1971 Bland Torino?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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

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?

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, Advertising 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.

Knob Fondler.

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.]