaney is one such genius. Maybe there's a little Carmel Delaney in all of us? Don't you think? No. Definitely not. ...Or is there?... No.

Alexander Smith Carpet - Understanding your teen.

2012-01-24T07:11:00.001-06:00

Being a young adult isn't easy. School-work, friends, pantomime, carpet. How can all these things fit in just one brain? That's why we at Alexander Smith make it easy for you to give your teen the one thing they really need at this magical time in their life: carpet.

You know, your teen-ager lives in a show window too, just like you do. The most important thing in their life is what others think of them, just like you. When he or she says "Come on, let's go up to my room! It's all carpety up there!" with pride, you know they're happy. Happy because carpet.

And just what do they get up to in their room? Oh, all sorts of things, but nothing that will surprise you. You were once their age, too, right?

But don't peek in on them. They like their privacy! If you poke your head in, perhaps to offer them ginger snaps, they'll pretend to be shielding their eyes from the mono-centennial curtains and matching couch. They don't want you to know that they're practicing a little show for you, by pantomiming along to their favorite Marcel Marceau record. It's just their little way of saying "thank you" for the wonderful carpet that has transformed their lives. Don't ruin the surprise! The refreshments can wait. You're happy enough just knowing that they have Alexander Smith carpet in a smart shade of Opera Red that will hide wine or blood stains as if they never happened. Oh those teen-agers!

Click for enbiggenment.

The Windy Bishop

2012-01-23T07:33:00.001-06:00

Joke #1 - "...So I sez to the man 'If this is your Chaucible and Surplice, what's your wife wearing????' ..... .... I said 'IF THIS IS YOUR...'"

Joke #2 - "...Now, I don't want to say that Father Norbin likes to molest kids, but we can't seem to recruit enough altar boys to support his molestation habit, if you know what I mean! Ha ha ha ha! And now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce... Father Norbin!!!"

Joke #3 - "...and so, if you think about it, any birth prevented by abstinence is pretty much the same as killing a baby. So, therefore, I think you'll all agree that it is favorable in God's eyes for us to all to stop violating the sixth commandment and begin.... Wait! I'm not finished yet!"

Joke #4 - "... and this Tuesday evening in the rectory we will be viewing the film Krull synchronized with Bach's cantata Lobe Den Herrn, meine Seele. I think you'll agree the film's cut points are too convenient to be coincidental. Wednesday evening, we will be playing the video game Krull, as usual. I think you'll all be blown away by my new technique on the avalanche screen."

Joke #5 - The first and last use of Mad Libs to open the day's events at an Ecumenical council.

Joke #6 - "Before we begin, I'd like to invite you all to help me solve today's Jumble. It's really hard. The letters are..."

Joke #7 is courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Anonymous 2. Thanks, A2! - The council meeting was almost over, they were all excited and ready to leave for the Scouting Weekend Trip, when Father John had to bring up the fact that he still thought his Chili should have won the Rectory Cook-Off & wanted to know what he could have done better.

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

Around the House - Handyman tips from 1941

2012-01-20T07:17:00.001-06:00

The American Magazine had a DIY column in which readers shared their tips for home improvement. Reading this column, it's amusing to note that, apparently, there was a housing shortage back in '41. That's adorable.

One other interesting note is the bit about waterproofing your awnings with a mixture of gasoline and paraffin. I imagine it worked, but I'd be surprised if your Helpful Hardware Man or Home Depot Drone would ever advise a customer to do this. In the process, you've got a pretty decent accelerant all over your garage, and even after the project is complete, a canvas (I think) awning soaked in wax would pretty much amount to a huge candle. At least they advise you to keep smokers away while you're working.

The illustrations in this article make for nice clip art. I've scanned them and contrasted them into clean black-and-whiteness for you, our beloved readers. The ultra-deco handyman guy at the head of the page deserved even more than mere jpegging, so he's also available as a vector file, for those of you who can make use of those. Blogger doesn't allow posting of direct file downloads in any vector formats, so email if you want it sent to you as an attchment. The EPS version is 318K and the AI is 91k.

Rude Finger Graphic Gifts coming up in three, two, one...

Click for huge.

Smith Brothers Smokers Drops - Treat the symptom.

2012-01-19T06:59:00.000-06:00

Even though dad smoked my whole life, as well as several relatives, I'd never heard of "smokers drops", which apparently are not cough drop and not a candy. Smith Brothers says that they restore taste buds "dulled and faded by fatigue". What if my taste buds are wilted, and in dire need of restoration? How would I know? I need some of these, right away!

It seems that smoking dulls the sense of taste. The P.A.G. Research & Googling team was able to find lots of articles that insist this is true, but you can also find articles on the web about the health benefits of an all-monkey diet. WebMD is usually pretty responsible about this stuff, and they have an article referencing a study from the journal BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders. So far, the BMC journal has never lied to me. It's the basis of our relationship. Here's some medical mumbo jumbo on the subject from my old pal BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders:

“Smoking is an important factor which can lead to decreased taste sensitivity.”

If you like eggs, pizza, ice cream or Indian food, this is not good. However, if you're into durian or lima beans, this is great news, and those foods should be served on a bed of cigarette garnishes. Blunting the eater's enjoyment of these foods can only enhance the eater's enjoyment of these foods.

As I recall, a few (but not all) of my formerly-smoking friends have told me that their sense of taste gradually improves after kicking the habit. So, how did Smith Bros Smokers Drops work? They don't say. Hmm. To the internet!!! Disappointment. All Google has to tell me is that I can buy this ad from a number of auction sites for anywhere from ten to sixteen dollars. Who would buy a magazine that has survived fifty years in a basement or library storage room, only to cut it to pieces and sell the pages? Hmm. That's pretty good money. Still, in ten years I'll still have the magazine to flip through, and the pages will be even more valuable by then... unless time travel were to someday devalue all antiques by making it cheap and easy to buy them. I'd look like a fool. But if time travel were ever to be invented, wouldn't we have been visited by people from the future already? Hah! Screw you, AdsPast.com and your magazine-mangling craft! I'll continue to hoard my investment, and when the time comes, I'll stop by your headquarters in my solid gold helicopter to flaunt the fruits of my financial wisdom - if you're still in business, losers!

FDA regulations were different in 1958. Smith Bros probably weren't even required to prove that their "Smokers Drops" actually worked, or how they worked. If you think it's tricky researching a current product's efficacy, try finding reliable tests on a fifty year old product, from a time when companies could claim whatever they wanted with no evidence at all. You think this is easy? Come over here and say that!

Smith Bros. only mentions a "special medication", and uses a lot of mint-related imagery on the packaging. I'd imagine it's some kind of effect similar to a breath mint. You know how water feels extra cold if you drink some after eating a mint? These "smokers Drops" probably worked via some mechanism kind of like that -one that temporarily increases sensitivity of the taste buds with contrasting flavors, readying them to be pummeled once again by a wildly different flavor. Other analogy: drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. Exposing the taste buds to two very different flavors in succession will make them more distinct, by contrast. It could be that Smokers Drops contain ingredients that are very distinct from that of cigarette smoke, making your next cigarette more "cigaretty". This is conjecture on my part. I've done no tests of Smokers Drops.

Any readers with smoking experience are invited to share their experience on this subject in the comments.

YouTube link to TV host Andrew Zimmern having a little durian. Shuttle to 5:41.

Click for enbiggenment.

F.U., SOPA

2012-01-18T06:20:00.000-06:00

The solution to any piracy problem is not to punish your remaining customers.

Petition to sign.
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

The more you know.
http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57329001-281/how-sopa-would-affect-you-faq/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57360665-503544/sopa-pipa-what-you-need-to-know/
http://mashable.com/2012/01/16/white-house-sopa-petition/

Window Shopping - Perfectly innocent.

2012-01-17T07:31:00.000-06:00

Joke #1 - Father Florn was beginning to feel at home at his new parish, the "troubles" at his old assignment fading into memory. He was so optimistic about his new post that he decided to take a few of his favorite students out for an afternoon of window shopping after Sunday school. That sounded safe. There was no way he could be tempted doing that, right?

Joke #2 - In the immediate postwar years, America rolled up her sleeves and got back to work, but always with an eye towards economy. Small business owners cut down on monthly supplies by cleaning their windows with hard-wearing, extra-absorbent children for a streak-free shine.

Joke #3 - "No! We're almost home. You can both hold it till we get there. Hollllld it in. Keep hoooldiinnng!

Joke #4 - One of America's most obscure fetishist minorities, the "building humpers" feel the need to begin training their young at an early age.

Joke #5 - For those times when you need a little extra reach, try Kid Gloves! Available in small, medium, and awkward teen.

Joke #6 - Alec Baldwin's ongoing frustration with the ever-present paparazzi.

Joke #7 comes from Anonymous2. Thanks anonymous2! - John's new "Ass-Puppets" got him into more trouble at the Five and Dime then he'd bargained for. "I guess they just don't understand my sense of humor", he told the officer putting him into the squad car. "Is it me?".

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

1974 Mazda RX-4 - Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen.

2012-01-16T07:51:00.000-06:00

Know what's better looking than a 2011 Mazda? A 1974 Mazda RX-4, that's what! This ad from the December '74 issue of Car and Driver proves it.

It kind of looks a little Challenger-y, but then everything did, back then. It's got the headlights pushed back into a chrome-surrounded cowl and a nice fastback-style rear. Also, the aluminum lace wheels are perfect for the car. It makes you wonder how we got to where we are now with Mazda styling. What do I mean? Let me show you.

Here's a 2011 Mazda 3 series. My god, I hate this thing. Mazda thinks the front end is cute and charming. Lots of people call it a "cheshire cat grin". I call it juvenile and retarded. The grilles and intakes on the front of a car should indicate where a grille or intake is located. Mazda violated all of this when they pretty much painted a grin on their car with black plastic. That grin? only the bottom third actually lets air in. The second picture with the blue car shows this in clear detail. The upper part of the "mouth" and the "dimples" on the sides are just decoration. All in all, this is what you'd get if you asked a five year old girl to design a car for you.

Disclaimer: The Mazda 3 is a stylish, reliable car and everyone should have one.

The 1974 Mazda also has a "Wankel Rotary Engine". Off the top of my head, I can't think of another widely produced engine that's as vastly different from the ordinary type of engine. Most engines have pistons that turn a crank that makes the wheels go. This constant reversing of direction (pistons moving up & down) can be considered "wasted energy", from an engineering standpoint. A rotary engine has a... umm... "triangle" that basically spins around and around inside a kind of oval-shaped chamber. With no parts that need to move, stop, reverse direction, and move the other direction thousands of times per minute, the rotary engine has far fewer moving parts than a piston engine and can spin much faster, with less vibration. This should indicate a fundamentally superior deign, but it never seemed to get perfected like the piston engine. It's always been a bit of an oddball engine design that's also terribly clever. It should be mentioned that the 2011 model pictured above has a normal piston-type engine, as well as the entire current lineup of Mazda models.
Rotary engines generate more power for their size, but get surprisingly bad gas mileage. Also, they've always had problems leaking oil. This may be part of the reason Mazda dropped the design in 2011 - a move that made lots of people sad, because of the cult following rotary engines enjoy.

The desirability of the rotary-powered 1974 Mazda must be weighed against the trouble of owning the "uncommon" power plant along with the super cool chassis. At least when it does break down, it won't be grinning at you like an idiot, prompting you to simply abandon it by the side of the road.

Click for hugeness.

Urgent Report - Weather control by 1966!

2012-01-13T07:45:00.000-06:00

I used to enjoy reading Popular Science, Mechanical Science, Sciencey Mechanicalness and similar magazines. The cover article typically features a thrilling painting (there's a clue) about heads in jars surviving for centuries, laser guided hover-fish or something interesting / horrifying. Then, flip to the article and it's a lot of "artist conceptions" and generally made up bullshit about "what may one day be possible". They then grab a couple of guys with degrees to quote about the state of one technology or another and then they make goofy predictions about when incredible things may happen. I got tired of this continual tease and disappointment and quit buying the magazines. In their defense, they've got to grab eyes at the newsstand, and the easiest way to do it is with sensationalist craziness that's only bound to annoy you with it's overall flimsiness once you actually look at the reasoning. You don't grab attention with headlines like "Most Products Incrementally More Useful This Year! Page 46!"

This just in from our Bureau Chief stationed in 1956. Apparently, mankind will control the weather by 1966, and will have the power to melt the polar ice caps at the flip of a switch by 1980. The author, Dick Halvorsen, uses the great line "Crazy day-dreaming? Science-fiction? Not a bit of it." He then goes on to point out the power of weather, as evidence for his prediction. The destructive force of nature is not the part that sounds stupid, Dick. After that, there's a fictional account of a possible World War III being fought with storms and floods. This makes up the bulk of the article. Near the end of the article, he does a paragraph or two the fact that people have been able to make it rain sometimes. Boom! Case closed! Cloud seeding, therefore, complete weather control in ten years.

We now present in full the article from June 1965's issue of Mechanix Illustrated for your hilarity.

McGregor Jackets - I.G.Y., baby.

2012-01-12T07:50:00.000-06:00

McGregor Sportswear, whom I had never heard of until this morning, was excited about their new Nylon jackets in October '57. They were ready to take on the South Pole, apparently. They look to me like they were definitely up to a trip to the corner for a gallon of milk on a chilly day, but the Antarctic?

They look like spring jackets, and the gloves look like the kind you use to work in the yard - definitely not the first thing I'd reach for if I were invited to the bottom of the globe for a gallon of milk. Looks like McGregor is still around, and doing the same thing. Good for them! Well whattya know? Their outerwear looks puffy and generally more arctic-worthy. I guess they learned a bit more in the years since the I.G.Y.

All in all, the entire arctic getup in these pictures looks sort of "not up to the job", but then again we know more about the Antarctic, having been there a bunch more times than in 1957. We have better stuff.

Shine on, you crazy rifleman.

The guy on the left page looks surprisingly well moisturized for being at the South Pole. He also looks like Chuck Connors.

"IGY taught us new ways to control the elements... inspired 4 ice-cap colors!" So what's this "I.G.Y." thing? In 1957 and 58, the International Council of Scientific Unions coordinated a number of scientific activities with thousands of scientists from 67 countries to learn about the Earth. It was called the International Geophysical Year. Pains were taken to ensure that all the going-on were apolitical and purely scientific in focus. They studied things like geomagnetism, the aurora borealis, cosmic rays, gravity, meteorology, the ionosphere, seismology, rocketry, and on and on. No bad thing, if you ask me.

Here's a quote from the NAS link:

"Given the state of science in the late 1950s, the timing of the IGY was highly opportune. Research technologies and tools had advanced greatly since the 1930s, allowing scientists a scope of investigation without precedent. Cosmic ray recorders, spectroscopes, and radiosonde balloons had opened the upper atmosphere to detailed exploration, while newly developed electronic computers facilitated the analysis of large data sets. But the most dramatic of the new technologies available to the IGY was the rocket. Post-World War II developments in rocketry for the first time made the exploration of space a real possibility; working with the new technologies, Soviet and American participants sent artificial satellites into earth orbit. In successfully launching science into space, the IGY may have scored its greatest breakthrough."

Yes, space was the exciting new frontier. Apart from this ad, mentioning the I.G.Y., what also appeared in the October '57 issue of LIFE was the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. (Anything that orbits a planet is technically a "satellite", whether natural or artificial. So, the moon qualifies as a satellite, as do Ganymede, Callisto, Sputnik, etc.). As this was the height of the cold war, the U.S. was seriously freaked out that a Soviet space thingy was flying overhead every six hours or so. There's a long article about the national freak-out in this issue, and it probably deserves to be posted in full. That's a lot of scanning and stitching together (LIFE is bigger than the P.A.G. Pitney-Bowes ScanTron, and each page must be scanned in two sections and knitted together in Photoshop by the Phil Are GO! Images and Scanning Them Dept.), so it may or may not happen.

I had heard of I.G.Y. before this morning, thanks only to Donald Fagen's 1982 album The Nightfly. Apart from being a brilliant piece of work, it's kind of a concept album. It's a catalog of the dreams and obsessions of a young Don Fagen growing up in "the remote suburbs of a northeastern city". There's a song on it called "I.G.Y.". Here's a YouTube link that's not really a video, so much as it is a picture of the album cover with the song underneath. The song is deliriously optimistic about the whole Bright Future thing. Well, he was a kid, after all. Also relevant is New Frontier, a similar song about the wonderful sciencey things to be seen at the World's Fair. That YouTube link is a proper video, and one of my favorites of ever. This is also the album that taught me about Dave Brubeck. The cover of his significant album Time Out is pictured in this video, and he's mentioned in the lyrics. It's a catchy tune, Beware.

It's probably kind of pathetic that Donald Fagen's account of his boyhood obsessions became my boyhood fantasy of growing up in the cheesy/naive late fifties and early sixties. How to purge these demons? That's what blogs are for.

Click for huge.

Conn Organ - Turn on, tune in, drop out.

2012-01-11T07:19:00.002-06:00

It's common to hear that modern electronics have us all locked into our own synthetic worlds. Blah blah blah. Comic books were the Great Cultural Evil too, at one time, so shut up. Anyway, this makes it really weird to read the copy for this Conn organ ad. "What a comfort to close off the world, let music spin out your dreams."

By comparison to our current capacity for tuning out, this domestic scene of musicalness seems downright gregarious. Look at the happy couple, actually sitting in the same room, listening to the same thing. It's frikkin' quaint. Check out the missus. She's not even using sheet music. What's she got going on there? Free form jazz? We'll decide in a minute.

Conn then goes on to repeatedly drive home the message that YOU, yes YOU SITTING RIGHT THERE could PLAY MUSIC! Stop looking for someone behind you. We mean YOU, idiot! By carefully poking our product, YOU can make MUSIC. Can you imagine, a useless dope like you, making MUSIC? Obviously, their target audience was the musical "outsider".

Here's a nice FaceTube video of a Conn Minuet. I don't think it's the same model, and it may be a little younger than the one in the ad, but it's close enough for me. The cabinet on the model in the video looks to be sixties or seventies, judging by the Early American styling. Do NOT miss the little button falling off at :49. I watched that part at least three times. To his credit, the guy doesn't miss a beat. Clearly, that's not the first time that's happened. He's pretty good. No sheet music, and very confident hands. Judging by the number of similar videos he's posted, he practices a lot.

It's scarier when he wears the mask.

I like the inset picture they included, just to prove that tired businessmen can PLAY MUSIC with THEIR OWN HANDS too. Look how happy he is, plunking out 76 Trombones by ear. So pleased with himself. "See honey, I'm a music-shian too!"

What this ad needs is some jokes. Oh how I wonder what they could be saying/thinking/playing. Doodley doodley doodley doodley....

Joke #1 - "...and I'll be sleee-ping aaaaat my siiis-ter's house to-niiiiiight, because Iiiiii want a dee-eye-vee-oh-are-see EEEEEEEEEEEE."

Joke #2 - "Honey, the gardener taught me a song today. Want to hear it? Okay, here goes. It's called 'Back Door Lover'..."

Joke #3 - "Our Father, who art in Heaven, please let my next wife will be deaf."

Joke #4 - "Honey, I wrote a song about us today. Want to hear it? It's called 'You Don't Pay any Attention to Me'. Honey?... Honey?"

Joke #5 - "What wonderful comfort to close off your wife, let music bounce off your earplugs..."

Joke #6 - After she got a few more weeks of practice, Don would try plugging the organ in for her. Baby steps.

Joke #7 - "Honey, the pool boy, roofer, mail man, gardener, and painter simultaneously taught me a song today....."

Excited Picture Viewer Update!

2012-01-10T17:05:00.002-06:00

We have fixed the picture viewer! You can once again view the images at delicious full resolution in a new tab/window. It was a check box in Blogger's settings. Apparently, it wasn't labeled "Please waste all my effort scanning images at high resolution by forcing them to display at a stupid default size." If it were labeled like that, it never would have gotten checked.

[-Mgmt.]

AMC Ambassador Optional Interior - Very distracted driving.

2012-01-10T07:33:00.000-06:00

AMC used to be a car company. They spent their entire existence in the role of "industry underdog", and they wore the mantle with a certain pride, as you can tell from this ad. Because they always had to try extra hard to get customers' attention, they did lots of kooky stuff, like the Gremlin, the car whose width was the same as it's length, and Pacer, the car with different-length doors. Let's not forget the Eagle, which was a four-wheel-drive car that was available decades before anyone wanted one. They also offered a houndstooth check interior on their otherwise-sensible Ambassador model. Think that sounds nice? Tilt your eyes ten millimeters downward and ask yourself again.

Flipping the page to this ad made me literally jump and blink a few times. It's a startling feast for the eyes. It almost looks like a magic-eye picture. If you stare long enough at the seats, you may be lucky enough to see a picture of Tommy Smothers.

This interior was available on the top-line version of the Ambassador- the "DPL" which, according to Wikipedia, was an abbreviation of "diplomat". I can only imagine picking up Indira Gandhi from the airport in a car like this, to take her to the U.N. She'd decide right then and there to invade the U.S.

AMC Ambassador DPL. Business on the outside, party inside.

If you got the Ambassador with the special houndstooth interior, it came with two matching pillows, presumably for the back seat. Pillows in a car. This is new to me. We can assume these pillows are for general luxuriousness, and not for sleeping. As if anyone could sleep with this fabric just outside your shuttered eyeballs.

None of this is to say that this interior option should not have been made available, or that AMC should not have done so much crazy stuff. The auto industry has, for as long as I can remember, been burdened with laziness and stagnant ideas. Change happens slowly from one model year to the next. Arguably, this is because cars are so expensive to produce, manufacturers only make the most conservative decisions whenever possible, for fear of not sucking up to the most average and boring consumer segment. Notable exceptions are things like the Nissan Cube.

We needed AMC, and we still do. We need a car company that makes rash decisions and releases batshit-crazy products. I would probably never buy a car with this interior, but I want to think I might. I'm glad AMC manufactured a car like this, and that some people did buy it. Of course, AMC paid the price of craziness, and that's obscurity and death. Too bad the vast majority of consumers are too dull to enjoy a weird car... reliability aside. There are far too many beige Toyotas on the road.

"A little nonsense now and then is treasured by the wisest men." -William Wonka

Click for bigger.

Personality Posters - The secret source.

2012-01-09T07:32:00.003-06:00

For those of us who rode in the middle of the bus, we were grateful we weren't "front of the bussers". They were uncool dorks. We in the middle were not so haughty as to mock them, because there was always someone cooler than you, ready to take you down a peg. Those were the kids in the back of the bus. They wore the Zeppelin shirts even after the principal announced them to be verboten. They had the hats with the pot leaf on it. They'd never had any pot, but they knew they wanted some. And when they someday got some weed, their groovy posters would be ready and waiting, back at their basement bedroom. The middle bussers wondered where they got the posters. They couldn't get into head shops... probably. Maybe an older brother or sister took them to Crow's Nest, which was a record store that was practically a head shop. But, even better than that, they could order them from the back of comic books, courtesy of Personality Posters.

Aha! Personality Posters! It only took me thirty years, but I have found the Xanadu of rear-bus scary-coolness. I will break my fast on honeydew, and drink the milk of paradise! Now I'll be in with the rockers. Let me explore.

Absinthe. Clearly a visual parody of Degas' L'Absinthe, with the diabolically subversive addition of Alfred E. Newman at the table next to miss Andree, it's far too literate and snooty. I'd never make it to the back of the bus with this in my bedroom.

Syncopated Rhythm. Hmm, That's kind of groovy, but I'd look more like a jazz fan, like Brubeck or Coltrane. Also, I could make that myself with scissors and a book of that colored construction paper. Nah.

Aquarius. Ooooo! It's printed on mylar! That'll make it hard for an outraged parent to tear up. This one's pretty good. Trippy and possibly colorful, it could easily be used as a cover for an Alan Dean Foster novel.

Love is Splendid. I did like Snoopy books when I was a kid, but this isn't snoopy. It's a shitty rip-off of Snoopy. Snoopy's head isn't shaped like that, and he doesn't have that many spots. The font at the bottom looks like Hebrew for some reason, too. Also, I'm not a girl.

Cosmos in Chaos. Possibly! The illustrator was being paid by the hour to turn these designs out, and people are hard to draw. So the figure was left in silhouette and he resorted to the can't-miss seventies tactic of splashy colors. Are those rays shooting into or out of the guy? Hmm. There are too many Saturns in there, too. I'd find it hard to own this poster without talking about that, and that would be suicide. Plus, it could be construed as being a religious poster. Negative!

The Future. Heeeey. A cold glimpse of our alienated future. One silhouetted guy sitting on glass cubes, ironically stranded on a tiny pinnacle of his own glorious creation or something. Lonely and tehcno, it'll prepare me for the eighties and the coming of Rush's Signals album, which I'll be buying in a few years. then all those stoners will have blown minds, with my complicated canadian prog coolness. I think the poster is airbrushed, which is super cool because it's the seventies, and airbrush won't be worn out until at least 1985. I've found my critical back-of-bus art acquisition. Three bucks?!? That's a lot of lawns to mow, but it'll be worth it. Back of the bus, here I come.

I'll have to borrow the money and have mom write me a check to... Gandalf? Oh Gandalf. Is there any kind of subculture coolness for which I don't have you to thank? I hope I can convince mom this is for school.

So what magazine were the cool kids reading? Cream? Rolling Stone? Not even close.

The Mighty Samson. A kind of sissified comic book with a hand-to-hand umbrella battle on balloonback. I think those stoners might have been dorks all along. I think I've been had.

Click for biggerness.

Bell Telephone System - Establishing shot, executive office, early morning.

2012-01-06T07:19:00.002-06:00

"Jacobs! Get in here. I need to see the proofs of the new campaign." (To self). "Aw, gosh, do I enjoy being a Bell Telephone PR Department executive, here in the progressive year of 1958. It fills me with no sense of dread at all that things will ever change. I sure am glad that I'm not tone-deaf to the prevailing winds of impending social upheaval. I can't wait to see the new ad. I'll bet it's a hum dinger."

"Why this layout is so modern! So forward thinking! I really like the openness of the whole shebang. It's just a picture and some copy. Lots of negative space around it. Lets you focus on the image. Good job directing the peons, Jacobs. Nice, clean ad."

"'This is your wife.' Look at her. She's smart, resourceful, and capable. Cook, nurse, chauffeur, other nurse, and glamorous arm candy. She can do it all. And, she has Me Bell to thank for everything she has accomplished! Jacobs, I think we've outdone ourselves this time. Cigar?"

"You know what, Jacobs? I think we're looking pretty good after this one. The bigwigs wanted us to modernize the corporate image and embrace the whole postwar family ideal. Look what we gave 'em. We're good, Jacobs. Damn good. I think we're going to be riding this wave for a long long time. We're gonna sell a lot of phones, kid. Stick with me. It's gonna be a hell of a ride."

*Beeeep*. "Looks like I gotta take this call, kid. Better scram while I do my thing. Great job. See you at the links."

"Hello? Bell PR Executive here. How can I help you, Miss Friedan? An article, huh? Cosmo? My wife loves that magazine! Sure, I got a few minutes for some questions. Let me put my feet up here. Go ahead. Shoot."

Little Ads - Disclaimers to innovation.

2012-01-05T07:35:00.000-06:00

Science refuses to stop advancing us towards The Future, and Science and Mechanics is there to help Science refuse to stop. Keep informed on all Science's not-advancing refusals by reading the critical innovations of the little ads! Science! Disclaimers may apply.

Space Training for the Small fry.
Disclaimer 1: Not all children are suited to space travel.
Disclaimer 2: May result in Catastrophic Child Inversion Syndrome or amusement. Use only as directed.
Disclaimer 3: Use may result in "the woozies", "icky-tummy", or "spontaneous nutrient jettison".
Disclaimer 3: Not for use in hard vacuum, or in absence of gravity. Not approved for use in place of acceleration couch.
Disclaimer 4: Not for use with space suit.
Disclaimer 5: Party dress may not provide adequate protection from hazards of space travel.
Disclaimer 6: Use of Space-Trainer may not qualify as comprehensive Space-Training. Consult Space for details.

Eat Anything with False Teeth.
Disclaimer 1: Not responsible for consequences of eating absolutely anything.
Disclaimer 2: Not all things with false teeth may be edible.
Disclaimer 3: Not responsible for lack of enjoyment of eating non-food items.
Disclaimer 4: Not responsible for unintended death after combat with British Secret Service Agents..

Baby Training Handle Trains baby without Having to Bend Over.
Disclaimer 1: Construction of Baby Handle may require bending over.
Disclaimer 2: Head notch as shown may be more rounded to accommodate human-shaped baby heads.
Disclaimer 3: Not responsible for results of non-poodle Baby Handle ornamentation. User assumes all responsibility for design variations.
Disclaimer 4: Construction of baby may involve bending over, if you know what I mean.

Double Duty Toothbrush - Prevents things.

2012-01-04T07:13:00.000-06:00

Well, the fifties were a more innocent time, right? Yes and no. Back then, you could market toothbrushes under the name "Pro-phy-lac-tic" and nobody would look at you funny.

Would they? I'm not old enough to say for sure, but I'm pretty sure the word "prophylactic" meant "condom" even as far back as 1958, the year of this ad. In the truest sense of the word, it simply means "preventative". So, there's no official wrongness here, but in the cynical age we live in now, I don't think any company would sell products (other than the obvious) under such a word... especially any product you stick in your mouth.

"Prophylactic" is a terrible name for a company, dirty connotations aside. Number one, it's hard for people to say, or to figure out how to say for the first time. Number two, the company seems to understand what a mouthful the name can be, breaking it up into syllables for you with the hyphens, then just abbreviating the name to "Pro". These are signs you should junk the name and pick something else. Maybe it was the name of the founder? Wallace Prophylactic?

Here are some other great brands from the fifties with purely coincidental names you can no longer find on store shelves...

-Dr. Spermatazoa's Extra-Waxed Dental Floss
-Scurvy Jane's Pancake Mix
-Com-mu-nism Brand Woolen Socks - Now available in grey!
-Trumpet-Dump Prunes
-Rumpforce Stool Softener
-Splattergone's Fast-Acting Stool Hardener
-Grandma's Old-Fashioned Private Spray

So, The Fifties were naive, right? Maybe not. There's more subtlety going on here. Why all the girls in at-the-time scandalous bikinis all over the ad? The only one not wearing a swimsuit looks like she could be wearing a slip. Double you tee eff? Why use all the sex to sell a toothbrush? It was assumed that the housewife was making all the buying decisions at the grocery store, so women were the likely target of the ad. Why try to motivate her with toothbrush babes? Body image envy?The world may never know, not even with biting.

One more note. You'd never see any advertiser using any negative words today like "careless". The lawyers would go apeshit, fearing you're encouraging people to be careless. I love living here in The Future, but I will say that things were better before each and every decision made by more than two people was filtered through a lawyer.

1962 Cadillac - Hip to be square.

2012-01-03T07:35:00.000-06:00

The '62 Cadillac shows us it's hip to be square, but it's not hip to be Huey Lewis any more. Sorry, Huey. This is a huge two-page ad of the 1962 Cadillacs. These are the cars that caused the great square shortage of the early sixties. So soon after using up all the ovoids, ovals, and humps building the cars of the fifties, Detroit then caused a worldwide run on squares and 90 degree angles. This is widely regarded as causing the AMC corporation to use whatever was leftover to build the Gremlin in the early seventies: trapezoids.

Cadillac is still trying to build angular cars today, but the result is simply jagged and irrational, like they were styled by an angry nine-year-old. I know lots of people like the new Caddies, but to me they look like buildings, and buildings aren't cars. Yes, they're fast. Too bad they're ugly.

Stock up on prettiness of the past by right clicking these models onto your hard drive. Sorry, it took long enough to paint out the fold, so I didn't get a chance to do flipped versions with reversed badges. You could probably just flip these yourself in whatever program you're pasting them into and no one would notice. Big and small PNG flavor files, with transparent backgrounds, just like you like em. Click through each image to the larger version, then right click save. You're welcome.

Pazo - Exquisite suffering.

2012-01-02T12:16:00.002-06:00

This ad is a little weird in that the name of the product is buried in the copy. To be honest, when you wanted Pazo, you didn't care about the name. The product is all about the problem.

To look at the picture, you'd think that men and women suffer from orgasm. But nope, it's piles. That's an old-fashioned way to say "hemorrhoids". As with our previous Pazo reports, you can look up the details about hemorrhoids yourself. And, if you do, celebrate your ignorance.

Nice Betty Boop haircut on the suffering lady. This was 1938, so WWII was about to happen and nobody had a TV, and hair was varnished and shiny.

I'll post a crop of the shiny-haired suffering model, so you can use her however you want. People will wonder what she's suffering. Tell them they don't want to know. They'll still want to know.

We're still officially on holiday break, here at GO! Tower. Proper regular posts resume tomorrow, Jan 3rd. Huh huh. "Regular". Huh.

Old Crow - Still life with shopping bag.

2011-12-29T09:56:00.002-06:00

Drinky Week continues here at P.A.G. (It's Thursday and I've just decided that.) Today's picture is an ad for Old Crow. Here's a link to a previous post with an Old Crow ad. We are faced with another mystery today. Why is there a plastic bag in the punch bowl?

Thanks to the entire peanut gallery for helping to solve the mystery of the Georgette de Lattre Gilbey's ad earlier this week. Turns out ours was not the only blog to have a hard time figuring out the signature.

So here's old crow, made into a punch, apparently with the critical addition of orange slices and a plastic shopping bag. Is the bag inflated with the breath of Foster Brooks perhaps? Is it poorly rendered miracle whip? Only the internet can tell. Please assist with the explaining, internet.

Less mysterious than the floating punch bowl anomaly is the inclusion of a pirate's accordion in the shot. I guess it helps the scene to be festive? I was pretty sure that specific type of accordion is a "concertina". Turns out I remembered correctly. After a few drinks, feel free to call it a "squeeze box". There is, however, never any excuse for saying "arr". That is the lamest piratey thing you can do. I bet no pirate ever said that.

If you really want to act like a pirate, take the high road and make some grog, which was originally just watered down rum. See, water would quickly go rancid on a ship at sea, and sailors mixed it with rum because the alcohol prevented putrification, preventing disease, if not sensibility. Too bad Old Crow is whiskey. Ah well. Not everything can come full circle.

Grog:
    1 shot rum
    1 teaspoon sugar
         (preferably superfine)
    Squeeze of lime juice
    Cinnamon stick
    Boiling water

Stir all ingredients, adding enough boiling water to fill mug or glass.

Click for 1210x1600.

Not our usual watermark. Courtesy of Unknown Leaky Basement.

Reinventing the telephone.

2011-12-28T10:47:00.002-06:00

Joke #1 - "...so, you get 2000 'AnyTime' minutes per month, at one dime every ten minutes, which comes to $200 per month. I'm sorry. I don't know about this 'data plan' you keep mentioning. Ready to sign?"

Joke #2 - "This new coin hopper plate is made from magnesium, which is twice the price of the steel unit, but does reduce the total weight by four ounces. This makes the phone more portable and reduces Catastrophic Pants Failure by nearly six percent."

Joke #3 - "I left a penny in here yesterday , Kent. Where is it? That tie looks like it cost a penny, Kent. Don't you think that's a little suspect...KENT?"

Joke #4 - "... and we'll have to redesign the entire coin mechanism, thanks to these new gigantic fifty dollar coins. Thank YOU, president Gingrich."

Joke #5 - "... And you lift the little door to shout a message to the recipient. Of course, the message becomes the sole property of Apple, along with the emotions that inspired the shouted message. And, they can never be copied or transferred, or repeated with the same phraseology in the same language, without the express written permission of Apple, Inc. Oh, the handset? That's for beating yourself if you think about wishing you could change your icons or something."


Click for huge.

Gilbey's Gin - With water. No lemon.

2011-12-27T11:24:00.002-06:00

Gilbey's Gin took the high road in 1958 with this classy and fairly beautiful ad. It's a picture of the bottle. Fine. behind the bottle is a gorgeous painting of what seems to be New York City, or some similar place. (Sorry. I'm not super familiar with NY). To go further out on the limb, I'm going to guess it's a picture of Manhattan. If isn't Manhattan, Manhattan should sue Gilbey's for copyright infringement. Either way, Gilbey's wants you to start thinking about your New Year's drinking. Also something about Lincoln.

Anyway, gosh this is a nice painting. Interestingly, the artist (whom we'll ponder later) has forgone the classic blanket-of-snow winter holiday look in favor of the damp-pavement-and-clammy-fog kind of winter scene. That's what kind of weather we have in Chicago this Christmas. This makes for lots of glittery reflections of streetlights in the wet. Cleverly, the artist (whom we really are going to try and figure out later) has managed to include lots of color in the painting, despite it being a fairly dreary and gray kind of scene. Nice work.

You can really tell what kind of weather they're having in Manhattan (I think). The lines are interrupted with indistinct areas and all the lights have a bloom of white around them, which is what you'd see on a misty evening. You can look at the piece and think "Oh yeah. We had a night like that the other night."

All in all, I applaud the ad for not using the super corny Thomas Kinkade storybook cheese-fest type of art to sell product. This painting is complex, subtle and sophisticated, which, I'm sure the Gilbey's execs would insist is no coincidence.

The Research and Googling Brigade was unable to find out more about this artist. The signature seems clear enough, but results were not encouraging. They searched on "Dohettre", "D. Hettre", "Hettre", and "Dehettre", with no joy. The letter after the D doesn't look like an E. It could be a period or something. If any Alert Readers can find some more information on the artist, the post will be updated and credit given to the cryptologist who can unravel the Dohettre mystery.

Here are some more wonderful events in the life of superchristian alcoholic and schmaltz artist Thomas Kinkade. Know what smells worse than urine on a plaster Disney figure? Hypocrisy. Enjoy.
Thomas Kinkade FBI investigation.
Thomas Kinkade arrested for drunk driving.
Thomas Kinkade Urinates on Winnie the Pooh figure at Disneyland hotel. He says God has guided his brush and his life for the past twenty years. Did God also guide his wiener when he marked Winnie the Pooh as his territory at Disneyland?
Thomas Kinkade heckles Siegfried & Roy (drunk) in Las Vegas.

Click for huge.

A Couple of Captions - Relationshippy.

2011-12-21T07:32:00.001-06:00

Pictorial Review was an American women's magazine that ran from 1899 to 1937. Mostly, it was filled with beauty ads and romance novellas, which were illustrated by skilled painters whose work was limited to spot color upon publication. The art was reduced to two colors: black and something else. In this case, red or blue. Shockingly, these novellas were full of melodrama, like soap operas, and were very relationshippy. You don't need to read the stories. The pictures tell the whole story.

Editor's note - Unless I'm confusing my various gods, the man in the white suit has a Buddha on his safe. Or a peacock. It's hard to tell.

Joke #1 - "They say they're out of kung pao. Will curry chicken be okay? I said, will curry chicken be... oh, come on now."

Joke #2 - "I'm sorry. I lost the call. Either your son's division was annihilated, or it's just a Verizon outage. Cheer up. We'll find out in a few months either way, right?"

Joke #3 - "Yeah, she's shut down again. I think it's her power supply. What? Cycle power? Hang on. Where's the power button on this model? The right elbow? Okay, one sec."

Joke #4 - "Aw jeez. We were too late. They're out of iPhone 4s's. Will a Nokia do? Hey, come on, those support Flash..."

Joke #5 - "I'm sorry, Mrs. Pearson. He says the photos are already posted to the internet. There's no telling how many times they've been downloaded already. Well, that's what comes of intemperance, am I right? Silver lining time: He did ask if you've been working out more."

Click for hugeness.

Joke #1 - "Sooo, I leave town on business for a few days and you're in bed with crummy old George from across the street, eh? A fine wife you turned out to be. Nuts to you! How was he, by the way? Did you get him prag-nuts or whatever? No, wait I don't wanna know! I just hope you gave each other cooties!"

Joke #2 - "Aw gee, Suzy, ya don't have to blubber about it. If you won't marry me, then maybe I'll just marry George or somebody. I just gotta get my green card is all."

Joke #3 - "I'm sorry, Fergus. While you were away at camp, I.. I... borrowed your baseball glove, just for a second. I put it right back, but I just got.... I got 'girl' all over it. I'm ever so sorry!"

Joke #4 - "Fergus McGee, you forgot our anniversary, you rat! That's the fifth time this summer! This relationship is smothering me! You go tell the ice cream man to divorce us. I'm going home. Get me a grape popsicle."

Joke #5 - "Oh, I don't know, Fergus. It just feels like we're living in some ridiculous Normal Rockwell imitation world. Everyone has that stupid rigid posture and they make those inane faces. Everything is so exagger -oh, for Christ sake, you're doing it RIGHT NOW!"

Joke #6 comes from Comatoast. Thanks Coma! - "I'm sorry the other ladies threw you out of the book club. I for one would have loved to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Look why don't we crank call the Eldridges down the street? That always makes you feel better right? You want to ask them if the fridge is running or should I?"

Joke #7 springs from the mind of Anonymous. Thanks you, secret joke maker! - Listen Dan, I told you if you come to work dressed like that again, I'm gonna have to call security. That's NOT what they meant by "Casual Friday!"

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

Borden's Instant Coffee - Scary good coffee?

2011-12-20T07:25:00.000-06:00

It's time to perpetuate the stereotype about the old auntie who disapproves of everything you do... with the help of Borden's instant coffee! Who's instant what? BORDEN'S. I guess they used to make it.

In this ad, a young bride teaches her frosty, patrician Aunt Bea (No, not that Aunt Bea.) a thing or two about instant coffee. Aunt Bea is so grateful at being A) tricked and B) taught a lesson that she gifts he niece with an elaborate magic amulet, which probably gives her a +12 bonus to turn undead ... something that, by the looks of Aunt Bea, will come in handy in a few months.

Now, the girl has two options. She can either keep and use the amulet - possibly against her own kin when the time comes - or destroy the amulet at an enchanting table. This would allow her to learn the "turn undead" enchantment and thereby have the option to create her own magic item of similar ability. Also,when she chooses to try making her own anti-mummy mojo, the resulting item may very well have a stronger bonus than the necklace from Aunt Bea, if her enchantment skill is high enough.

That is a gamble, though. By the time she finds out whether her home made Amulet of Turning is better than the one she destroyed to learn the spell, she won't have a choice any more. The original (and possibly superior) item will be gone. This is why she should save her game before she disenchants the one from Aunty. If she does lack the skill to make a better one, she can just wait it out and level up. Eventually, she'll improve her enchantment skill and she'll be able to make a whup-ass mummy blaster for sure.

Let's see. Umm, where was I? Aunt Bea reminds me of robot magnate and general evil-doer Mom, from Futurama.

This coffee tastes like porpoise hork, you crap!

The picture of Aunt Bea in the last panel might be good for scaring children, so here's a Rude Finger Graphic Gift of her. Big and small. Left and right. Come and get 'em. She's a PNG with a transparent background, to help her fit into all sorts of emails or graphics. You're welcome.

And yes, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a wonderful game. Buy it for everyone you know and you'll never hear from them again. They'll be too busy making poison and poking dragons to call you.

Tom Thumb - An Exmess surprise.

2011-12-19T11:27:00.000-06:00

Joke #1 - Hard-to-find gift for holiday 2011. "Super Out Ken." Comes with dance belt. Super Out Ken Honda Del Sol sold separately.

Joke #2 - "Mom, Santa left one of his weirdo elves behind again. I'll keep smiling at him. You get the swatter."

Joke #3 - Sasha found the wonderful toy drum she had asked for. It was her most wished-for gift, and here it was! She could hardly wait to play it. As she reached for it, her heart a-flutter, out popped a tiny, very festive elf! He bounced on the drum, and it went "boom boom boom!". The little elf seemed very happy with himself, and just wouldn't stop. Sasha became ever so disappointed, and decided that this wasn't worth it any more.

Joke #4 -The Christmas Elf flashmob, like all flashmobs, is fun only for the participants. The observers are just victims of the flashmobbers' self-indulgence. Don't become a statistic.

Joke #5 - "Oh, how delightful! A happy little elf! He's so jumpy! What else does he do? That's it? Oh, how.....delightful."

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

Click for hugeness.

Pillsbury Flour - A Quadruple X cooky!

2011-12-16T07:29:00.000-06:00

Lots of art from the forties and fifties is viewed by us Future-dwellers with the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. People drew differently back then, and everyone was naive back then, and nobody ever had sex until 1960. So, lots of what you find in old magazines is great. Then there's this monstrosity.

I'm sure Pillsbury intended us to be drawn right to the girls face when we turn the page. Well, mission accomplished. I nearly jumped out of my skin. This girl is unnerving. What's the secret filling in the cookies for chrissakes? Speed?

She's a terrible piece of art. She's amateurish and primitive, but not in that charming way that so much commercial art from the fifties is. She looks like she was drawn by a simply shitty artist. The sad part is, this person was a professional commercial artist who got paid perfectly good money to do it. Somewhere there's a talented artist, flipping burgers for eight dollars an hour who would just dip his head in the fryer if he knew how much some hack got paid to paint this hideous troll-girl. Often, the people who make art decisions are, more or less, visually illiterate. Sad but true.

It's hard to tell what this ad is trying to sell. Flour? Mint wafers? Sugar? Sedatives? Well, it's flour they're selling. Trouble is, when you bite into a really good cookie, your first question is not "Wow! What kind of flour is this?" Here, the flour is trying to take credit for the cookie, and the cookie is basically a vehicle for another cookie baked inside of it. The recipe they're promoting here is called a "Starlight Mint Surprise", which looks to be a chocolate mint cookie baked inside some dough-based cookie with a pecan or walnut on top. It's the Cyrano Debegerac of cookies, and it reminds me of a story about a friend of mine.

This guy I know once entered a robot into a science fair, back in grammar school. He took apart a toy robot, removing the torso, leaving only the motorized legs. He placed a coffee can over the top of it and called it a robot. The result was a pair of walking robot legs under a coffee can. You could summarize his invention this way: "Using this robot and this coffee can, I can build a robot!" We find this endlessly funny to this day. I hope he doesn't mind that I told this story.

This is how the Pillsbury Starlight Mint Surprise seems to me. You've already got a perfectly good cookie. Sticking that inside a second cookie doesn't mean you invented a new cookie. Take away the chocolate mint wafer and what have you got? An empty coffee can.

And "cookie" is spelled with an I and E. What's a "cooky"? Pillsbury seems to get the plural spelling right. What's with these people?

There's a piece of trivia to discover. What do the Xs mean on the bag of flour? The answer is elusive (meaning it doesn't appear on the first page of Google search results). This one seems plausible. It pertains to confectioner's sugar, but could it also apply to flour? I bet it does...

"The Xs on the package of confectioners’ sugar indicates how finely it has been ground. Four X sugar is slightly finer than 3 x sugar, but the two different kinds can be sued interchangeably in the same recipe."

So, it's nothing to do with the sexiness of the flour... not that a finely ground flour can't be sexy. Maybe you're into that. That's fine. I don't know. Get off my back.

GE Toaster - Streamlined breakfast.

2011-12-15T06:27:00.000-06:00

I have a toaster, and it's kind of shaped like this domey one from the December 1950 issue of Look magazine, but probably won't last as long as this one did. I have no proof. That's just a guess.

It's got that rounded streamlining that everything had in the forties and fifties. Plus, if you look at the bottom half - that dark brown plastic - I think that's bakelite I'm looking at.

Bakelite was a kind of early plastic that was made from wood filler. It's production involved formaldehyde, and the process was smelly and kind of complicated, compared with that of plastic. Plastic kind of made Bakelite obsolete, which is part of the reason that old bakelite products are so collectible now: hardly anybody makes it any more.

There are still a few niche uses for it, though - mostly industrial applications where plastic just won't do. Why's that? Well, bakelite (sometimes called "phenolic" by old timers like my dad) has a few interesting properties that differ from plastic. Normal plastic melts at a fairly low temperature. Your stove will melt most standard plastics. But bakelite is a "thermoset polymer", which means that after it's initial liquid state, it hardens forever and can't be melted. Epoxy resin is another kind of thermoset resin that you may be familiar with. Once you mix the two tubes of goo, let no man nor god make them soft again. So let it be written! The curing process for epoxy can be sped up with heat. After curing, these materials can be destroyed with enough heat, of course, but they don't so much melt as simply burn. The top end of bakelite's thermal tolerance is not easy to find online. Elm industries says that phenolics can tolerate 450 degrees. They seem pretty geeky with the plastics and stuff, so I'll take their word for it. I do know that like most plastics, bakelite really really stinks when it burns, and probably causes neurorlroguical probelmkns and drain bamamge.

Carbon fiber is exciting high-tech stuff at the moment, so much so that auto manufacturers sometimes decorate their steering wheels and dash boards with it, even though it was developed as a structural material. So it once was with bakelite. Bakelite jewelry can be found at most antique stores, but don't expect it to be out on a shelf. You'll probably find it in a glass case, and it will be surprisingly expensive. Like I said, people collect the crap out of it.

Thermoset resins are useful for situations where you want something lighter than metal but with higher heat tolerance than plastic, and less likely to shatter than ceramic. So, parts for electrical components, brakes, and - ta da! - toasters are all common applications for bakelite. Want some? You can buy it in sheets here. It kind of looks like reddish brown wood, with the cross section having a finely layered look. It's weird stuff.

Anyway, the top of this ad shows a little cartoon Santa. Some weird decisions were made here. Why does his empty toy sack figure so prominently in panels two and three? It doesn't even appear in panel one. Judging by this little comic, I'd guess that GE were either selling sacks or chairs.

Photographing reflective objects presents its own challenges. You need to keep the camera from being seen in the surface. This toaster shot was nicely done. Knowing that the toaster would be shown against a white background, they surrounded it with white cards, so it wouldn't look weird. You can see the studio lights in the dark areas at the "corners" of the toaster. They arranged the white cards so that the lines of the toaster would be accentuated by the black reflections, to show off the swoopy shape. Where's the camera? Probably right between the two white panels near the front-facing corner of the toaster. Clever.

Graphic gift time. Here are the Santas from today's picture, presented to you in vivid JPEG format lovingly compressed. The backgrounds are solid white, as opposed to transparent alpha channel, because tracing around all the trees would have been a pain. I'm not MADE of pen tools, people! Big and small. Left and right. Right click them onto your hard drive for easy Christmas e-card pasting in three, two, one...

881 x 1200

220 x 300

1200 x 901

300 x 225

1200 x 990

300 x 248

1200 x 1047

300 x 262

Fixed, until next time.

2011-12-14T19:16:00.002-06:00

The Phil Are GO! I.T. and Swearing team has restored the structure, using some kind of crystals and jasmine tea. Cords were unplugged and re-plugged. Made up deities were invoked. Thanks to all nine of you who came to the broken site today. Your names will be written into the scrolls of The Good Ones. To all the rest of you who found something else on the internet to read: I would have done the same thing.In other news, the Pointy Tree Day cards should be arriving at your place of domicility round about now. Why aren't you staring at your mail box right now? Nothing interesting will appear here until tomorrow morning. Commence a-staring![-Mgmt.]

Blogger's a genius. Fixed soon.

2011-12-14T07:47:00.000-06:00

Well, because Google are the smartest guys on the planet, the PAG template has broken again. We'll have it back to normal tonight. Meanwhile, I wouldn't blame you if choose to read something else.

Lane Hope Chest - I cedar appeal, but kind of obsolete.

2011-12-13T07:39:00.000-06:00

Gosh, what a serviceable-but-not-hilarious pun in today's title. You try and think of something clever. Shut up.

Growing up, we had a thing in our house that we just called "the cedar chest". Little did I know it was a "hope chest" - something I had heard of in old TV shows, but never understood. I never knew what a hope chest is until this morning when I threatened an unpaid intern with dismissal if he didn't look it up for me. Until today, all I knew about them is that they smell nice.

According to the "lazy person's knowledge source"... "A hope chest, dowry chest, cedar chest, or glory box is a chest used to collect items such as clothing and household linen, by unmarried young women in anticipation of married life." I never knew that. I don't think there are many people who have these any more, at least not by the "hope chest" name. Back in 1950, the year of this ad, women didn't have - shall we say - many options. Marriage was just about everything they were expected to want, and the hope chest was the thing a girl used to store up her linens and stuff, in anticipation for the Big Day.

Now women can do lots of things, such as "have a career" and "leave the house". A hope chest is an anachronism, especially when you consider that things like bed sheets and towels are pretty standard wedding gifts, and don't need to be stashed away in long anticipation of marriage.

Hope/cedar chests are nearly always made of wood, with a lining of cedar. Why? Cedar wood contains cedar oil, which smells great to humans, but is gross to bugs and mold. So, if you surround your linens with cedar, they'll stay moist and delicious forever.

Click for hugeness.

Apart from that, cedar oil has been used historically in cosmetics and paints, but these days, we mostly use it for the smell. It's a pretty common ingredient in men's colognes. Ask the counter lady at the store for a men's scent with a "woody note", and you'll probably get something with cedar oil in it. If you're lucky, she may even spray it in your eyes as you approach her, and ask you if it's okay afterwards. Good luck finding the ingredients on the cologne's label, though. Any company that sells its juice for fifty bucks a bottle holds their cards close to the vest when it comes to telling you how they make it.

Incense often is made with cedar. You can burn cologne too, but doing so lacks the relaxed, long-burning control of incense. It tends to go up like gasoline. Plus, once you light it, you'll be adding the smell of your terror to the room's olfactory cocktail, and that is the world's worst cologne of all.

The Lane ad calls a cedar chest a "Love Gift". Double-you Tee Eff? You may give gifts to people you love, but you don't go calling it a Love Gift. That's creepy. You know who would do that. Rachel Dratch's and Will Ferrell's "Lovers" characters from Saturday Night Live, that's who.

Hudson's Cutaway - Like those "Castle" books, without the murder holes.

2011-12-11T18:20:00.001-06:00

Today we bring you weary holiday shoppers a cutaway of the Hudson's department store in 1958 Detroit. Apparently, Hudson's used to be big stuff, rivaling Macy's for size and success. It was demolished in 1998, after spending some time in a state of abandonment. The drawing is by Michael Ramus, a career commercial artist who outlived the Hudson's building by seven years. His career consisted of work much like this, doing illustrations and paintings for LIFE and similar magazines. I don't want to think of how many hours it took him to finish this piece, or what it was like showing it to the editors of LIFE magazine for approval and revisions.

There's no viewing the detail without clicking through to the huge version. Incidentally, today's image is presented to you by the Images and Scanning Them department in extra-huge 8069x5492 dimensions. You may want to run out and buy a bigger monitor. Please enjoy scrolling around the picture to see all the whimsical little shoppers. Do not find waldo.

Here's a photo of the Hudson's store in it's pre-implosion state. Much less rubbley. The idea of a massive department store where you can buy absolutely anything reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where Eric Idle buys a pet ant and names him Marcus. As he works his way through the store to find the pets department, he passes Carol Cleveland playing a woman shopping for a flamethrower.

Looking at the density of shoppers in this drawing makes me really glad I do all my Pointy Tree Day shopping on Asthmazon.

So what's there now? A parking facility. See? I wonder if Michael Ellis parks there.

Entry Hall - Tracy's friends.

2011-12-09T06:31:00.001-06:00

Joke #1 - "Oh! Tracy, your friends are here for your birthday party! Why don't I make Rice Krispy treats while you all go play in the redrum... Whoops! I mean 'red room'!"

Joke #2 - "Oh! Tracy, your friends Tracy and Tracy are here to celebrate your birthdays." -A perfectly ordinary day in the sleepy little planned community of Serophene Hills.

Joke #3 - "Ah. Tracy, your two friends have arrived. How expected. And now you shall all move to the Celebration Chamber and remain perfectly still. I shall play a record of 18th Century Russian waltzes and prepare toast."

Joke #4 - "Hello, Mrs. Haffleflaff. We are here to play with your daughter Tracy. Is there anywhere unattended we can frolic together in a completely appropriate manner and do nothing unsettling?"

Joke #5 - *Sigh*. "Again? I said 'no' and I meant 'no'. What is it with you Mormons?"

Joke #6 - "Stairing" contest. (See what I did there?)

Joke #7 - "Ah! Tracy, your replacements are here. Let's hope they know how to behave. Your things are already in the car. You can exit through the back door. We don't want the neighbors to see your shame."

Joke #8 - "Ah! Tracy, your doubles are here. On my mark, all of you sprint from the house in opposite directions. I doubt the Campfire Girls sent three snipers. Let's show them how the Girl Scouts fight a cookie war."

Joke #9 - Carol let out a breath and relaxed. Although she hadn't invited them into the house yet, both girls had stepped across the threshold on their own. That was good. That meant they weren't vampires. But they could still be lycanthropes. Hmm. Her letter opener was made of silver, wasn't it? Wait. Silver was for zombies, right? No, definitely werewolves. Jeez, these Young Earther playdates were getting weird.

Joke #10 - "Ah! Tracy, why don't you come and greet your new best friends I found for you. Oh, do please come down from those stairs and stop being understandably freaked out."

Joke #11 - Girl 1: "Hello, ma'am. Do you have a daughter of similar approximate age? We are here for playing. Please enjoy these untainted lemon squares while we simply play." Girl 2: "Yes. Play."

Joke #12 - "Hm. That's odd. I don't remember ordering any creepy Stepford girls. Did you, Tracy? ...Tracy?"

Joke #13 - "Cheerio! Here's your parcel, ma'am, right as rain! No need to tip us. It's all in a day's work for United Poppet Services! Ta!"

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

Click for hugeness.

Holiday Buying Guide 1908

2011-12-08T06:53:00.001-06:00

Good-morning, friends and companions! We all know how busy life can become at this tome of the Season, what with the cow-milking and carpet-beating needing to be done. That is why your friends at Phillip Are GO! have chosen to ease your horrible suffering. To-day we bring you four delightful gifts that are sure to please some-one on your Christmas list. Are you ready to begin viewing the delights? If so, simply scroll downward and prepare to have your Christmas troubles solved!

Base-Ball Uniforms - What normal boy doesn't love sport? As everyone knows, boys who don't participate in Base-Ball are fated to grow up stunted, and are prone to self-molestation, upon reaching puberty. Stop this needless monstrosity now! Encourage your boy to engage in healthy athletic intercourse with his peers through Base-Ball. It fills the body with vigor, and also teaches fair play. These Base-Ball uniforms are constructed from the finest wool, which encourages the expulsion of bad humors through healthy perspiration. The trousers, especially, promote this beneficial function.

Conley Pocket Folding Camera - When you show your workaday friends your new Conley Pocket Folding Camera, beware: they may think you are a Witch and try to burn you, ridding the world of Evil. They won't believe the evidence of their own senses when you demonstrate this camera's foldings.

With the Conley Pocket Folding Camera, you can say "Good-Bye" to your special Camera Trousers, for this camera folds up to fit neatly into trousers with pockets of ordinary dimensions!

Purchasers of the Conley Pocket Folding Camera are advised not to demonstrate the camera's Photo-graphic capabilities, as this will surely result in a mistaken Witch-Burning.

Japanese Grass Suit - A splendid gift for men fond of Pleasure-Shooting. These Grass Suits are imported from The Distant Orient, and are guaranteed to conceal the fattest and noisiest hunters from the observation of all but the most astute woodland creatures, such as the very shrewd peahen.

Abandon all plans to construct your own Grass Suit! The ancient secrets of Grass Suit construction are known only to the denizens of the Distant Orient. All attempts at domestic Grass Suit construction will surely end in Failure and Misery. Get your Man a Genuine Japanese Grass Suit this Christmas and you shall surely never see him again!

Home Tooth Forceps - If you are continually frustrated with the results of inferior-quality Home Tooth Forceps, please consider these top-quality Home Tooth Forceps. Excellent for extracting all your children's teeth. However, do not engage in home blood-letting. For this service, please continue to patronize your local barber, as The Lord intended.

Reminder: There are still some Phil Are GO! Pointy Tree Day Post-cards available. To get yours, merely send your postal-address to us via this horseless letter-carrier address: PhilAreGo@Gmail.com

Listerine - Cold weather science marketing facts.

2011-12-07T06:36:00.001-06:00

This morning, the Health and Illness Editor dropped this Listerine ad on my desk, because of it's heavy bullshit content. We should go easy on 1950 (the year of this ad), because what the hell did 1950 know about virology? But, there are myths in here about the common cold that persist to this day, so why not use 1950's Lambert Pharmaceutical as a whipping boy for the betterment of your sinuses? They'll thank you later, and you can then pass on your sinuses gratitude to me. Just don't expect me to shake your hand when you do.

"How COLDS and SORE THROATS start". Sounds like some science is about to happen! Trouble is, this is an ad, and you should never take scientific information from a salesman seriously. An ad's only job is to sell product, and advertisers don't care why you buy, as long as you buy their stuff.

In this ad, the first (reading from left to right, as is my habit) cause of a cold is being in a draft. Negative. Cold and/or dry air does not make you sick. here's a link to WebMD's "Cold and Flu IQ" list, which mentions this. The fact that we call it a "cold" doesn't mean that cold things make you sick. That's magical thinking. It's mentioned again here.

This ad thought that a draft may "lower your resistance". Do they mean "weaken you immune system"? This one is beloved by marketers to this day. Lots of crap is sold under the claim that it will "boost your immune system". This is supreme bullshit. Nothing you eat or ingest can "boost" the immune system. As we've stated before, you wouldn't want to if you could. A berserk immune system is another name for allergies and diabetes. Look up autoimmune disease. These are the result of a boosted immune system.

What you want is an immune system that's running at exactly "normal", and the best you can hope for is to stay out of it's way. How? Here's a list of myths and facts about that. Eat right and avoid stress. Get enough sleep. Crazy, huh? Green tea can help... maybe. So, if you like green tea, drink up. If not, meh. It's not a sure cure. What'

The "secondary invaders" are viruses, according to Listerine of 1950. Wow. Secondary. At least Bacillus Influenza was listed number one in their list of secondary invaders. So, the flu virus comes second to cold air? It was nice of them to show you pictures of the germs, so you could see them coming and know when to duck. That's useful information, people.

Interestingly, I was able to find two different articles on WebMD claiming that you should avoid things with caffeine, and drink green tea. Sure, you can get green tea without caffeine, but who'd want to? The reason for the "avoid caffeine" advice is that it can dehydrate you, because caffeine makes you pee. However, I remember Dr. Dean Edell saying on his radio show that, while caffeine does make you pee, most caffeinated foods are water based - so much so that it's impossible to dehydrate yourself because you'd be drinking so much tea/coffee/soda to get the caffeine inside you. That makes a lot of sense to me.

But what about Listerine's biggest claim, that gargling with an antiseptic can keep you healthy? Well, WebMD's Cold and Flu IQ article doesn't mention it, and their Cold and Flu FAQ doesn't mention it either. However, it does mention gargling with salt water can temporarily relieve a sore throat. That only means it relieves pain. It doesn't mean it prevents or shortens illness. I've heard on doctor call-in shows that a salt gargle kills bacteria and stuff, so why not an antiseptic mouth rinse? It's good for your teeth, at least.

Zinc has been shown to probably do nothing for a cold. Results from various studies are mixed, with most results being equivalent to placebo. There is 100% evidence that zinc makes your mouth taste like crap. So, I just skip the zinc and eat a sandwich. Just tell yourself it's a zinc sandwich to grab that super-effective placebo effect.

But the best treatment for a cold is to avoid getting one, and that's all about the virus. Get a flu shot. Duh. Wash your hands. Duh. Try not to touch your eyes, which are a common entry point for viruses. For this reason, pour Listerine in your eyes.*

*Do NOT pour Listerine in your eyes. [-P.A.G. Legal Advisory Dept.]

Here are some crops of the sneezing guy and the whiny "my neck feels like a window" guy. They're funny.

Click for huge version.

Nescafe' - Only half a cup, please.

2011-12-06T06:44:00.001-06:00

I know people who regard themselves connoisseurs of coffee. They say things like "this is good coffee" and "this coffee tastes bad". Snobs. In my mouth (which is where almost all my tasting goes on with my nose coming in a close second), the pleasantness of a cup of coffee exists in direct proportion to how much non-coffee flavorants have been added to it. By the time coffee reaches the drink-it-without-making-a-face state, it could just as easily be acetone and I wouldn't know the difference because of all the Swiss Miss/sugar/Life Savers/Cap'n Crunch I've dissolved into it. "Hey Phil, this is great acetone! What's in it?" "The entire product line of the M&M Mars corporation."

So, when people turn up their nose at instant coffee, I feel like I'm doing them one better when I turn my nose up at all other coffee. It makes no difference to me whether the boiled roasted bean juice has been dehydrated before starting it's new life as a fluid in my belly.

That being said, Nescafe' knows how to sell coffee.

Click through the smaller version down below for a high resolution version of this ad.

It's not the brown spot color, although, strategically, that was very clever. It's not the uniform esses of cartoon steam planted dead center in everyone's cup. It's not the Clark Gable and Audrey Meadows simulants they hired to pose for the reference photo.

It's not even the pre-fifties clip art people enjoying their bathtub batch of Nescafe' at the bottom of the ad, thought all these things are great.

THIS guy is frikkin' fantastic. he makes me want to go and buy Nescafe'. If he were holding a dead kitten instead of coffee, I'd still grab my coat to go find a dead kitten at my local retailer. "Which aisle are the dead kittens in?" I'd ask, and then practice my wonky eyebrows on the way to aisle four to pick out my kitten.

When you crop in on him like this, you miss out on his shoulders and elbow, which both describe his ramrod-straight dorky posture. Normal Rockwell paintings always have people sitting like this. Nobody in real life ever sits like this because it looks so stupid, and it's not comfortable. When I was a kid, I loved Rockwell paintings, but now the stilted posing of the people makes me want to punch the paintings. This is why it is hard for me to shop for priceless heirloom copies of The Saturday Evening Post. I'm liable to start punching them before I've even paid for them.

Anyway, this dork looks like he's never had coffee before.. maybe like he's never had anything before, and everything in his life makes him go "SAAAAAAYYYYY...!". If only we knew what he was saying. Doodley doodley doodley doodley....

-"Saaaaay! What'd you call this, again? 'Coff-fee'? Some new delight from the orient? Is it hard to find?"

-"Saaaaaay! The spaghetti was getting in the way all along! I should just drink bolognese sauce instead!"

-"Saaaaay! This cup is delicious! How do you get them so crunchy?"

-"Saaaaaay! Everything tastes better when my hand is on the hostess' thigh!"

-"Saaaaaay! Nescafe is even better without water!"

-"Saaaaaay! What'd you call this? 'human blood', eh?"

Click for hugeness.

Hires - Woot! beer.

2011-12-05T12:07:00.001-06:00

Today's picture comes to us from our Senior Refreshments Editor (She's the senior editor about refreshments, not the editor of all things about senior refreshments, whatever that would mean.), who found this ad in a June 1965 Saturday Evening Post.

It's just a soda ad. The tone of the ad should be keyed to the importance of the product from the consumer's point of view. The product is always a life-or-death issue for the advertiser, but a common mistake is made when they expect the consumer to view the product with the same gravity that they do. A car is a big purchase. So is health insurance. Those ads can have a heavy or dramatic air. Soda is a frivolous thing. An advertiser shouldn't put more importance on it than the consumer does, or people will roll their eyes and tune out.

Yesterday I drove past a billboard for 7-up that said "Be yourself. Be refreshing. Be 7-up." LAME! I understand that the Dr. Pepper / Snapple group would LIKE us to invest our identity in our choice of soda, but that's retarded. It's effing soda pop.

So then there;s this Hires ad. They're trying to turn their brand's identity as a market underdog to their advantage. "Break away from the ordinary." etc etc. Fine. Good, even. And nobody's intelligence has to get insulted or anything. Advertisers don't like it when you have or use your intelligence. They prefer to just obey or brain stem. Eat, excrete, hump, consume...

The ad mentions their "colorful" carton. Everybody likes some nice circus-tent stripes, like they put around the handle area, but I don't think you should describe anything so predominantly brown as "colorful". Nice, though. The taller middle section of the carton kind of makes it look like a castle, which only adds to the appeal, from a kid's point of view.

Poor old 1965. They didn't have photoshop to make the artist's job easier. You can see that the product was shot on a white background, and when they pasted the picture over the larger photo, they didn't really have a way to make the neck of the back row of bottles transparent. It hardly matters. A modern "graphic artist" would just have just dropped the transparency of the glass to 50% and called it done. To do it right, you'd have to spend some time making some areas transparent and other areas less so. See, glass is most transparent when you're looking straight through it, in the center of the bottle. Near the edges, there is so much refraction and reflection going on, that you'd actually see very little of whatever is behind the bottle. It's pretty geeky and complicated, and few artists take the time to get this stuff right, even when they have all the technology The Future has to offer.

This text might be the coolest part of this ad. Few things are so perfectly Sixties as this over-under, push & pull kind of text. See how the "T" is tall and the "I" and "S" fit underneath it's arms? Also, the "I"s are all lower case for some reason. This kooky lettering is wonderfully Sixties, and you don't see it used much, even when trying to imitate the Sixties style. Why? Probably because it can only be done "by hand". There's no TTF font that will automatically come out fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. Do get this right, you need to manually stretch the strokes of the letters and make each letter fit together with it's neighbors. When you get it right, it looks great, but there's no real automatic way to achieve the look. So, laziness keeps it from being ordinary... just like Hires Root Beer. See what I did there? You're welcome, Hires.

X-MESS card reminder. Email us a postal address to get a free Phil Are Go! Pointy Tree Day card! No salesman will visit. It's just a post card. We've had some good response but there's still enough to go around. Make your friends feel inadequate and empty inside. Get in on all the card-getting fun today!

Jergens Lotion - Give him a handgasm.

2011-12-02T06:30:00.001-06:00

Oh, 1947, you're killing me. Your idea of funny was Abbot and Costello, but everything else was so melodramatic. At least, everything in McCall's magazine was. Lots of ads had photos of embraces so overblown, it makes you wonder what the man's hand is doing, just out of shot.

This woman is getting a brain-boner, merely because her ear is in a man's mouth. I'm going to go out on a limb and call the expression on her face "suggestive". Either it's the guy eating out her ear, or something really great is happening in the baseball game she's got playing on the radio hidden in the napkin on her shoulder. Either way, SOMEone's going to third base. Heh heh heh. Nice one, Phil man.

Sure, it's a turn off when a woman has hands like a sleestak, but when I'm doing the "let me count the ways" dreamy enumeration of charms, her hands fall somewhere halfway down the list. As long as there aren't huge doritos of hard, dead skin hanging off of them, and they're not Man Hands, they are generally a pass/fail sort of thing. "Hands? Check. And now to check for boobs!"

Sorry, Jergens of 1947. I guess I'm just not part of your demographic. To look at advertising is to know what advertisers think of their customers. Apparently, women of 1947 spent their entire day cleaning and thinking about relationships, and their heads were filled with girly dreams of being swept off their feet and provided for, happily ever after.

If Jergens of 1947 were here, they'd probably give me a sock in the nose just for owning a copy of McCall's at all.

Let's see. How could Jergens advertise to men? Hmmmmm. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I don't think anybody did what I'm thinking of in 1947. I tend to assume that the entirety of humanity was a virgin, and knew nothing about dirty stuff, until the sixties.

But the woman in this picture? She's definitely going to need to clean up after Waldo is done tasting her brain stem. The secrets in her brain are going to force me to rethink my assumptions about pre-sixties dirtiness.

"I hope you like it, honey. I bought you Montana." They'll still argue about where to put the couch.

Day after glorious day they hiked. Do you like their hiking clothes? He's wearing his best hiking suit and she remembered to pack her Chanel hiking dress. In 1947, men wore top hats to bed and women wore ball gowns to make dinner. So, really, these two are dressed down. He may not even be wearing a tie! What if a squirrel sees? He had to bring her to Wyoming to explain how he feels about her hands. "Sweetheart, I love that your hands are really soft, like a tree. See? Trees." What's he going to do when he needs to explain that her faults are nearly undetectable, like neutrinos?

Ooo! Note to self: Get an intern to copyright the the word "Neutreen-o's". We'll just sell empty boxes and tell people they're full of cereal with an admittedly small but nonzero mass. It'd still be less of a scam than homeopathy, because technically speaking, there would be some actual neutrinos in the box at any given time. Proving that would be expensive, though.

Supplementary Post - PAG Exmas card list open enrollment!

2011-12-01T09:34:00.001-06:00

This just in! If you want an actual paper Phil Are Go! Pointy Tree Day card sent to you, send us your address and get in on all the fun. No, you won't get junk mail from us. No, we won't sell your address so some advertiser. No, we won't come to your house and stare in your windows. All that sounds like too much work, man. Alternately, you can have us send the postcard to your work address and we'll stare in THEIR windows... wups.

So, to get a PAG Exmas/Pointy Tree Day card sent to you, yes YOU! All addresses will be torn up and swallowed after the cards go out. Send your address to us at:

philarego@gmail.com

Supplies are limited, so hurry blah blah blah. You know.

Libby's Tomato Juice - What can brown "eew" for you?

2011-12-01T06:43:00.001-06:00

Today we have for you an ad freshly delivered to my desk all the way from 1947. Food pictures are hard to get right in the first place, and they don't age well once the colors start to drift over time. This ad for Libby's Tomato Juice has a kind of subtle "browning" that looks pretty good on old magazine photos... except for the food, which is the center of attention here.

There are photographers who specialize in food. Most food dries out and becomes disgusting under studio lights, and the trick of getting it to look good despite all this is interesting reading. I need to pick up a book on this, so that I may know more whereof I speak. What I know about it now mostly comes from stories from friends and dim memory of some TV show I saw a hundred years ago.

So, Libby's, yeah. I don't like tomato juice. I loves me some tomatoes. However, give them to me in their original shape, please. Like peanuts, once they've been molested into a liquid or a putty, I've lost interest. I don't know why. This rule only seems to matter sometimes. I have no problem with lunch meat or candy or most foods which undergo a baffling technological transformation on their way to a cellophane package on my plate, and peanuts in their "natural shape", as I called it, have been roasted and salted to death even then. It's not a nature versus science thing. I just look at tomato juice and brain says "gross". Sorry. I don't make the rules. Brain does. You think it sounds dopey? Try living in this thing.

Anyway, here's a fun fact I heard about this weekend on one of my science podcasts. Tomato juice is actually brown. It needs to be artificially colored to be red. Always has been. Yep. Have a look at this article in Psychology Today, which I was really relieved to find, as I couldn't remember where I'd heard about this. Here is some pasted text from the article:

Would you drink brown tomato juice? If given a choice, most likely you would refuse the brown tomato juice in favor of the same stuff doped with an artificial chemical that stains the juice bright red. Even though you know that the brilliant red color of tomatoes fades with time after caning, and you know the red colored artificial chemical does nothing for taste or nutrition, you can't help yourself from consuming the adulterated juice instead of the faded colored juice in its natural state. Is this rational?

Har har! I found a typo! "canning" has two N's, unless your tomatoes have done something very illegal in Singapore. Ironically, a caned butt, like a canned tomato, will start out a vibrant red and, over time, will probably fade to some shade of brown. Less ironically, I want neither on my dinner plate, unless the tomatoes are fresh.

I'm a bit surprised that in 1947, a white bread magazine like McCall's featured exotic foods like tortilla chips. Are those tortilla chips? Odd side dish for a cup of hot tomato juice. They could be goatskin. I have a couple of doumbeks (Egyptian drums) with goat skin heads that look like these goat skin chips. Searching for some doumbek links was dangerous just then. I see them, and I want to whip out my credit card. Doumbeks are wonderful drums that have a surprisingly deep tone when you hit them in the middle, and an equally surprising sharp "crack" sound when you slap them near the edge of the head. This wide range of sound makes them, in this person's opinion, better than bongos or congas for a small portable "bring it to your friend's house because everyone's bringing their guitars to my Christmas party and we need a drummer". With a doumbek, you can simulate almost any kind of sound you'd get from a drum kit, all in a package about 12"x20".

Wow, a bit off track there. Umm. So, tomato juice is brown and gross, but people like it anyway, and you eat goat skin nachos with it. I don't think the goat skin nachos are going to catch on. This ad ran in 1947 and if they were a hit, I think I'd have heard of them by now. Nice try, Libby.

Here's some unfortunate retouching. The steam rising from the cup (which was added by an artist after the fact, of course) seems to be doing some weird stuff. Where it overlaps the juice, it's solid white, but over the white of the cup, it looks misty. Pity the poor artist back in '47 who had no Photoshop to make this easy. Also, the art director wanted him/her to airbrush in some steam over a white background. WTF? There was nothing for it but to make the steam a pale blue. Morons. Should have shot it over yellow, or almost anything but white. This reminds me of some commercials we worked on years ago, for a toy called The Littlest Pet Shop. It was a toy for girls, and the commercial was all pink and lavender, and we were animating the opening sequence. Girly toy commercials always want every color to be as bright as possible. Of course, the sky was so bright as to be almost white. Then they had us do magic sparkles over a pony or something, and they couldn't be seen against the sky. When your sky is nearly white, you've got nowhere to go but down, in brightness. So, they wound up with colored pixie dust that was slightly darker than the sky behind them. morons. It looked like shit and of course it didn't matter, but I complained about it anyway, to our producer. She told me she understood but just get it done and move on. Wise words. Doing that was still easier than getting through a glass of tomato juice.

1971 Bland Torino?

2011-11-30T06:55:00.001-06:00

Nope. Not really, but it rhymes and Ford marketed the Torino as "right in the middle" - the champion of mediocrity. So, they get what they get.

There actually was a fast version of the Torino which everyone now knows as the titular car in the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. It's a nice looking car, and could be had in fast trim. So, no, not bland at all. This ad is from 1971, a year before the Gran Torino came out, but the GT model was around, and it was pretty quick.

The Raquel Welch-looking lady in the top photo looks like she's just walking into the shot. "Oops! I'm not on yet? Okay, I'll go and resume volumizing my hair."

Please enjoy the top two cars in the ad as part of your ever-growing multicar pileup of PNGs. I didn't do the wagon, not because I'm yet another anti-wagonite (I like two box designs), but because the woman and her kid were in the way and I didn't feel like 'shopping them out. Even after they were wiped away, I'd still have to close the tailgate and that'd be pretty tedious and I'm an important man with a media empire to run. I'm not MADE of Photohsop, people!

Anyway, here comes a graphic gift in the form of the red and gold cars. Left and right, big and small. Get your rude fingers ready to right click them onto your drive in three, two, one...

Oh, hey. It's not your imagination. The page is now a little wider. Those people still viewing on an 800x600 monitor need to get with the times, man. Also, they should consider upgrading from a green screen to a color monitor. They don't know what they're missing.

Oh yeah. Also, Phil Are GO! now has a mobile version that is more viewable on your mobile doohickey of choice. Faster loading. Better on small screens, etc etc. No extra steps are necessary. When you look at it in your mobile browser, it should just default to the mobile version. You should see a link at the bottom of the mobile site to go back to the normal version, if that's what you're into. Why aren't you doohickeying with it RIGHT NOW???

Cowboy Cabaret - No parking.

2011-11-29T07:05:00.005-06:00

Joke #1 - This weekend, five were killed and over twenty were injured in another hilarious parking mishap at the annual Magoo family reunion. all witnesses described all other witnesses as "roadhogs".

Joke #2 - 2013 Nissan Leaf. Current range on a full charge: to the kitchen and back. Described by manufacturer as "ideal city car".

Joke #3 - May 25, 3077. The head of George Lucas, suspended in a jar of fluid, proudly announced the absolutely-final-for-real-this-time-we-really-mean-it revised commemorative extra special holographic edition of the original Star Wars film. Mos Eisley Cantina scene pictured.

Joke #4 - For the 34th year in a row, the entertainment at the American Family Association's annual conference resulted in violence and ritual sacrifice, due to alleged "witchcraft".

Joke #5 - NHTSA Crash testing facility, 1908. Model T Ford undergoing the stringent "jangly piano test", which would determine whether the vehicle received the coveted "rootin' tootin'" rating or the dreaded "lilly-livered" rating that could spell doom for the auto manufacturer's sales.

Joke #6 - The SEMA convention of 1908 played host to nearly two manufacturers and attracted over twenty attendees, introducing such products as "the Fantabulous Floor Mat Fantastique", the "Emergency Roadside Safety Revolver" and "Doc Whitman's Old Fashioned Traffic Whiskey".

Joke #7 was donated by long time commenter Graigf. Thanks, Craigf! I was able to find out what a "flivver" is, but no results yet on the "hup-mo" reference. You have bested me, sir. Well done. Joke #7: ...coming to you LIVE in glorious FlivverVision, it's the Hup-mo-tones!

Joke #8 comes from first-time joke maker Anonymous2. Thanks Extranonymous! Y'll come back now, y'heah? - Hilldale Blotter- May 7th 1908. Police were soon summoned after Act 1 of Matilda Tannenheid's Octet, The "Nausea-Eight", threw open the doors of their automobile visage, revealing the four pantless gentlemen crooner's naughty-bits were actually being struck by felt covered mallets, operated the keys of her "Organ-Organ" to retrieve the vocal pitches she required. Those arrested were Ms. Tannenheid & her four female vocalist accomplices, all members of the Hilldale Suffragette Movement. The gentlemen received immediate hospice after icing.

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

Please Stand By.

2011-11-28T13:39:00.000-06:00

Our I.T. and Swearing team has spent the day fighting the Blogger layout interface. Turns out a post with weird code in it can break the whole damn template, and since Blogger "improved" the template design functionality, getting the old site back isn't a simple matter. We plan to have this sorted out by tomorrow morning and the jokes can once again spew forth.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the white sidebar and the stupid gradient in the page background. Just kidding. Do not enjoy them, even for a second. See you tomorrow.

[-Mgmt.]

Black Friday Music Shopping Guide - Stay home.

2011-11-24T10:56:00.002-06:00

For the first time ever, Phil Are Go! is doing a music review sort of thing. Today is Annual Mercantile Lapse in Judgment Day, when millions of people self-destructively stampede into stores in the small hours and indulge in some bare-knuckle consumerism. Eff that. Buy a couple of gifts online and save the unnecessary expense of having your pelvis held together with steel pins.

If you're a person who reads P.A.G!, you, or someone on your Pointy Tree Day list may be a person who likes music that either sounds old or is actually old. Here are some albums (An album is a collection of songs released as a whole, regardless of what format they are delivered on, so shut up.) that contain no auto-tune. In my brain, good music is any that makes pictures appear in my head. And, a picture of the vocalist singing does not count! It needs to be evocative. These albums do that to my brain. They also demonstrate that jazz is evolving without betraying it's past.

The Five Corners Quintet, Chasin' the Jazz Gone By. The Five Corners Quintet is a jazz band from Helsinki, Finland who are decades younger than the sound of their music. The title of the album pretty much also serves as the band's mission statement.

The album sounds like sixties heist movies. They sound bigger than they are, but they're just a five-piece combo, with just two horns on most tracks. It's mostly instrumental car-chase music with occasional guest vocals by American jazz singer Mark Murphy. The album cover art was a perfect choice. Modern, retro, and very classy.

The astute listener with decent headphones will notice something odd about the sound of the album. It seems that, in their enthusiasm to capture the retro sound, they added a small amount of "analog distortion" to the recordings. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this was done digitally in the studio, rather than recording the whole album on vintage tube equipment. I wish they'd have left that off, but it's livable. You can most easily hear the effect as a kind of "fuzz" over the top of the higher horn notes and some of the cymbals. It was a curiosity the first couple of times I listened to it, but now it doesn't bother me and all I hear is the sound of a spy running through a hotel lobby.

Here's a YouTube clip of my favorite track off the album, "Trading Eights".

Nicola Conte, Bossa Per Due. Italian guitarist and bandleader Nicola Conte also pours a coctail over your brain with his 2001 release Bossa Per Due. Unlike the Five Corners Quintet, he uses some contemporary electronic rhythms and looping to modernize the sound of his jazz a little, but nothing overt or cheesy.

Like Chasin' the Jazz Gone By, I think this album will age well, and you won't be embarrassed to listen to it in twenty years or so. The computer trickery doesn't interfere with the retro sound at all. Blending the old with the new and making the two sound seamless is the mark of a clever and nuanced artist.

You may recognize the following song from at least one commercial. I think it was used on a Maytag ad for some stylish washing machines in red enamel shot on a black background. That's not where I first heard this song, but I was glad that word was getting out. I think I heard of Conte through Amazon's fairly useful "if you like this you may like that" functionality. When I bought the album, I was relieved that someone was still making music that turns me on.

The songs on Bossa Per Due are less action scene than travel montage. The Vespa on the cover was, again, a well chosen piece of art. The sound of the album is all departure lounges and silver Sean Connery suits. If Conte wasn't Italian, the sound of his music would seem pretentious, but coming, as it were, from the horse's mouth, I have no guilt in succumbing to the very Italian Euro-beat this album moves to. Like Chasin', the songs are mostly instrumentals, but with non-verbal female vocals distributed throughout. This is perfect. It imposes no narrative on the music, letting the sound paint the pictures. Everyone can be a synesthete, and that is no bad thing.

Koop, Waltz for Koop. I wish I could say I first heard Koop at a basement club on a trip to Sweden, but no. I just heard them on a record review on NPR back in 2002, like everyone else.

Koop is, at it's core, a pair of jazz-loving Swedish DJs called Magnus Zingmark and Oscar Simonsson. Yes, they like to wear women's clothes. They can act as goofy as they want, as long as they keep releasing albums like Waltz for Koop. The album is a short thirty minutes, but each song feels like a scene from a movie. Waltz for Koop is the most obviously looped and electronic of these three albums, but the work is done with as much sensitivity and taste as Conte. Koop record vamps and clips of a live jazz combo, then build those into loops and cut them together with synthesizers and various guest vocals. The result sounds surprisingly effortless and natural. Your average DJ oaf couldn't pull it off, and that's what excuses the computer infringement on the hallowed ground of jazz: taste and skill.

The songs on Waltz for Koop range from bouncy (Summer Sun) to moody (Modal Mile). This makes for a good live show, and Koop does perform live, by bringing their jazz band and vocalists out on the road. So, out of the machine comes soul. How bout that?

Kooking Kornir - Animal Lung Sconosciuto!

2011-11-23T06:31:00.001-06:00

Today we bring you another Fictionalized Settlement Day feast suggestion. Wow your guests with the taste of old Roma: Animal Lung Sconosciuto!

Begin by selecting an animal lung from your neighborhood open-air market's animal segment vendor. Choose the animal according to the number of guests you need to feed. A sheep lung will feed just two people romantically, but a sperm whale lung can feed an average old-world village, and will require a specially reinforced table.

If you happen to know that your family enjoys a char-grilled sort of flavor, ask your old-world market vendor if he has any lungs donated by animals that were chain smokers who died of emphysema. Almost all people and animals in old Europe smoke cigarettes - sometimes two or three at once, so it shouldn't be hard to source a "smoked lung".

Enhance your old-world market experience by wearing a sun hat held on with a gauzy scarf. Also, hold hands with someone and laugh randomly. Consider twirling.

Bring home your carefully chosen animal lung in a paper grocery bag with celery and an inedible loaf of long, thin bread sticking out of the top. Once inside your home, discard these.

Place your animal lung in an old-world baking pan shaped like the animal it may have come from. Spray the lung with AdhesiveCheese brand aerosol food spray. Drizzle with some kind of red. Place in an old-world baking oven for 45 minutes set to lung temperature. During baking, the lung juices will fill the pan and gradually evaporate away, leaving an oily orange film in the lung pan. Do not switch to a clean pan, as this film is good for "bread wiping", usually by uncles.

Garnish with lemon slices and parsley to give you something to scrape into the trash, because our Animal Lung Sconosciuto will leave your family gasping for more! Syödä!

Kooking Kornir - Deep Fried Shapes.

2011-11-22T06:26:00.001-06:00

This week, America celebrates Fictionalized Settlement Day, and that means food, food , food. But, as you know, not everyone likes their food to come in so many different forms and textures! Turkey can be so "slicey" and "meaty". Cranberry sauce can be so "sauceful" and "fuitish". Stuffing can be so "variable" and "seasoned". This Fictionalized Settlement Day, reinforce your family's comfort zone the American way by serving up this super-comforting platter of deep fried shapes, all with the most reassuring texture of all - friedness!

Start your Deep Fried Shapes platter of the right way - with a platter. Our serving suggestion shows the platter served raw, but for proper theming, you may want to deep fry it. Platter fryers can be rented by the hour from any VFW hall if none of your fryers can accommodate your platter. A cast iron platter like this one needs to fry for thirty seconds, but aluminum models only need to be in the grease for twenty seconds. Don't overdo it!

Next comes the fun part - shapes! Look at our picture for ideas. Gosh, it could be anything in there! Those stick shapes could be fish sticks or cigarette lighters or whatever. Those round things could be cream puffs, golf balls or maple syrup cysts. Everything's delicious if you deep fry it enough!

Choose your shapes based on the diameter of your eaters' mouths. Measure their "nutrient inlets" while they're sleeping. Hopefully, your family has a nice, healthy snoring habit. This makes it easy to slip in a pair of calipers to measure the inner diameter of their mouths at full gape. You want shapes that fit into their mouths whole. If they can fit the shapes in their mouths without biting, this makes it easier for them to enjoy their Fictionalized Settlement Day dinner while playing video games or wielding a lawn chair in an impromptu "backyard wrastlin" match.

Some good starter shapes are "circle", "rectangle", "oblate spheroid", "ovoid", "thin squiggle" and "thick squiggle". Some of these are pictured in today's serving suggestion. Can you find them all? Fry your shapes in your best deep fryer set to "very crunchy". If some of your shapes come out a different shape than they went in, fry them again. What have you got to lose?

Arrange your shapes on your platter segregated by shape and size. This will minimize hunting and ensure that eaters who enjoy only one shape know exactly where to find their favorite. Garnish with the barest suggestion of vegetable matter. Not too much now. The steaming crispiness is the star of the show. Serve your shapes with several tubs of dipping goos. Consider traditional flavors like yellow and flesh-toned. White flavor goo is best served with some kind of lumps in it.

Your eaters may start arguing and biting each other. This is a classic indication of Not Enough Food. Only empty mouths can bite. Fry up another fried platter of crispy orange comfort shapes and revel in your happy, gorged family. Aloha!

Ivory Soap - Little bubblyyyyy!

2011-11-21T06:42:00.001-06:00

Today the IT and Swearing Team installed our new Pitney-Bowes ScanTron color image scanner. So, there will be no more - shall we say - "racing stripes" in our images. In the Images and Scanning Them department, there was a mighty throwing of hats into the air and many shouts of "Huzzah!" For the curious, the Okidata Adequate Scan620 will now be retired to the museum wing of GO! Tower. It will be on display during business hours from now on, or until somebody walks off with it under their arm. For the Pitney-Boweses (sp?) maiden voyage, we bring you this tender domestic vignette from a 1938 ad for Ivory soap.

Ah, yes. I have only dim memories of my mother teaching me to blow spit bubbles, but I'm pretty sure there was a crease running vertically through that day in my life, too

Babies don't come out of the packaging knowing how to make bubbles with spit. Like everything else, they need to be taught by their mother. Here we see a pretty mother wearing a pair of pink curtains, showing a larval Alan Hale to blow spit bubbles with her clay leprechaun pipe. It couldn't have been easy for her to pull off a bubble of this diameter. See, babies' saliva nearly always has the viscosity needed for spit bubbles because they are in a near constant state of just-having-eaten-ness. Their mouths usually have a thick coating of creamed peas, creamed carrots, or creamed perch mixed in a 50/50 ratio with spit.

Adults, on the other hand, brush their teeth and drink acidic or astringent things like soda pop and coffee, which tend to make for very thin spit. Maybe the woman in this ad is just getting over a cold? When I'm sick, I can drink lacquer thinner and my mouth will still feel filmy. Sick person spit is nearly always a viscous blend of Nyquil, chicken broth and sinus drainage that could be used to hang wallpaper. Blowing a bubble big enough to encapsulate a baby would be a snap. Hell, you could probably do it just by accident if you doze off watching How It's Made on your next sick day (my favorite flu delirium sick day show). You'd wake up and wonder who draped you in a polyethylene drop cloth. Then you'd sheepishly realize it was just an ordinary flu-virus-sponsored spit bubble.

If you ask me, this lady is cheating by using the leprechaun pipe to assist. See the baby's hand about to make a grab for the bubble? Don't do it, little buddy. The viral cocktail in that bubble will make a "pox party" seem like child's play, and there's no mixture of coconut milk the Professor can make to defeat it.

Sidebar Ads - Can't break them up.

2011-11-18T12:55:00.001-06:00

Time's a little short today, but something is better than nothing... usually. This something is a vertical strip of black and white ads from a 1959 issue of LIFE. At first, I thought it was all one large ad, but they're four different ones - for Gum Turpentine, 3 in 1 Oil, Tums, and Carter's Glues. There's some great character art in the 3 in 1 and Carter's ads, and the Turpentine ad has art that could be an engraving, or an ink drawing imitating the look of an engraving. These ads look so good together, they deserve to be posted as a group.

After looking at the 3 in 1 ad, you may want to recall how horrible those kind of skates were. You know the ones: they had metal wheels and clamped onto your shoes. This was fine if you had the stiff leather kind from the forties, but if you had soft rubber sneakers, they threatened to slip off your foot, leaving you with sudden traction on one of your feet at nine miles per hour. Man, eff those things.

Have a good weekend!

Horse Ride - Fufner and Dorette

2011-11-17T06:29:00.001-06:00

Please forgive yesterday's lack-of-postiness. Go! Tower had to be vacated due to a fourth-floor toilet issue, and subsequent what-the hell-is-that-dripping-from-the-ceiling issues on the first through third floors. Those responsible have been referred to one of several volunteer recovery organizations and also a gift basket of Metamucil products.

Joke #1 - "Honey, you can't keep yanking on the reins like that, he's not a puppy, you know."

Joke #2 - Dorette, please stop yanking on the brakes so hard. I just had a new jaw put on this thing, and it cost a fortune."

Joke #3 - "Well, Fufnir, if you're going to keep spouting nonsense about how all numbers greater than five are the sum of two odd primes, I'll just turn this horse around and go home. Do you think I've never heard of Goldbach's Conjecture?"

Joke #4 - "No, darling. Pulling on the reins is how you make him stop. It's not how you do a wheelie. You're thinking of a bicycle."

Joke #5 - "Dorette, the sky is all mauve. When we left, it was pink. We'd better get back before the carmine comes."

Joke #6 - "Easy on the throttle, dear. You're going to stall him! His battery is low, and you don't want to know what it takes to jump start one of these things."

Joke #7 - "(Knock knock knock) Excuse me, miss? Do you know how fast you were going? License and fecal sample, please."

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

Ethyl - Really? Drain bamage?

2011-11-15T06:16:00.001-06:00

Look at these happy squares - Mister and Missus Dandy, out for an afternoon's shopping and general consumption. First stop, a new suit. Then, some sparklies for her, then a tank full of Ethyl, with delicious, smooth-running lead. Mmmmmm, yummy in my engine. Feeling antisocial?

I love ads like this. In 1941, nobody understood that lead caused brain damage, right? Well, not so right. The Wikipedia article on the subject is well-referenced and smells not a bit of fabrication. Tetraethyl (a lead-based fuel additive that's good for engines but not good for pretty much everything else), had been identified as a public health threat in 1924, after "refinery accidents left workers dying from violent insanity". Holy wow. Don't worry, the U.S. Public Health Service swooped in and convened a meeting (a year later) about the whole argy-bargy of lead toxicity. It lasted a day. Their conclusion was that lead did not pose an immediate threat, also there were no alternatives, even though private memos discussed ethanol as an alternative, although it was more expensive than lead. The U.S. Public Health Service concluded that the matter deserved further study and called for lunch. Thanks guys.

Here are some effects of lead poisoning:

-Lowered I.Q.
-High blood pressure
-Hearing problems
-Angry violent behavior
-Stunted growth

"Git 'r dumb!"

Leaded fuel was still used in Nascar as recently as 2008 when they switched to unleaded fuel. This explains the popularity of Larry the Cable Guy among Nascar loyalists and their acceptance of driving in a circle as "sport".

So who was the Ethyl company? General Motors trade marked the name Ethyl in 1924, because even then, "lead" was a dirty word and would make the product harder to market.

Everything's fine now, though. The EPA's phase-out of leaded fuels began just thirty years later, in 1972. But the process was interrupted when Ethyl Inc. sued the EPA. It took four years for the EPA to win the case and the actual phase-out began in 1976. A 1994 study showed that concentrations of lead in the blood of Americans had dropped by 78%.

Here's DuPont (makers of Styrofoam and Teflon) mentioning how awful lead is for your brain.

I'd probably be smarter if I hadn't gotten into Dungeons and Dragons when I was ten. The little miniature dudes we used for the game were still made of lead back then. Now I think they switched to some other metal. Sure I never breathed my miniatures, but I spent lots of time re-carving them to exactly match my character, to impress my big brothers. That may have had some kind of effect thingy on my brainular region or something. What, was I supposed to use a figure holding a longsword when my character sheet clearly stated he had a scimitar? Maybe you're the one with brain damage? Heh. Good one, Phil.

Nurse Dinka

2011-11-14T07:00:00.001-06:00

Joke #1 -"Heyllo, you are here for doktor? Please sign paper while I get doktor, tank you... Okay, doktor ready to see you now... Heyllo, I am doktor."

Joke #2 - "Aah, you are new patient? Very nice. Doktor is almost ready for treat you. Please sit. Won't be long now. Still a little sober."

Joke #3 - "Heyllo, you are ready for annual finger-in-bottom checkup? Right this way, tank you."

Joke #4 - "Heyllo, welkome to library. You want book? Oops, someone check out book already. Come back maybe tomorrow, tank you."

Joke #5 - "Yes, I be right wit you, one moment pleiz... Uuh, how to spell 'leprosy'?"

Joke #6 - "Heyllo, one moment please. Almost finish drawing pikture of escaped patient with perfectly normal missing-liver scar for police report. Will be right wit you."

Joke #7 - "Heyllo, welcome to Mister Fancy Super Moscow Hair Salon. You are ready for annual finger-in-bottom checkup? Right this way, tank you."

Joke #8 comes from veteran commenter Craigf. Thanks, Craigf! Take THAT, Dinka!- Good Mornink, wealthy Amerikan businessperson! I am Honest Ledvinka, Russian doktor of finger-in-bottom! We have many young Russian girl who can perform test! Ha ha ha!

You like Nadia, former Vladivostok Beet Harvest Queen, circa 1983! Nadia is build like brick house of shit, if you hear what I am joking! Ha ha ha!

Perhaps not liking Nadia? You like Vladlena! Vladlena first woman in Russian space program, also first woman to spend 12 years in Russian MIR space station! Wealthy American Kosmonaut drink Tang, Vladlena drink own urine. Vladlena capable of sucking cantaloupe through 50 feet of GAZPROM line, if you are hearing my saying! Ha ha ha!!

Joke #9 has been brought to you by the letter M, and by Anonymous. Thanks, Anonymous! - The last known photo of Dinka Yankinov, military volunteer for Russian "коричневая нота"
(Brown Note) Infrasonic Subwoofer Experiment.

Clad in her Krapenov "sack-suit" & notepad at the ready, the amplifier aimed directly at her mid-section for the 6.5 Hz wave.

Dinka spent her final months in a modified Chernienko Iron Colon. The test facility was subsequently deconstucted & buried in a limestone pit(c. 1954)
[Commenter jokes will be added to the post. -Mgmt.]

Japlac - What the duck?

2011-11-10T19:27:00.001-06:00

Purely by coincidence, today is Veterans day. This has nothing to do with the fact that the Snark Materials Acquisitions Team dropped this copy of Picture Post magazine on my desk and I flipped randomly to this ad for Japlac. Double-you tee, eff. Really?" "Japlac"?

This ad is from 1951, when, (you would think) there was still a bit of a sore spot in England when it came to Japan. Although, maybe Americans had more of a problem with the Japanese, due to the whole Pearl Harbor thing. England probably liked the Germans less than they did the Japanese. Still, double-you double-you eye-eye was only six years past when this ad ran. It's a bit of an eye-opener to see "jap-anything" sold commercially so soon after "the icky bit" between nations.

So, what's the deal with Japlac? Well, when you think about it, it makes some sense. The word "lac" can be traced back to an insect which was so numerous in India and China that is was given the name "lac", which was the root of the word "laksha", meaning "one hundred thousand". Lac bugs contained a resin that could be used to make the shiny painty stuff called "lacquer". Ta-da.

Lacquer is very glossy, and generally dries harder than other finishes, such as enamel. The lady in the ad had better have a window open - lacquer tends to smell a lot while it's wet.

In Asia, lacquer production became something of an art, and they were good at it as far back as 4500 B.C. So, while in '51, it was no longer made from squashed bugs, but polymers and petroleum just like everything else in the world, the name had already stuck. In people's minds, Asia is still The Shit when it comes to lacquer furniture and shiny black things. Remember the shiny black furniture in The Eighties that looked kind of Asian? That's the lacquer look. It's a shame that The Eighties had to go and rub it's stink all over an ancient and beautiful art style, but "tasteful restraint" was a dirty word in The Eighties.

Actually, it's kind of understandable to use the prefix "Jap" to sell your lacquer in 1951 England. But still, that font. Wow. Kind of racist. You can download MP3s of WWII news reports from about a hundred places on the web, and it's really bizarre to hear an otherwise professional reporter talk about "pushing back the Japs" in a battle on some island or other. That's kind of an indicator of how much Americans hated them. They didn't think anything of calling them "The Japs". You don't get that kind of slanted hate speech in the news now without resorting to Fox News... but then again, that's not real news, is it? Heh.

It's easy for us here in The Future can look back on the word "Japlac" and exchange awkward glances. But at the time, it worked. Yes, Japlac is still around, but they've changed their logo to something a little less "me so solly". Good job, there. I'm kind of surprised to see they're still using the name at all. But if you must keep the name, at least lose the Nixon In China font.

So what would be an equivalent product in the future? Something that turns out to be racist but seems fine now? Let's see. Who do we "sort of not like", as a nation? Someone we'd be surprised to find we're friends with in a few decades? "Tali-Ban Roll-On: Issue a fatwa against body odor!" Not really. That seems tacky even now. Gosh, peering into the future sure is hard.

Some other unfortunate household products from history that seemed like a good idea at the time:

-Philips' Milk of Rhodesia: Go like a Rhodesian!

-Kraut Kraut

-Babycham Lite - Now with much less baby!

-Irish Times Bathtub Whiskey - Everyone's a little Irish sometimes!

Graflex - Prize-winning picture.

2011-11-10T07:05:00.000-06:00

This ad for Graflex cameras wants you to take up a new hobby. Photography's great. Yes, back in 1948, even hobby-level photography probably meant developing your own pictures, which means you'd need a darkroom and some chemicals and, well, of course it's way simpler now that it's The Future. Duh. That's not news. What is news is the baffling picture they chose to feature in their ad.

"..for prize-winning pictures you need one of the PRIZE WINNING CAMERAS". Fair enough.. "Classical" photography places a barrier of entry in front of the hobby that I imagine eliminated anyone who wasn't pretty determined to be there. To work a camera, you had to understand what the hell you were doing to a degree that most "photographers" probably don't today. Technology has just made it super simple is all, and that's neither bad nor good, just different than before.

Yes yes, that's not insightful or anything, but beyond the mere challenge of getting a discernible image down on film, there's the challenge of taking a well-composed or interesting picture.

What the hell is this, then? I'm not the Pope of Photography, but I do know a couple things about composition and stuff. Here's a boy behind a screen door, placed dead center in the frame. Kind of makes you cry, right? There must have been a huge pile of photos to choose from. Why this one? It must be artistically important for some reason. Graflex was a camera company, after all. You'd think they would know their shinola about nice picture. Let's just trust that this is a prize-winning picture, or at least prize-worthy, and try to figure out why...

-One in a series of photographs of superchildren by Arnold Pearson. Here, Lightning Rodney is photographed inside his Faraday cage, the only safe way he can interact with his family. Poor Lightning Rodney. So lonely, So positively charged.

-The boy has hidden behind the door, hoping to surprise his mother when she comes in carrying the groceries, including a carton of Faberge' eggs. The photo is significant because it captures the adorable stupidity of childhood: The boy doesn't realize that the eggs represent not only a significant achievement in the jeweler's art but also the investment of his parents' life savings. His little joke may result in the ruination of the carton of eggs, and his family's future. Also, he's hiding behind a screen door.

-The picture portrays mankind's necessary ties to nature, despite all our pretensions of sophistication. The boy has finished doing his business out in the yard and is ready to come back in and finish writing his sonnet "My Mother, My Apoplexy".

Pope John XXIII - Putting the "man" back in EcuMANical Council.

2011-11-08T07:06:00.000-06:00

Joke #1 - In 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the historic Ecumenical Council to address allegations of hypocrisy as regards to their collective vow of poverty. It was decided that their giant marble statues' hats should merely be made of bronze, as opposed to the more traditional gold.

Joke #2 - "Good news gentlemen. The passage in Judges 15:7 '... and after that I will cease.' was mistakenly mistranslated from the original Hebrew. The correct translation should be '...and oft times were the male children decietful, crying out for cecassion, when their hearts truly desired for more, and it was good.'"

Joke #3 - "Well I can't tell if he's fallen asleep either! Go on and poke him. Scared? What, are you gonna PRAY him awake?"

Joke #4 - Seemingly assaulted from all sides by the sexual revolution and social decadence, Pope John XXIII, in a little known ceremony in 1962, begins to summon the Kraken from the watery floor of St. Peter's Basilica.

Joke #5 - "I can't belieeve how good thees carrpet is! Soo many wine stains. So many siiins! All wiped up weeth a damp cloth! Eet looks as goood as new! Truly thees ees a miiiiracle! Praise bee to Vatican Carrpets, Inc."

Joke #6 comes from Anonymous. Thanks, Anonymous! - "It was the annual "Men's Red Gown Gala" and Bill's mom had sent him in the brown gown. As he sat in the front row, he wondered "Who would EVER ask him to dance?"

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

1963 Pontiac Bonneville - Panoramic purdy.

2011-11-07T07:41:00.000-06:00

Today we bring you an especially high-resolution two-page ad for a 1963 Pontiac Bonneville. It had the crotch of the magazine running right through the middle of the car, and while I usually don't take the time to paint those out, I did today.

Today's picture has been lovingly scanned and presented to you on the finest acid-free archival-quality jpeg. Pixel dimensions are 3000 x 1984 - two very good years for video games, I might add. Compression is set to 9, so it won't look too crunchy when you have it printed on your children (I don't want you to regret your decision).

The magazine fold also went straight through the "BONNEVILLE" badge on the grille, which was unfortunate. It had to be P-shopped a bit to make it presentable. That was an interesting challenge, so that little adventure is demonstrated below. First, it was a matter of first fixing the horizontal lines in the grille with the clone tool. Then, I had to build a "B" out of some "O" parts. Then, I noticed some ghosting in the horizontal lines from when the sections of the image were pieced together (The P.A.G. Okidata AdequateScan 620 won't fit a whole copy of Collier's all at once. It has to be done in sections and knitted together). So, those should have been fixed first but there were done last.

While not perfect, the badge looks decent enough at final resolution. This is the benefit of scanning at silly high resolution and fixing it at that stage before dropping the resolution down to final size. It helps to hide your tracks.

Wype - Paint your car like a lazy dope.

2011-11-04T09:53:00.004-05:00

Today, we have a chapter from our country's rich history of sexism in advertising.Good thing it's for a product conceived by a dumbass. Wype auto enamel wants you to paint your car with a rag. "Anyone can do beautiful job" ... even a woman!

I feel obligated to wonder how this product could possibly have worked. But, since we live here in The Future, our advanced perspective generally shows us that, if Wype actually worked, it probably would have survived the test of time. Yes, there are good products that fail, but the obvious stupidity of this product coupled with Wype's historical obscurity makes a pretty strong case in favor of the possibility that Wype Corp went under. So sad. (Not really).

This is one of those ads that looks like twenty smaller ads. The Images and Scanning Them technician had to crop carefully. It was hard to tell where the ad ended. Turns out, it's at the edge of the page. Clearly, Wype didn't feel like paying for professional design.

Honestly, you could spend half an hour reading the ad. In every little box or cloud shape the copy seems to start over: "At last! Practically anyone can now paint his car with WYPE!" Then halfway through the page..."WYPE is a new Miracle Enamel for Autos." A little later... "Start making BIG money now! Sell WYPE in cans or...." A little deductive reasoning tells us that these are all drafts of the same ad. When Wype Corp found that, by not hiring a designer, they could save enough money to buy a full page ad, all the rough drafts became "the ad".

How could Wype possibly have worked? Well, it could have possibly worked like shit, which could possibly be why nobody tries to paint their car with a rag any more... I mean with a powder puff. I really reeeeally want to find pictures of sample Wyped cars on the web, but there doesn't seem to be anything, just pictures of the can. Most of the other Google hits seem to be from people who don't know how to spell "wipe". Thank you, Marketing Industry, for intentionally misspelling words in product names for decades, helping America with the Institutionalization of Ignorance project.

Look for these other intentionally misspelled (and highly trade-markable) words in your local market today!

Krazy, Nite, Sooper, Tuff, Ruff, Nukular (Hat tip to George W. Bush!), Cheez, Beaf, Chik'n, Froot, Ched'r, Flipz (and, really, any substitution of the letter "Z" in place of "S"), Leprosee, Fixin's, Gluttiny, Regurg-i-tayt, Ignurance

But, be sure to tell your kids that it's okay to be in idiot, as long as you're in marketing. They'll thank you later.

Knob Fondler.

2011-11-03T07:25:00.001-05:00

Joke #1 - August 1948. The U.S. Air Force begins testing of tactical hors d'oeuvres in the fight against the red Menace. Previously, military-grade canapes and ballistic aperitifs met with initial success, but were found lacking in the face of the Russian "tapas threat". This was the American military's last-ditch effort in the most delicious, but not too filling, stage of the cold war.

Joke #2 - August 1985. As widespread pig-killing becomes an ever-greater problem, The U.S. Air Force adopts the "bust a deal and face the wheel" method of court-martial.

Joke #3 - August 1978. The U.S. Air Force's Dungeons and Dragons team begins testing the new MG-1A flight glove for "dice recognition and sensitivity".

Joke #4 - The U.S. Air Force's training of blind pilots was made faster and more thorough with the advent of the "feely wheel". Fatalities due to"Catastrophic Knob Mis-identification" plummeted.

Joke #5 - Tailhook, 1990. A U.S. Naval officer relaxes in a side room , practicing with the "grope-go-round".

Joke #6 comes from Mr/Mrs Anonymous. Thanks, mystery joker! - Mabel started having second thoughts about sending Johnny to military school and the effects it might be having on his OCD after observing the results of asking him to arrange the crudite platter for Thanksgiving dinner.

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

Multifilter - Stinking up the great outdoors.

2011-11-02T07:06:00.000-05:00

"Aaaah. Smell that? That's Nature. That's why I became a tobaccoman. I love the outdoors and fresh, clean air. Y' know, spending all day out in nature like this makes a man a man. And, a man leads with his groin. Let me explain."

"Out here in Nature, a man's got room to spread out. Air out the crotchular region, you know? My junk can't live in a cage like some 'modern men'. Nope. Not me. Not my junk. See this here tobacco corral? I built it with my own two hands. I spent weeks squatting, sawing, re-squatting, hammering, and squatting. Now I can hitch my leg up on it anywhere I want and spread out my thighs, showing the world what God gave me. Lets me kinda... open my legs and think clearer, ya know? Feels like I'm hugging the world with my upper thighs and lower abdomen."

"Multifilter understands. Y'see, when I'm drivin' a herd of tobacco, I don't want my flavor all mucked up with tar. Nope. Not me. I need that stuff filtered out, and nothing but acetate fibers will do. And Multifilter only uses the finest acetate fibers, grown right here in the U S of A, harvested at the peak of freshness. Those dew-picked acetate fibers make Multifilters multi-filtered. It's like inhaling the wind, and you can't get that any other way, and that's a promise. It's like a fresh summer breeze blowing between, around, and through my various portions down below."

"Maybe when you're ready, you'll spread your manly thighs and hitch a leg up on my fence? Come breathe with me. I'll be here, swingin' in the breeze, with Multifilter."

Stinkin' up the Great Outdoors.

Three groovy offers - Thanks, The Seventies!

2011-11-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

Our drunken idiot friend The Seventies is back with some wonderful consumer products for us. Thanks The Seventies, for always being both tasteful and well-reasoned! Let's see what you have for us today!

Hey, it's the driveway flame thrower! I remember that from our last post about it. The price has gone up a bit, which is odd, because both ads are from 1971. However, this ad is in color. Models in Abba boots don't work for free you know. The other ad just has a line drawing, and everyone knows artists will work for free if you promise not to shove them into a locker.

I have to admit, I'd like to have one of these flame throwers to keep the P.A.G. plaza clear in winter. I'm sure they're illegal now, right? Google doesn't show any current availability of such an item except for this British Ebay posting. The "buy it now" price is 144 L's, whatever those are.

To show us how easy and possibly safe it is, they show us that pretty Greta can use it while wearing a skirt. Here, she's melting some pesky gravel in her photo studio. "I don't know who keeps bringing it in here and arranging it in a neat path!" she sighs. No matter. Just melt it into liquid hot mag-ma! We in The Future can't have it. The Seventies is such a tease!

The Seventies knows fashion! In 1971, Hush Puppies were the shit. See? An ordinary middle aged sex worker can afford one in each color. The brown suede ones- he has the left AND the right one. That's some life you've got there, Prosperous Male Prostitute (or Steve Carell's dad).

Last night he wore the patriotic bowling shoe to play squash with a client. Delightfully scandalous! The Seventies knows how to show a lady a good time!

Wow! such sexy language to sell a vinyl envelope of mineral oil and metal dust. If I had one of these, I'd spend hours staring into the depths of it's "exotic red material", waiting for it to stop being so blue. You know what? The blue is in your mind, man! The Seventies knows how to tune in and drop out.

Thanks, The Seventies! Time for your nap.

Holga, Diana, CCTV - Cheesy lens test.

2011-10-31T07:48:00.002-05:00

Today, we have a special feature from the P.A.G. Photo-graphy team. We bought three intentionally crappy lenses for an Olympus Pen E-P3 to show you the different results from each. I spent literally minutes searching the web and couldn't find a side-by-side comparison of three low-fidelity lenses. If it doesn't show up on the first three pages of a carefully-worded Google search, it doesn't exist, baby. So, let's fill that void.

What kind of lenses? For those who don't know but are interested, what follows is a brief summary. For those who don't know or care, come back tomorrow, when we'll probably say some mean things about a defenseless old picture.

If you have an iPhone or Android smarty-pants phone, you've probably heard of or downloaded a program called Hipstamatic (iPhone) or Vignette (Android). These are camera apps that simulate the look of old obsolete cameras in your nice, modern, advanced phone camera. In the same way that some people like the crackle of vinyl, lots of people like the old faded look of Polaroid photos or the light leaks, streaks, and blurs of a Holga or Diana camera.

The Holga was an inexpensive plastic camera produced in China in the Eighties. Even the lens was plastic. It leaked light onto the film and build quality was questionable. This all contributed to the randomness of the photographic results. You can still buy Holgas at hipster stores like Urban Outfitters, but it'll be a film camera. You still have the cost of buying and developing film, and of course you can't see how your photos turn out until you spend the money to have them developed.

The Diana was also an inexpensive plastic-bodied, plastic-lensed camera made in Hong Kong in the Sixties. Pictures taken with the Diana were similarly wonky and unpredictable as with the Holga.

Both of these cameras have been enjoying a kind of renaissance in the last few years, in addition to their softwarey dopplegangers for various camera phones.

Well, you can also just buy their lenses and stick them onto your digital camera. This is what I did. In addition to the Holga and Diana lens, I bought Photojojo's "Lo-fi" lens. So what are the differences? Well, the Holga and Diana lenses can be bought for about $20 - $30 on Amazon (which is where mine came from) and Ebay, plus maybe fifteen dollars for an adapter which I needed to get the Diana lens onto my Micro four-thirds camera. If you really want to, you can buy the same Diana lens from Photojojo for sixty dollars, if that's what you're into. In exchange for simply dtriple the price, you do get their cutesy "Yay! Your goodies have shipped" emails. The Photojojo "Lo-fi" lens costs $90, and is clearly marked as a CCTV (closed-circuit television / security camera) lens with a specially made adapter for your camera. Turns out you can get the exact same lens for $30 on Ebay. It even comes with a micro four thirds adapter to pop right on a non-CCTV camera. Of course, Photojojo does not mention that the lens has the words "TV Lens" inked right on it, or that the box it comes in also obviously designates it as a repurposed security camera lens. If a customer knew that, a customer might go and look elsewhere for the exact same product at one-third the price. "Yay! I'm a sucker! Wheeee!"

Left: Ebay, $34.99 Right: Pjotojojo: $90, plus shipping. Wow.

"I'm worth every penny, Tee-hee!"

Lesson learned: see something nice on PJJ? Check Ebay before ordering, unless you find it's worth a 200%-300% premium to have things sold to you by a company that talks like an Anime schoolgirl. "Aw, shucks! We lost your business!"

The Diana and Holga lenses are totally plastic and are very light. They feel as flimsy and junky as you'd expect, but that's what you sign up for when you buy these. They each have a focus ring.

The CCTV PJJ lens is all metal, is much heavier, and even has a little iris in it, which you can adjust via a ring on the lens. There is also a focus ring. Note that the aperture created by the iris is not exactly round. Again, build quality is not what you should be hoping for when you buy things like this. You want some wonkiness in your retro pictures. This lens is pretty cool. I just wish I'd done more homework before I ordered.

Anyway, here are some sample pictures. Generally, the Holga requires much more light, due to the tiny pinhole aperture on the back. Pictures have a lot of vignetting (dark edges). The Diana has the "dreamy" look everyone talks about, due to the soft-focus quality of the cheap plastic lens. Pictures are brighter than the Holga. Also, the Diana is more likely to have random light blurs coming in from the side of the frame, as in the bird picture below. The Photojojo lens is the most adjustable, thanks to the built-in iris. Pictures tend to have lots of concentric smearing at the edges, like you see in the tree picture.

Kooking Kornir - Loaf meat.

2011-10-28T07:13:00.000-05:00

Hey eaters! Of course you grew up eating your Mom's meat loaf. It's an old fashioned favorite, right? You betcha! Well, it's time for Mom to learn a thing or two about loafing up meats. This is 1971, so there had better be room in her recipe book for a modern take on good old meat loaf. We're going to "sock it to her" with our Loaf Meat! Yeah!

To start, you'll need a loaf of Italian bread 16 inches long by 10 inches wide. Remove the lid and scoop out the center (or "bread guts"), after first making a lid by slicing off the top of the bread.

The bread guts are not meat in any way, and therefore nutritionally irrelevant. So, out it goes. Throw it in the trash or set it on fire at your leisure. Now, back to meat!

Mix four pounds of ground beef and four eggs in your best beef mixing bowl. Also, some onion or whatever. When mixed, stop mixing. Pour the beef into the bread shell to a depth of two inches, then include six wieners on top of this beef base strata. Also, include a few pickles or small fish (The picture isn't very clear, but play it safe and put in both!). Resume the beef mix inclusion until the beef is completely included in the bread shell.

Replace the bread lid, cover with high quality beef foil and bake at 375 degrees for two hours in your favorite beef oven. The beef will shrink in size as it cooks itself. This extra space will be taken up by the flavor juices that renders out of the beef. It may form pockets in the boundary layer around the wieners and pickles or fish things. This is normal and desirable.

If you scooped out your bread guts properly, leaving the bread shell just the right thickness, the flavor juices will seep through the bread right up to the durable Italian crust without dripping out. Did it stay in? Hooray! Did it drip out? Well, just remember that water only makes grease fires worse.

Just wait 'till your family puts a fork in this Loaf Meat! They'll think it's an ordinary bread roast. Then they'll be all "Whoa! Beef!". Then they'll go "Hey! Wieners!" and "Pickles or some small fish I'm not sure! Wow!" and then they'll find the flavor juices and go all "Flavor juice pockets! Slurp!" Mom's meat loaf might as well admit defeat. Mom has surely had it socked to her by this! Loaf Meat's socking-it-to-mom abilities will surely go undoubted! Opa!

Superzapping in Computer Land - The ride of the "Dalton Gang".

2011-10-27T08:01:00.001-05:00

This article comes to us from the January 12, 1981 issue of Time. (Actually, "TIME" always spells their name in all caps, so I guess they want you to shout it whenever you say it.) The article covers the antics of four thirteen-year-old boys and their proto-hacking adventure.

Since this is 1981, and most people only understand computers as crazy things that huge companies have, the author (Frederic Golden) takes on the task of teaching some new words to TIME's audience. This is always hilarious. It's unclear whether Golden himself had heard the new terms only recently, but it's easy to imagine him using quotation fingers around strange new words like "access"... hopefully just for the benefit of the readers.

New "jargon" taught to TIME's readers in this article:

"accessed"

"seized control"

"bits"

"garbage"

The four hackers in the article were all students at a New York private school called Dalton School, and they had hacked into Datapac's (an ISP) system. This, of course, was a softball opportunity for TIME to call them The Dalton Gang. I'm sure there were high fives all round the office at TIME when they thought that one up. Sadly, The P.A.G. Research and Googling team was unable to find any updates about who the kids were or what they've been up to since then. Since they were only thirteen, their names weren't mentioned in the article and records of this crime are probably sealed or whatever. Incidentally, the amount of data the hackers destroyed: 10 million bits. That's 1.25 megabytes. It would fit on a floppy disk. That's adorable! Like a kid who had his lollipop stolen. Better still, that 1.25 Mb was one fifth of Datapac's computer's total storage capacity. So, a 1981 ISP's computer had 6.25 megs of storage. BAH hah hah, snort! Hang on. Let me go get some coffee so I can properly laugh it out my nose.

In '81, high-profile computer crime was still a curiosity. Back then, Kevin Mitnick was just getting warmed up and even the FBI didn't know his name yet. Sure, it had been about ten years since John Draper had started his career by phone phreaking and by '81, he was already developing software for the Appe II. However, computer security was still a kooky sci-fi idea to most people. How kooky?

Jeez oh man. "Some" users are resorting to coding devices and "changing passwords". "What has the world come to?" they must have thought. I'm sure that, back in 1778 when the first tumbler lock was designed, people hung their heads in disappointment. What a sad day it must have been for people to realize that if you leave your front door closed with a nice heavy chair leaning against it, somebody might just find their way in and mosey out with your harpsichord under his arm.

I try to be in favor of any effort to remove money from dumb people. Still, the naivete of 1981 is maddening. That must be how most of the world looks from the perspective of guys like Anonymous.

The illustrations are by Kimble Mead. The name sounds familiar, like I should know who that is.

A Google search page on the name is pretty much a bunch of art-related sites all stumbling over each other to proudly announce they've never heard of him. Nice work, Google. Here's a book he's illustrated on Amazon. Aah yes. That's him. Still beating the dead horse of bulbous, post-Yellow-Submarine Peter Maxism after all these years.

For further reading on early hacking, I recommend watching some TV. This wonderful documentary on Discovery Channel is... well, wonderful. Surprisingly, Discovery will let you watch the whole damn thing online via that link. It tells the story of Draper and Mitnick and pals with interviews and not-too-annoying reenactments. It also tells the story of the blind kid in the 60s who could whistle the control tones into his telephone to "seize control" (heh) of the phone system. Careful though, Discovery may try to sell you a DVD or something. I carry this doc around in my phone because I love it so much. I watch it a few times a year, because it's interesting to see how things get started.

Maaaaybe somewhere in the future, someone is reading this very post on an archived compilation of the entire internet stored on a 75,000,000 petabyte nano-USB stick while they're riding the hoverbus to their job at the space cafe? I wonder what we're starting... right... now? WooooooooooOOOOOooooo!

Homko Lawnmobile - Doing lawn donuts.

2011-10-26T07:13:00.001-05:00

I never heard of Homko. It looks as though they're out of business, or they were bought out by Beatrice Foods or something and rolled into their Spreads and Condiments division and outsourced to Thailand. But look how happy this dad is on his luxurious lawnmower in this 1959 ad.

Homko is dead set on convincing us that this mower is like a car. Well, it's got four wheels and a motor, I guess. Well spotted, there.

I this journalist's opinion, one of the laziest names one can give a company is "something-co". A -co name proclaims to the world your lack of imagination. Best name for a company is the family name of the person who started it up. Soichiro Honda. Henry Ford. Charles Virgin Atlantic.

At the other end of the spectrum are the shittiest overdesigned names dreamed up by "naming companies". I'm not kidding. When a large company with more money than they know what to do with changes it's name due to horrible customer service, or just comes up with a new product, they sometimes hand over millions of dollars to a third party company who invents a stupid name for them. Often, these names sound like they were made up by the same douchebags that name paint colors (gentle harvest, sunset mallomar). Sometimes, they try to sound like a word or emotion that they would like you to associate with the product, but actually has nothing to do with it. Celebrex is an arthritis medication. Abilify is the market name for Aripiprazole, an anti-depressant. Xfinity is the new name Comcast came up with after they appeared on The Consumerist's most-hated company lists too often. Altria used to be Philip Morris, until one too many massive cancer settlements put a certain stink on the company image.

I have to remember that. When the feds come knocking on the door, demanding to know whether I paid any taxes on those illegally imported ostriches, I'll just tell them "Phil's not here any more. Meet Innocentstopher Jones! How are you guys?" Problem solved. Scott free. Hey wait! Scott Free is an even better name than Innocenstopher Jones. Gotta make a note to have an intern go back and change that for me.

Anyway, this "special needs" mower guy in the picture is looking mighty free and festive. Ah, The Fifties. Back then, you could look super happy, wearing highwater chinos and no one would assume you're a high-functioning assisted living patient. People would just think things were going your way, like this mower guy. "Look at me honey! I'm driving! Ha-ha!". "Yes, dear, I see you."

Actually, with his super-long shifter (or blade height adjuster maybe), he sort of looks like Rat Fink, the cartoon rat who, I'm sure, this nerd never heard of. Also, Rat Fink wouldn't really appear in pop culture until 1963. Even after '63, I'll bet the lawnmower man, here, never moved in any of the same circles as Rat Fink types. But Lawrence Welk... definitely.

Domestic Drama - Two vignettes.

2011-10-25T06:53:00.002-05:00

Joke #1 - "Oh Iris, you're ever so lovely tonight. The opera is going to be positively grand. How could I stay mad about your little accident on the floor?"

Joke #2 - Grant swept Iris into his arms, and the moonlight sparkled in her eyes. It would be so easy to simply kiss her. But no. They must wait until marriage. He shuddered, and regained his composure. That had been close. The milk had, as always, gone straight to his head.

Joke #3 - The light was just right. Grant's eyes were luminous beacons of desire. Iris' hair shone like liquid silk. Passion would rule them this evening. It was lucky they had gotten ready for bed early.

Joke #4 - Iris stared into grant's eyes. She saw her wishes mirrored there. The swell of his breathing was an insistent drumbeat against her chest. They were swept away in a tide of passion that drew their hearts together. Grant was lactose intolerant, so they had about ten minutes before the milk took effect. Tonight, it would be enough. It had to.

Joke #1 - "I know it'd hard dear, but you knew it would be when you married me. We can push the beds together after we've been married for a year. You don't want to make a mockery of my faith, do you?"

Joke #2 - "Patricia, won't you please lie down to sleep? We both saw Paranormal Activity. You're starting to creep me out."

Joke #3 - "I'm sorry, dear. I do like your new tramp stamp. It's just that I've never found Family Circus very funny."

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

Ironized yeast Tablets - So there used to be a "too skinny" problem?

2011-10-24T07:51:00.002-05:00

In 1938, the Great depression was still stinking up the joint, financially speaking, and lots of people didn't have enough to eat. Enter Ironized yeast Tablets to help plump up our women!

When people are undernourished, they are prone to Anemia, due to vitamin deficiency, like iron, and vitamin B-12. Symptoms include fatigue, and moanings of "Ow! Such anemia I have! Harken to my plea! My kingdom for iron!" People talked like that in the thirties, right?

So, yeast helps you gain weight and Vitamin B increases appetite. Got it. Why don't we see many ads like this now? Well, number one, though times are tough, it ain't the Great Depression. Number two, with the advent of fast food in the fifties, cheap, calorie-rich foods can be found within a few feet of every television set (fact exaggerated for your enjoyment), so most people can fill their belly, but with shitty food prepared by people who hate their jobs. So, fatness is a problem now.

Also, vitamin deficiencies are much less common than they were in 1938, due to the fortification of many foods. This means that manufacturers try to sneak a few extra nutrients into stuff we eat every day, like flour and rice, which is handy. Odds are, you get plenty of every vitamin from the food you eat. Here is an excellent article from Colorado State University explaining popular myths about vitamins such as "you should take them". There is no evidence that taking vitamins has any effect on health at all, unless your suffering from a few specific conditions. More and more, it is looking as though vitamins are much more effective when they are eaten in food and not when they are crammed into a pill.

Also, dosing yourself with vitamins can cause loads of health problems if you take too much.

The "dietary supplement" industry is not regulated the same as actual food and medicine. The rules are much more lax. Here's a good bit from the link (from the FDA) in the previous sentence:

"Generally, manufacturers do not need to register their products with FDA nor get FDA approval before producing or selling dietary supplements"

As it stands right now, you can practically sell bullets with leprosy sprinkles, and so long as you label it as a "dietary supplement", you have no obligation to prove it actually does anything - just so long as it's safe when used as directed. In the case of the leprosy bullets, you'd be within the limits of the dietary supplement laws as long as the directions on your package clearly state that you are to bury them in a cube of concrete several hundred feet underground and not to eat them or remove them from the package. (Hazmat suit sold separately).

Anyway, both of the women in this picture look okay to me. Sure, the one on the left looks grumpy and has bad posture, but that's just how marketing works. The woman on the right could be a right arm amputee, but so long as she's smiling and arching her back, emphasizing her hourglass figure, she'd be the obvious "you want to look like her" picture. The girl on the left would look great too if she were posed flatteringly and didn't look like she's doing her taxes in her head.

This ad has a nice Disembodied Floating Head. He's supposed to be convincing and trustworthy... you know, like a doctor, but they don't even give him a name or say who he's supposed to be. He's just a head, staring at us, telling us we're too skinny. He looks kind of lascivious, like he's the creepy old perv whose job it is to ogle the women at Ionized Yeast HQ and tell them whether they look good or not. I bet he thinks they're all positively yummy.

Apparently, Ionized yeast assumes we're eating plenty of carrots and our eyesight is great. The type size drops down a size halfway through the ad, like they paid for a 1/4 page strip ad but really wanted to squeeze in the part about gaining "normally attractive pounds". He's watching your attractive pounds right now. Better fatten up, twiggy.

Winter Window - Trinny, Rufert, and Mummy.

2011-10-21T07:22:00.002-05:00

Joke #1 - "Yes, Rufert, you can go make a snowman, but be sure to close the door, or you'll let all the red out."

Joke #2 - "Oh! Children, it looks like a small spacecraft has landed in the yard. Go and tell them we don't want any anal probing today."

Joke #3 - "Yes, you can go make a snowman, but be sure to take some spot color with you. It looks awfully halftone out there."

Joke #4 - "Oh great. Winter in June. I'll bet the sea has turned to blood, too. Now that glowy guy with the beard is going to be marching around like he owns the place."

Joke #5 - "No, Rufert, you can't go out and play 'till I'm done knitting you a new sled."

Joke #6 - "No, Rufert. It's still winter, so you're still grounded."

Joke #7 - "Oh! It looks like the trees are done out there. Trinny, be a dear and let them back in, would you?"

Joke #8 - "Oh! Children it looks like a small spacecraft has landed in the yard. Go and tell them it's Sunday, so we've already had our anal probing for the week."

Joke #9 - "Oh, for the love of.... *sigh*. It looks like a hack illustrator has come by in the night. Kids, do go out and clean those damn diagonal 'shiny lines' off the window, would you? Honest to Pete, some people can't draw anything at all without explicit photo reference."

Joke #10 - "Yes, you may go out and play in the snow, but be sure to wear your stovepipe hats and extra long scarves. It looks awfully Currier and Ives out today."

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

Now is the future of today! - Inventions required for complete living.

2011-10-20T07:16:00.000-05:00

Mechanical hunter is powered by one-cylinder motor, concealed by hanging over shoulder of automaton. Runs on hunter fuel. Allows hunting the scwewiest of wabbits by wemote contwol. Acme corp.

Car window locks prevent child from escaping vehicle. Simple mechanism operable from front seat. Tested in Lockheed Constellation airliner. Probably works in cars too. May be ineffective for children over age of 6 mos., or older children with slightest mechanical aptitude, chimpanzees, parrots, or vaguely clever crows.

Taping shopping list to purse eliminates need for pocket, pointing hand at face. May result in strangers discovering dependency on embarrassing products. Not for use with purse grease.

Child's cryptex trains young minds to solve theological conspiracies and to appear in two novels of nearly identical plot, theme, and characters. Easily made from discarded spool and cardboard. May be instantly boring to children over age of five, or crows.

Stove guard prevents child from cooking, surprising parents with ill-advised meals like spaghetti and gumballs, figs benedict, and lobster thermidor.

Kellogg's Pep - Rhymes with "hep".

2011-10-19T07:42:00.001-05:00

Every decision made in advertising is carefully considered, analyzed, focus-tested, ground into fine powder, tasted, reformulated, voted on, and finally presented to the disinterested public with the sincere enthusiasm of a municipal zoning hearing. We can only assume that it has always been so. Spontaneity and the vigor of genius are not only rare in the commercial world, but they are hated, all while paying lip service to the idea of celebrating the same. Trying to appeal to a young demographic has always been tricky. The Youth are cynical and mistrustful of The Man. Fortunately, there's always been the easy fall-back of tossing some slang around to show The Kids you're down with them. Problem solved!

Breakfast cereal has always been focused on the youth market. In this ad, Kellogg's is trying to win over the tricky and skeptical teenager. Glasses Nerd Jim lacks the energy to dance with Jill, and instead of dumping Jim for bringing her to a dance and just slouching around, Jill buys him a box of Pep cereal. That's very big of her. She could have easily smashed him in the gems with a folding chair.

Everyone knows that glasses mean either "smart" or "dork". Interestingly, here we see them used as both. In Jim's case, they mean he's a wiener. But on his sister "Sis", it means she's smart. Advertising has learned that this is discriminatory, and now glasses can only mean you're smart, or that you just need glasses. Now, if advertisers need someone to be a bonehead in a commercial, they just reach for the ever-dopey Man to learn the error of his ways thanks to his wife, with the help of Product, of course!

As we have learned in the past, putting something in quotes is The Past's way of indicating that something is exciting and new. The Past is such a square. Anyway, here's the hottest slang of 1941 as demonstrated by this ad, explained for you denizens of The Future:

"got the mopes" - This means you're infected with Communism, and are banned from dancing, since it doesn't help The State. Also, erectile dysfunction.

"my eye" - An old Italian phrase meaning "I'll give her the evil eye, and her turnip crops will all be eaten by goblins, and she will live in the wilderness like a jackal." The Evil eye can be warded off by strategic use of The Corna, as made famous by Ronnie James Dio. Hopefully, Jill knows The Corna move.

"hot-head" - Someone who suffers from encephalitis, a brain fever that was common in the deprived swamps of wartime middle America. To be called a hothead was to be called a person of low class or of sub-average intelligence having poor decision making skills and poor memory. Encephalitis has also been tied to herpes simplex, making this an especially bad thing to hear from your girlfriend.

"of all the crust" - Identical to "of all the nerve". No longer in use. My mom didn't even know this one. Can also be used to imply the presence of herpes simplex. It's really not looking too good for Jim.

A collection of free things one could have hoped to find in a box of Pep.

Pep TV commercial, in which a guy picks up his date in wat is clearly a WWII era jeep, for some reason.

Another Pep commercial mentioning "that marvelous malty pep flavor." Yes, "malty".

UPDATE: I've just found "crust" in my slang dictionary, and the definietion is a bit roundabout, but it goes like this: 1."The head". From ca. 1870. Upper crust. Hence, off (one's) crust, crazy, or insane. 2. 20th century colloquial "impudence", "cheek": since early 1920s.

Jaan Pehechan Ho - Choreography complete!

2011-10-18T07:22:00.000-05:00

Phil Are Go! sadly announces today that the world will no longer be requiring the services of all choreographers throughout the world. Much like a book that reaches a dizzying, flawless climax, dancing is now complete. We can close the book and move on to something else. We're really sorry, choreographers. We know you work really hard. It's just that we don't need to think up any more dances, so maybe now you can devote your energy to landing a spot on almost any reality series on Bravo. Thanks, we'll see you later.

You see, dancing achieved perfection in the 1966 Indian film Gumnaam. The song, performed by Mohammed Rafi, may sound familiar, as it's currently featured in a Heineken commercial called "The Date". It was also used in the 2001 film, Ghost World. The name of the song is Jaan Pehechaan Ho", and is brilliant. You can buy it from iTunes or Amazon.

Henceforth, throughout all of human existence, let there be no dance performed other than the crazypants dance of Jaan Pehechaan Ho. Weddings, funerals, board meetings. Whenever any person dances from now till the end of time, it must be this. Sorry about this, but I think you'll agree it's for the best.

Also, if all bands from now on could wear black suits and bandit masks that would help out a lot.

In case you don't speak Hindi, the P.A.G. Localization team has translated the lyrics into English, and can be read along below the embedded video. Please enjoy.

Jaan Pehechaan Ho lyrics - English translation:

Vomit like a dino.
Gina has unroll.
John pick up Don Ho.
Genius, uh, no.

Dino cut your rally want a a hog natural.
Now, I'm soak a tie, duuuuh.

Don pack a sand roll. Huh huh.
Gina has one throw.
John has a bun roll.
Gina has one bow.

Jean, at your Huckleberry rock, match your aisle.
Non-sofa timer.

Jan pack up Yarnell.
Dina rouse Don Ho.

Oh, I think I found ya
You're my silly guy.
I'm seeing Tom, though, and you're a jelly tray.
We're a standard pie pig. A kissy camp will lie.
We'll stand to buy a fig and Sissy's tramp will die.
Willy candle lighting a fizzy dandelion, yeaaaaaaah.

Yeah, woo woo.

Join the telethon-o.
Cheetah Arizona.
Don's alpaca sunroof.
Greener mouse gun throw.

Seen a rack of belly samples, mommy pack a goat.
Now I soap up rhino-o.
Firecracker dino.
Bean of our son-oh.

Where I get a bowl of 'em?
Hope it is shiny.
Bowler get a whole room.
The hukka is shoddy.
Sitter sitter, talk to Huey. Did you took a lolly?
Zippy zippy Rapa Nui. Witty Fittipaldi.
City zitty daughter hooey. Did you book her mommy? Aaaaah!

Huh, huh, huh.

Swingin' like Jongo.
Sheen of ice on hole.
Don's Mantalban-oh.
Be a paisano.

Be a cultured Wally-whacker walk natural.
Dolls fold a tire.
Juan's at McDonald's.
Seen a fire's gun hole.

Oh, super-duper dapper dukcy.
Very messy money.
Soup or goop of lamb or turkey.
This is very funny.
Then I think about the fungi and a honey.
Then I see about the one guy who broke a bunny.
Then a zebra bought the binary Maserati.

Yeah. Whoa, ooh ah.

Found my lack of vinyl.
Gina eyes are none.
John pecker try now.
Gina likes Bono.
Vito, patch a rally, knock a rug, notch a rail.
Now I'm super fly.
Sean Penn if I know.
Jean Nate's son know.

Yeah.

Babst Blue Ribbon - Energy drinking.

2011-10-17T07:42:00.001-05:00

In 1986, Pabst Blue Ribbon was an unhip brand of beer, and had been for some time. That's when Blue Velvet was released: a movie in which a crazy old man played by Dennis Hopper shouted his preference for PBR to a freaked out Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan). That may be all you know or want to know about Pabst. This ad from 1941 tells us the tale of two reg'lar guys who seek the seclusion of the wilderness to discover the secrets of PBR's flavor and in the process, learn something about themselves.

Pabst Brewing brags that their beer is blended 33 to 1 "like the finest coffee and champagne". As far as an explanation for that goes, I found this page on a home brewer's forum that's authoritative enough for me. Many food manufacturers do this. They mix many batches together so the flavor is more consistent. One poster on the thread calls it "beer averaging". That makes sense. Mystery solved (or solved enough for me, at least).

But apparently Joe and his unnamed friend - let's just call him Joe, too - got a batch of PBR that was slightly heavy with an unnamed stimulant, and maybe some finest coffee.

Panel number three shows Joe and Joe soaring on the PBR rocket ship. Holy smokes. I've never looked like that after one beer - or any number of beers, really. What's Pabst blended with? Thirty three kinds of speed? Joe says he "feels like a NEW MAN now!" "We'll be in camp in NO TIME!" I think this ad might be a little dishonest about the effects of beer... unless "in camp" is code for something else, like "sleeping face down in a woodchuck" or "curled up together on a bed of pine needles, whispering our secrets to each other." By the look on Joe's face, it must be his first experience with beer, but not as first as his friend Joe's.

It may be that the artist exaggerated the expressions, knowing that the final print size would be on the small side. That panel in the ad is about 2 1/2 inches wide, with the faces maybe 5/8 of an inch across. That's pretty small. Any time I'm beginning a project, I always need to know the final use of the piece. That may influence decisions made along the way, like how much to "push" the expressions in these two faces. Or, maybe these two guys just get really really REALLY cranked off one can of PBR.

In my travels on the Google train to plumb the mysteries of the "33 to 1" claim, I found this picture of an old Pabst Blue Ribbon sign from 1943, here in Our Fair City of Chicago. It's part pf a collection of unearthed color photos of depression-era America, in the Library of Congress. Looking at photos this old in full color is slightly incredible. I recommend a look at them, especially if your mind has been in a state of un-blown-ness lately. I gave every photo a rude finger salute right into a folder on my drive, for safe keeping.

In 2001, Pabst engineered a comeback of their brand, using their obscurity and misfortune as an advantage. They used word-of-mouth marketing and sponsorship of counter culture events like scooter rallys and bike messenger races. Here's a link to that story. Clever. Now, with virtually no advertising done, Pabst is enjoying a renaissance all their own, among the hipster beardy types who ride fixed gear bikes with no brakes and mustache handlebars. Makes sense. Those pedal pushers could use the extra energy a can of PBR priovies. They'll be in camp in no time.

Pedestrian Crossing - Frank's dilemma.

2011-10-14T07:18:00.004-05:00

Joke #1 - Frank knew he had to get the door fixed, but the holidays were coming and money was tight. It was just getting so damn annoying holding it on with his armpit, though. Right hand turns were a real treat.

Joke #2 - Frank turned his lights on at the last second, startling them all. "A-HA!" he shouted. "Caught you, Barbara! How dare you have an affair with that man, that girl, that other man, that boy, and that baby... AND at our special intersection, too!"

Joke #3 - "Well hey, Frank! Nice to see you! I didn't expect to be run over by you this evening!"

Joke #4 - The joke had gone over like gangbusters, but Frank had neglected to wash his hand afterwards, and he had to get home for dinner in a hurry. He liked being known for something, but he would have to think of a new joke to use around the office. The "stinkpalm" was getting to be a real pain.

Joke #5 - Frank was tired of being a spectacle at stop lights. The window came up to his armpit, the steering wheel was buried in his stomach, and the roof pushed his hat down over his ears. Maybe in future decades cars would be bigger? Or maybe one of the manufacturers would produce a special model for sufferers of gigantism?

Joke # 5 - Frank turned his lights on, startling them all. He was getting good at this. It was pretty clever of them, meeting to plan his surprise party in the middle of the street, but he was cleverer still.

Joke #6 - His arm didn't feel right in his lap - it might get pinched between his leg and the steering wheel. It didn't feel right up on the wheel - he may hit a big bump, causing the wheel to jerk, breaking his thumb. Nope. He'd best keep it safe by hanging it out the window, where nothing at all could crush it suddenly.

Joke #7 - Audrey Meadows, Ron Howard, Grace Kelly, Mel Blanc and Bing Crosby, all in one intersection? Okay, Frank would save his murdering spree for the next crosswalk.

Joke #8 - Frank turned his lights on at the last second, startling them all. "A-HA!" he shouted. "Caught you, Gerald! How dare you... etc etc."

Joke #9 - Jeez, the goofy hayseeds that lived in these podunk towns.... They'd stand there, transfixed, hypnotized by his headlights until he turned them off. His commute was getting to be tedious.

Joke #10 - Scene from the Skokie Theater Company's 1954 interpretation of The Hobbit, Chapter eight, in which Bilbo and the dwarves, lost and starving, screech to a halt in an intersection to find a group of elves feasting, singing, and shopping, only to have the lights go out, and the revelers vanish.

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

1975 Plymouth Fury - Huge. The new small.

2011-10-13T06:54:00.003-05:00

Looking for a small car? Consider the 1975 Plymouth Fury. You may also want to consider purchasing a small town to park it in.

Well, why be so hard on 1975? What did it know about small cars? Considering what had come before it, the Fury was kind of smallish, I guess. It's probably longer than an Escalade, but I can't be sure. The research team had trouble finding the exact length of the Fury. Maybe Alert Reader Craigf has it memorized? According to the Wikipedia page on the Fury, the '75 model had a wheelbase 4 inches shorter than the previous version (115 inches for the coupe in the ad). For comparison, a 2011 Cadillac Escalade's wheelbase is 116 inches.

It's nice looking. I really like the white vinyl interior. Will someone in power please make the car manufacturers bring back white interiors? I'll be waiting in my office.

The real attraction in this ad is the smiling couple who, according to the plaid-trousered husband, are "waiting for a car that looks good...". Well, you oughta know.

I'll be passing around a basket of Plymouth Fury PNGs. Please take one and pass it around. Big and small, left and right. get your rude finger ready to right click them into the garage on your hard drive.

Allen-Bradley Motor Control - Who-who what what?

2011-10-12T07:35:00.000-05:00

The Change In Public Media supervisor dropped this in my inbox late last night. Must have been a late one for them yesterday. I need to tell them to stop monitoring so many changes in public media and go home to their families. Maybe I'll have the Work/Life Balance and Overtime Avoidance Manager tell them. Forza Motorsport 4 came out yesterday and it feels like a busy morning for me.
Dateline - The Saturday Evening Post. October 13th, 1962. An ad for Allen-Bradley Motor Controls appears in a mainstream publication, and part of the audience is interested!

Quite a product shot, huh? A manly hand holding a jumble of corners and screws. "What the hell is a motor control" anyway?", you say? Well, it's a thing found in factories, restaurants, laundromats, stores and probably your house. Anywhere there's an electric motor, you need a motor controller. The bigger the motor, the more important it is to have a motor controller.

"Why the hell didn't I know what a motor control is?" you say? Well, it's because pretty much all media was different in 1962. Magazines like The Saturday Evening post and Life were big stuff in the days when any activity participated in by more than three people DIDN'T have a magazine or website dedicated to it. In '62, everyone in the family read Life and The Saturday Evening Post. So, right next to ads for tampons and baby food, you find ads for obscure industrial geekdom like this Allen-Bradley one. "General Interest" meant just that back then. Now, there's practically no such thing. Markets are very specialized now.

Here in The Future, information squirts out of every screen, and screens are found on every object that costs more than a dollar to make. My Department for the Prediction of Technology Manager tells me that within three months we'll have flexible ads on our underwear. When you change your clothes, you'll be presented with an ad for Ass Don't Smell.

So, outlets for advertising and news of all sorts are as numerous and common as cell phones. It's like every person over the age of six having a continually updated copy of every magazine in existence in their pocket at all times. So there's little need to cram industrial machinery ads into the same publication as Hires root beer.

To the same extent, this also explains why television shows that were arguably a pile of shit, like Donny and Marie, Hart to Hart, and most of television from the Seventies could meet with any degree of success. There were five channels, so there was hardly any competition. That's all there was to watch, unless you wanted to go outside and look at nature or ride a bike or something insane like that.

Dad had a box or two of motor controls in the basement when I was a kid. I promise you the thing in the picture was made of shiny black phenolic resin, and the screws and metal parts were heavy gauge brass. Basically, you need motor controls because electric motors use more juice when they're working harder. A big motor has a big armature (spinning axle thing) and that's a lot of mass to turn. Also, the motor is probably hooked up to a conveyor belt or something, and that's heavy too. So, while you can simply throw a switch and instantly supply maximum current to a small motor, a big motor needs to be gradually brought up to speed to avoid drawing too much power and throwing a breaker, or worse. That's what motor controls do.

It looks like Allen-Bradley still exists, sort of. They seem to be part of Rockwell Automation, since a Google search takes me right to Rockwell's site.

I don't know why dad needed a box full of motor controls. Maybe he imagined someday singlehandedly re-fitting a laundromat with new motor controls when all their dryers simultaneously suffered Sudden Catastrophic Motor Control Failure (SCMCF)? He'd have been a hero of the laundromat, and he'd get free dryer time for a year. Too bad we had our own washer and dryer.