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.