Johns-Manville Asbestos Products - Roofing wiiiiith the deviiiiiiillll.

Hooray! More asbestos! We love asbestos advertising here 'round the office. There's nothing like laughing at the ignorance of the past to make yourself feel smart, even though I wasn't the one who discovered the health threat of asbestos and don't have the know-how to figur eit out. Yep. Standing on the shoulders of giants just to be a jerk is a great way to start the day.

This ad came in the form of two half page verticals, on opposing pages. So, that's why it's in two parts here. Fascinating, huh? Not really.

Back in '52, they understood that asbestos was a great material, suited to more than just diapers, napkins, and adhesive bandages. Why, Johns-Manville wanted you to cover your whole house in the stuff! And why not? It's weatherproof and colorful. It wants to keep you warm and snuggly. In fact, asbestos love you so much, it wants to climb into your lungs and hug you from the inside for the rest of your life - so what if that's about three years?

The left page ad was for asbestos shingles. Fair enough. The asbestos would mostly be a threat to the guys installing it, I guess. We don't use asbestos as a roofing material any more because of its general awfulness, but there have been worse applications for it than roofing.

The right hand ad promoted asbestos siding. Now there's a sinister product. Having asbestos down on the sides of the house in what we call the "lickable, rub-your-face-on-it zone" is a seriously bad idea.

Of course, nobody knew it was so bad back then, right? Not right. The threat of asbestos was publicized and documented as early as 1907. So how did people get away with basically making houses out of asbestos as late as the 1980s? You got me.

What a bummer, eh? Time for a movie to cheer everyone up again! Here's a promotional film called According to Plan, produced by the hilarious Jam Handy organization for a housing developer. Enjoy the excitement of a young couple planning the construction of their new house incorporating fireproof, durable asbestos.




If you're a real weirdo, you can also download it from good old Archive.Org. I did.

 Other Johns-Manville products thought perfectly reasonable at the time:

-Alberto VOh5n1 grooming products.
-Sarin Lee pastries. Nobody doesn't like Sarin Lee!
-Wisk. No more "ring around the cholera".
-Uncle Benzine long grain rice.

Thanks for reading. I'm going to go take a Silkwood shower now, just from typing this.

Homelite Chainsaws - Then I saw him.

Sometimes you need a chainsaw. Homelite wanted to be part of your household deforestation policy back in 1952, but those were simpler times, back when we thought trees caused communism and oxygen came from cigars.

Homelite is the "one man chain saw". Hey, wait. What if I need to get rid of more than one body? That sort of makes it financially impractical to go on a killing spree. The police will just count the number of chainsaws in your shed and arrest you for the same number of murders. You'll need a chainsaw to cut up your chainsaws. Fortunately, Husqvarna makes a nine chainsaw chainsaw!

Hm! I didn't know they used chainsaws in choreography. Well, modern dance is full of surprises.

"Well, time to get rid of some evidence."

This happy chainsaw guy isn't a car, but he may be fun to add to an otherwise inappropriate email some time. So, get your rude finger ready to right click him into the basement of your hard drive till you need to alienate a friend. You know the drill. Big and small. Left and right.

As for this, I dunno. Is it wrong to stand in the bright light of inspiration and not act? I say "yes it is".

New Products from Science of the Future.

Amazing Mystery Button - Some kind of button thing. Startles everybody. Possibly something about sound. Also cardboard powered. Also a better version with three screws. Order now.

Vitabrush - Miracle treatment for those suffering from Hair Sleep. Wake up your scalp. Cures various head things with made up crap. Allegedly fun. Write today for particulars. *Not responsible for loss of marriage after subsequent multiple casual romantic encounters or V.D.

Gigantic Auto Battery Chargers - No more battery trouble. Simple to use in uncommonly large garage. Operates on ordinary household 94kV cyclotron. May cause spacetime anomalies. Write today.

Hudson Jet Impelled Speed Grinder - Sharpens everything by disabling sink. Adjustable to 10,000 RPM, depending on water pressure and shower use. See our other ad for Hudson Jet Impelled Metal Shaving Sink unclogger. *May need sharpening.

Kooking Cornir - Frisky Little Mousse. Such a fancy feast!

Today we're going to make your family a dessert that's sure to have their whiskers twitching. Frisky Little Mousse!

Instead of wrestling with all that whipped cream and chocolate, try this short cut: buy some of that ice cream that comes in those little squat cans in the pet aisle. You'll need four or five of them to make this delicious mousse.

Combine the ice cream in a blender with 1/4 cup almonds. Blend until blended. Chill or freeze before serving.

Note that the high liver content of this type of ice cream may stiffen when frozen. As you can see in the picture, some strata of the ice cream have begun to separate from each other. No problem! You can easily hold it all together with a bit of hot glue as seen here. That should hold it together until after dinner.

Our Frisky Mousse not only is quick and easy to make. It'll keep your coat soft and shiny, too!

Oreo Cookies - Perfect for you cartoon family.

I'm a little scandalized that the Oreo package used to be yellow instead of what I have always assumed was its perpetual blueness. One thing remains the same: Oreos are a staple of daily life with your excitable weirdo family.

It's hard to choose the right snack for your family when you're a young mother recovering from cult indoctrination. Oreos are a real no-brainer, though. Good thing, too!

Know what makes a good businessman? Thinking young. Being able to get really cranked about a plate of cookies helps keep you in touch with the youth culture. So does purchasing your much-younger wife from a quasi-utopian commune. Just know the laws in your state of residence.

"Junior" can't see the top of the plate from his angle, but he knows what's for dinner! It's all his Perfect Mother ever serves. Oreos! "He" likes to get dressed up for these special Oreo dinners every night of the week. From his polka-dot hat to his rouge, eyeliner and carefully drawn eyebrows, Tad is ready for another yummy Oreo dinner. Can you tell this isn't his first all-cookie meal?

Daffy Daughter takes time from her busy day of acting out her favorite cartoons for an Oreo dinner break. The trick of letting her tongue flop out when she sees something good? She learned that from Tom & Jerry.

Nabisco cookies are enjoyed throughout the land, and they're not just for kids! Vanilla wafers are a big hit with the faculty at Hogwarts. Here, Professors Fizzlebottom, Wizzlefoss, and Bottomwoozle dish the dirt about what that naughty Malface boy did in Necromancy class. Somebody ought to woozle HIS bottom! Well, I never!

Fig Newtons are dad's secret midnight snack, but not for long. He's going to wake the whole house singing the aria from his one-man Fig Newton opera! Scotty is helping his master belt out the notes. Just look at the noise lines coming out of his head!

1975 Formula 1: (rear tire) = (front tire x 1.33)

The Content Acquisition Force dropped this Car and Driver from 1975 on my desk this morning, and upon flipping through it I immediately handed these pages to the Images and Scanning Them Dept for scanning. They went up while they were still warm. Fresh squozen goodness from the teat of an Oak Park antique store. We also got a super cool shriner fez.

The article is a report on the early season of F1. I recognize famous names like Emerson Fittipaldi, but I don't know the history and lore like SOME people I could mention... CRAIGF!

But just like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, I do know this: Formula 1 cars looked really really really cool in 1975. In the sixties, they looked cool because they were all flattened metal sausages with wheels poking out. In the seventies, they were just beginning to understand ground effects, so wings, spoilers, and the like were standard equipment, but they hadn't yet gone the way of the Darth Vader's Head look. Nope, you could still see the sausage shape - it just had a few wings stuck on it. More importantly, you could see the giant balooney rear tires and the weensy little front ones.

As a kid (in the seventies) I spent lots of time drawing race cars. Even in my single-digit-old years, I could have told you about the importance of having huge rear tires. There were a few experimental drawings testing the boundaries of this principal. Cars with silly little roller skate fonts wheels and nine-foot rears, but these looked stupid, and were discarded. The proportion of front-to-rear size was a bell curve. The size differential had an optimal relative proportion they became ugly at either end of the curve. You had to get it right. I understood this as an eight year old. I just couldn't have explained it in such fancy terms.

So, here are some great F1 cars from 1975. I'll identify the cars if possible, from the context of the article. Also, some of them are presented here in Rude Finger Graphic Gift form. So, get ready to do the right click rumba a few times. The PNGs are posted at the usual sizes of 1000px and 200px wide, but this time I didn't include flipped versions. All those sponsor decals would have been hell to correct on the flipped versions, and I've got an empire to run.

P.A.G. is proud to add these racing car PNGs to our growing multicar pile-up of graphic gifts.

Storyboards

Joke #1 - "...and then we cut back to Anakin, who has most of his limbs burned off. He's crawling towards the camera, and he says 'But from my point of view, you're wrong!' I know that line is absolutely shitty, but we'll replace it with something good before shooting begins."

Joke #2 - ..."and here is where your retirement fund really takes a nosedive. It would have gone off the bottom of the paper, but our printer is a tractor-feed type and the paper goes on and on, so we can track your investments all the way down to the point where YOU owe US money. Pretty cool, huh?"

Joke #3 - "...and then you come in and say 'that copier looks like it's out of toner. Let me help you with that.' Then you go 'I hope the door doesn't blow shut. We may be trapped in here! That's when the sexy music starts in, see?"

Joke #4 - Early prototype testing of the player piano. Later, the piano roll was stored on a spindle instead of being folded. Also, instead of using two old people to hoot out the notes, as many as 88 were implemented, eventually replacing them with wires and hammers. This greatly increased durability and decreased complaining about it being "too cold in here".

Joke #5 - In early 1986, to avoid expensive publishing costs, Bil Keane began showing Family Circus comic strips directly to the only surviving people who still found it interesting.

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

Doublemint Gum - Chew yourself beautiful.

Here's an odd one from the Pages of advertising past. Chewing gum makes you beautiful! In 1938, the laws regarding truth in advertising must have been different in that they exist now and basically didn’t then. Hooray for wildly fabricated lies!

The Wrigley company was free to claim that chewing gum could tone up your face in that it “stimulates sleepy face muscles”. The muscles used in chewing are basically your masseters and orbicularis oris, and the probably get plenty of exercise anyway what with all the eating you do every day. The masseter is the one on the sides that makes your jaw go up and down. The orbicularis oris is a ring-shaped muscle that’s inside your lips. Without this one, you’d drool all the time like you just came back from the dentist. Also, you’d find Everyone Loves Raymond to be an unpredictable and clever show. The orbicularis oris is… dun dun dunnnnn!... a sphincter muscle. “Eeeeew!” Calm down. That just means it’s a muscle with a hole in it. There’s also a sphincter muscle around each eye. Sphincters are muscles that pinch shut, instead of just pulling in one direction. There are loads of them throughout your body, and they mostly keep various juices from leaking from one place to another accidentally.

Anyway, Wrigley expected you to believe that not only did their gum tone up your face, but it also “brightened” your teeth. Keep in mind that this was in the era before any plausible non-sugar sweeteners existed. So, chewing sugar brightened your teeth. Also, it made you fly and scared off communism. Maybe Doublemint could be said to “brighten” your teeth if they were covered with food or fur from that dead squirrel you sampled on the way home from the boutique. But, chewing almost anything would force saliva around your mouth, performing the same squirrel fur eradication as Doublemint does.

Let’s not forget that Doublemint “relaxes tense lines” and keeps you “streamlined”. Wow. Streamlined. I guess people got around much faster back then before we built all these highways and filled them with parked cars. So much so that facial wind resistance was a widespread problem.