Super Ads of the 70's! - More punishment for the guilty.

I'm not done with you, seventies. I recently paid contractors LOTS of money to scrape hundreds of pounds of fugly from my bathroom, courtesy of the seventies. It was worse than anything that ever went down the toilet and couldn't be disposed of with a flip of a chrome handle. Better Homes and Gardens' back pages bring us more evidence in the mounting case against 1973 middle America.

I'm kind of angry that the seventies made me doubt my understanding of "authentic". I looked it up. "not counterfiet or copied". So, as I thought, "authentic replica" is an oxymoron. The picture doesn't clearly show what you're getting. I'm pretty sure it's a clock stuck in a picture, made to look as though its on a pole in the street. The ad copy is nicely honest though. "Rosewood finish plastic parts". They didn't have to tell you how crappy their clock is, but they did. Stupid honest hippies.

I'm sure I saw this fabric and yarn bird hanging in some model home when my mom was a realtor in the seventies. The seventies had a strange fixation with pictures woven in yarn on canvas. If you wanted to add that "bought at a craft fair for the mentally challenged" charm to your home without any of that icky "helping the disadvantaged" guilt on your mind, you could order this kit... with instructions. Yes, apparently people needed help creating something this awful. That's like a child needing directions on how to mess her diaper.

"Mortimer Bird" was designed by Dino Kotopoulis. Who? Apparently, he's still kicking aorund, doing "art". here's one of his more current pieces. It's not Snoopy's doghouse. It's a frog. No really. Try closing one eye. No? Try jamming an icepick into your forehead. Still no? Wiggle a little to the left. Careful. remember your skull is a fulcrum and when the handle goes left, the tip goes to the right. There!  A frog, see? The Greeks invented civilization. Then came Dino Kotplopooutiplios to stink up the joint. Thanks, Dino.

Hey, guess what? A thing stitched into canvas with yarn, that's what! This time it's an owl with blephartis, which is pretty cruel, considering owls have such big eyes. Poor thing has so much crust over it's eyelids, it can barely predate. Misfortune as art, both for the animal and the owner. Still, it demonstrates more ability than Kotopoulis, and the artist isn't even credited. Pity is, when hung on a wall, these things are really hard to accidentally spill coffee on. Better make an extra pot. Better display them on the floor in front of the sink, or under the car, right over that black stain on the concrete.

Your TV is in color. Why are you still teleconversing in black and white? Get with the times, OLD MAN! Check what the KIDS are into! Step aside for the revolution, OLD MAN! Wait, what? Oh, they're only colored plastic phones. The revolution apologizes.

I'm sure the ad would like you to imagine the word "color" spelled in color... and also the phone picture in color. I'd like one covered in the halftone pattern, like in the picture. These aren't even seventies phones. It looks like someone bought the molds for old rotary phones from the forties and began casting them in colored plastic. The handset is that old pointy-back design that is painful to hold on your shoulder. $16.95 in 1973 money is $80.94! Holy Fonzie! Do you know how many 8-tracks that is?

 I knew a guy in high school whose mom had a rack of tiny spoons like this in the living room. I thought she ran an orphanage, or was a habitual adopter of babies whenever there was nothing on TV. Neither of these things were true. The real explanation is that some women begin to like tiny decorated spoons at the age of fifty five. The orphanage story actually made more sense. Couldn't he just have told me that his mom was the percussionist in a jug band?

Sometimes assholes need help in driving their friends from their lives. Enter, the "talking toilet". I don't know anybody who would come back to my house after experiencing the talking toilet. The tape could maybe be used in less obnoxious ways? "I'm sorry I'm out of toilet paper. I forgot to run to the store. You'd think the time I used in recording this message could have been better spent buying some toilet paper? That's probably why you should find better friends, huh?"

the seventies had a problem finding adequate storage for all of it's clip-on ties. The clip-on tie holder also works with real ties, but to grab the attention of their early seventies customers, they went with the clip-on photo. This tells you something about the seventies.

True enough, seventies. Nobody's purfect. But you know what? You, as a decade, were amazingly non-purfect. Your energies were seemingly spent in devising ever more ways to be regrettable and embarrassing. Your large scale projects were often great, but anything that cost less than a hundred dollars in the seventies was pretty much unforgivable. Apology rejected!