Jules Verne's "I Forgot my Keys Up There"

Bunched, August 1957

The March of Science #9

Couple clip arts - The deadly art of persuasion.

These three little ads come from the dirt-cheap-to-buy-space-and-claims-are-never-verified section way at the back of the September 1957 issue of Popular Science. Can recycling their clip art make you richer, smarter, and more persuasive? Of course! But not really!! Let's get started!!!

You don't have to go back to icky boring school for losers to get English more good! Get yourself some learn, stupid! But at home! Do today! DOOOO! 

With this 1000x1000 px profile picture at the top left corner of your Popular Online Or Professional Communications Application, you'll have all the credibility of a person whose just whipped off their glasses to make a key point! What else are you gonna do? Go get some glasses and just remove them whenever you want? HAH! I'd like to see you try! Stop being a sucker and use this guy as your profile picture! ... IF you can handle all that credibility.

This version is a PNG clip art. As you know, "PNG" is an acronym for Probably No Goddam opacity on the background. That means that, apart from the black pixels, the image is transparent. Trust me, I just took off my glasses.

Do you know the secret to passing the civil service test? Ben Franklin knows. It's having big, chunky hands grafted onto your arms from a different drawing. The Franklin Institute is not government sponsored. There is a test for that, but they couldn't figure out how to pass it.

And now Ben can point at two things for you, with some other drawing's hands. What happened to Ben's real hands? He broke them off in the ass of the last jerk who asked him where his hands were, that's what!!! Get with it, turkey! Right-click Ben Franklin and his borrowed maulers onto your hard drive for when you need to do some persuading with a transparent background in your image. He's a PNG, he's only made of black pixels, and he's gonna beat some truth into you with someone else's hands. He's Ben Franklin and he's comin' to your town!

Yeah! Now we're talking! Casting! Just look at that babe, all eager to get cast in some kind of movie and she'll do just about anything to get the part. if only there were some way she could convince you she's the right one for the - Wait. What? Casting plastic? Like molds and stuff? Sonofabitch.

Okay, fine. I guess we're to believe you can cast yourself a new plastic girlfriend. Just be sure to trim off the flash around her edges where the mold came together. Nothing ruins an intimate moment like scraping yourself on a poorly dressed mold seam.

Ooooh, yeah, baby. You know I like it when your white pixels are transparent. I wanna see right through to your alpha channel. Come over here and make yourself comfortable on my hard drive. Just let me right click you a little bit. Don't pay attention to those car pictures or other clip arts you might see in there. They mean nothing to me. Yeah, Uh huh. Right. Got it. Right. Yeah. Sigh...Oh for the love of god, shut up. This relationship is suffocating me already.

The Frisk

 Joke #1 - Bertrand sighed wistfully. Chaz used to frisk him like that. He wondered what had changed. Had he gained weight?

Joke #2 - Some regarded it as an invasion of privacy, but it was the only way to ensure a hilarious night's entertainment for everyone. Before guests could enjoy the cabaret show, they all had to pass a level one zerbert test.

Joke #3 - "Chaz, he still doesn't have any weapons in his ass. Please move on."

Joke #4 - "Ooooo, no weapons, but someone's definitely smuggling something!"

Joke #5 - Chuck was afraid of this. He hated being searched, and now, of all times? He concentrated and chanted to himself "Please don't spread the cheeks. Dear God, please don't spread the cheeks."

Joke #6 - "Chaz, please let him pass. Perfectly aerobicized buttocks are not contraband!"

Joke #7 comes to us from Mr.FancySloppyPants_#2, who absolutely went there. "That'll teach him!" thought Bertrand as Officer Chaz reached back to frisk him. "I told him I had to go!"... Just then, last night's 5-Alarm Chili & Tequila Drink Fest followed by that Midnight White Castle Slider Run had let loose in all it's explosive thunderous wetness, as Officer Chaz's fingers hit their "mark"...

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

1958 Lincoln Continental - Lincoln In-Continental?

The English language is stupid. This is mostly because the prefix "in-" can mean two things which are exact opposites: "very" and "not at all". Something that is "insoluble" is the opposite of something that is "soluble", and yet "inflammable" means "very, very flammable". This is completely stupid and needs to end.

So, bearing this in mind, please realize that a "Lincoln Incontinental" would be a car that should be "not at all like a continent", meaning "shorter than one".

The 1957 Lincoln Continental was almost nineteen feet long. That seems pretty big, but in 1958, Ford would come to their senses and realize that the car could achieve perfection with the addition of more bigness, to the tune of five additional inches. That's the one in this ad.

Perfectioned!

...or was it?

Yes, it was.

...until now.

This car wasn't about lugging around back seat passengers. It was about you, your tuxedo, and your wife dressed like a lamp, stepping through a dimensional gateway into an achromatic void, where you are gifted with a gigantic carboat, with a grand piano nestled in the trunk. Lincoln Incontinental Supercoupe - Everything you need, and nothing your neighbors don't know you need. The automobile, re-perfectioned.

You're welcome!

Here's a PNG of the Lincoln Incontinental Supercoupe, with transparent background, so you can drag it all around your documents with your mouse, making cool motor noises with your lips. Just be sure you make it stop for gas every two hundred pixels. You're welcome!

And, if you're boring, here's the original big-as-a-continent one. You're still welcome.

Reynolds Aluminum - Shilling for the can.

Okay, in 1957, aluminum wasn't wasted on mundane things like cans just yet. Shut up. You try writing a pun with Christmas and aluminum. (Please post you depressingly superior aluminim Christmas puns in the comments, jerks.)

Reynols Aluminum wrote a nice shiny check to Disney, apparently. So, we get the Disney gang urging us to consider whether everything on our Christmas list could be a little more aluminum. And why isn't everything on your list aluminum? Why do you hate Mickey, you cretin? Your grandma knitted you a sweater? it better be an aluminum sweater or Disney won't approve, based on their promotional tie-ins. Don't you feel ashamed, grandma? Bitch.

This Disney serving suggestion suggests you should choose to buy the aluminum fridge, aluminum stove, aluminum TV, aluminum roller skates, aluminum suitcase.. okay, I do think those exist, at least.

Reynolds makes a point of mentioning that aluminum can be made in "a rainbow of 'in-the-metal' colors". They're talking about anodizing, but a word like that is too big and scary for the readers of LIFE magazine, it seems. We wrote a little thingy skimming the high points of anodizing back in 2011. Here. Read that if you're bored...

http://phil-are-go.blogspot.com/2011/08/west-bend-alumi-nummy.html

Hah. "Alumi-nummy". That's a pretty good one. Too bad it's not Christmassy, or I'd recycle it here. Aluminum puns are extra-recyclable, of course. Random thought: Imagine how extra pointy your Pointy Tree Day tree could be if it were made of aluminum, like that gongy one in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.



Bonus random thought: The English prefer to pronounce the word as "a-lu-min-i-um". This sounds as insane as intentionally eating a smoked fish leather and calling it a "kipper". But remember that the English invented English, so in the court of grammar, their opinion should carry more weight than the country tat invented "git r done". The clever blokes at Mental Floss did the homework for us...

Greeks and Romans used alum salts and in 1761, Guyton de Morveau suggested calling the mineral base alumine—he did identify the metal, and initially decided to call it aluminum.

Fast forward a few years to 1812, when scientific colleagues of Davy’s started using aluminium, saying that it had a more classical vibe (reports suggest that Davy signed off on the shift).

Hm! So the American pronunciation "aluminum" came first? Weird! I'd have thought it was just us yanks getting bored halfway through reading the word and skipping letters. But, the article also points out that their spelling is consistent with the other elements in the periodic table, like titanium, helium, and stuff. Do you fill your balloons with "helum"? Didn't think so.

So, I could probably get used to the British pronunciation of Aluminium, because they're right. But there's no way I could get used to eating fish jerky in place of actual food... not without also getting used to a plate full of barf, anyway.

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Schick Shavers - Good to know...?

Shick wants you to make it a smooth, hairless Christmas, and who better to hear it from than your own family?

Yep! Everybody in the family, go and shave. Weird, huh? To help drive the point home, the P.A.G! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade put a slightly finer point on it. We had to exercise from editorial restraint to reject the original replacement text "Christmas surprise... Dad prefers you shaven!" It was a little too "Duggar-y".Thanks a lot, guys! Now everybody needs a Silkwood shower. Hairy Christmas!

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Old Bigot Whiskey

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The space-suit.

Joke #1 - "You look great! Yes, my son designed it in preschool. It was so good, the teacher put it up in the hall. Launch is in eight minutes."

Joke #2 - Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White examines a suit the Air Force says will enable man to go anywhere in space, so long as space has at least one atmosphere of pressure, isn't too chilly, and looks mostly like the planets on Lost in Space.

Joke #3 - After his final prep and briefing, Captain Clev Rhintfarb was now ready to eat at Chipotle.

Joke #4 - Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White examines glamorous new suit of the shimmeriest silver lamé with contrasting gloves and booties, gloriously set off with anodized hose fittings, which will enable man to go to the most fabulous reaches of space with confidence and sass.

Joke #5 - A tired worker, seen just before decontamination, after putting in a twelve hour shift in the tinsel mines of northern Lapland.

Joke #6 - Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White examines a suit the Air Force says will enable astronauts to go anywhere in space while the pounds simply melt away.

Cyclotronboy sent us this Joke #7, with an atomic weight of hilarious! Thanks, CTB! - Sure, sure, space and astronauts! Whatever you say, Lieutenant. As long as that thing out there on the tower can launch nuclear bombs like those eggheads promised, I don't care what nonsense you're up to!

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

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Philco Televisions - High deaf gifts?

It's nuts how much television you can get for five hundred dollars. To the unfortunate troglodytes of 1957, twenty-four inches of grayscale was dizzyingly exciting. Know what, though? I'll bet their TVs sounded better than the built-in speakers of our TVs.

Here are two reasons your TV probably doesn't sound as good as these Philcos.

Reason number A) Unless your a pharaoh or a sultan or something, your TV's cabinet is probably made of ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). It's my favorite plastic. Yeah. I know. Who has a list of favorite plastics? Dorks, that's who. But ABS is great. It's damn strong, but you can easily trim it with a knife. It comes in brilliant colors. It tolerates thermal softening and reshaping without weird results. Also, it doesn't easily discolor over time and isn't very susceptible to sun bleaching. Legos are made of ABS for chrissakes, so shut up.

However, there isn't really any plastic that makes a good acoustic resonator. That hasn't stopped people from making everything from radios to drum kits out of plastic - mostly because it's so easy and great to make it look cool. Know what resonates very nicely with sound? Wood. Even plywood can sound great with a speaker mounted to it. Go rent a plastic cello and see how that sounds.

Yes, there are companies making carbon fiber cellos and stuff, but CFs freaky stiff properties can be manipulated to great effect in an acoustic instrument. Plus, it's a composite material, and not technically "just plastic".

Yes, you can get a tabletop radio made of plastic that sounds amazing, but the manufacturer has engineered into it special subwoofers and labyrinth channels to coerce decent sound out of a plastic radio. With wood, just give it a strong-ish speaker and screw it in nice and tight and you're done. Wood is acoustically wonderful.

Thing B) Almost all TV speakers today are an afterthought. They're only included to tick the box on the product manager's clipboard. "Yep! It's got speakers!" Yes, it will make sound at useable volume, but televisions are all about the picture. You're pretty much expected to buy, at least, a sound bar or use a component surround sound system with your TV.

Then there's the fact that TVs can be so thin nowadays. There's hardly any room for a decent speaker in there anyway. You think they're going to design a hefty cabinet just to make room for nice speakers when they can have a sexy thin cabinet to show off their anorexically thin LCD tech? Pull the other one.Your TVs picture is way better than your TVs sound.

Because all non-portable TVs were made from wood back then (the one that woman is carrying probably wa smetal and plastic), the sound quality was probably pretty great. Plus, nobody assumed you would be hooking up your TV to an external system. That was crazy talk, daddy-o.

Ooo! I just had a brilliant idea!
1 - Source two really old, beat-up cellos somehow. School rummage sale or SomebodysList.com?
2 - Take the guts and electronics out of a pair of nice, but possibly beaten up 12" three-way floor speakers.
3 - Make the cellos into your new speaker cabinets.

I am a genius. You're welcome!

So, let's see what you could expect to pay for these bad looking, good sounding TVs, back in '57.

Let's see. Inflation Calculator says that $279.95 amounts to $2,361.45 in modern day FutureBucks. And that's the starting price for Philco's "Wrap Around Sound" models. Oof! Philco's regular TVs started at $179.95 (or equivalent $1,523.09). Ladies and gentlemen, we are truly spoilt.

Hey! That lady carrying the TV looks familiar! Sure enough, she's basically the same piece of art Philco used in that other ad we posted in August '14. See?

She's obviously a heavily referenced painting of a photograph. They just did a new version with different clothes and slight changes to her face, and added the bow on the TV. It's interesting to look at two different rendering sof the same photo reference. It makes you wonder if the model looked exactly like either painting, or if they were taking creative licence with her face in both cases. I wonder if the model got an extra check for the re-use. Only joking. I don't wonder that at all. Of course she was paid just for the one photo shoot. Random models don't get royalties.

In any case, we posted her as a Graphic Gift back in '14, and of course we must provide her Christmas version now, just for the sake of completion, right? Gotta catch em all! She's a PNG.  She's got a present for you. She's 1600 pixels tall of pure woman, and she's all yours. You're welcome!

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Air-Wick - Classin' up the joint.

One of our wee little interns dropped this ad on my desk this morning, adorably wondering if the illustration could be of interest. She had no idea it was a stylistic dead ringer for something from my childhood, and is of massive interest. Good thing I maintained a solid poker face. You can't let these kids get a big head. Gotta keep 'em hungry. "I'll have a look at it." I grumbled, and waved her away.

Check it out! This uncredited 1957 drawing, without any clues or tipoffs to otherwise give context, could not look more The Late Fifties, which were a great sweet spot for commercial illustration.

Notice there are no outlines on any of the forms. Line work is all internal, with just blocks of color to describe the silhouettes of objects. Super cool. This is counter-intuitive by and large. What's a line for, if not to show the edge of a shape? Not in The Late Fifties. Lines are for wrinkles in clothes, and hair and stuff, but not edges. This, combined with the wiggly, clearly-hand-drawn look of the line work, keeps the illustration feeling really loose and fun. That's good whimsy, baby!

In trying to make the people in the illustration seem elegant and sophisticated, the artist gave them all rigid postures and really long necks. The lady in the middle with the white dress looks like Homestar Runner's broom-shaped girlfriend, Marzipan.

This drawing rings a bell - both in the subject matter, and in the art style. If you're like me, you are over a hundred years old, and your family had some board games that were purchased before you were born. We had an early edition of Clue (or "Cluedo", if you're in Europe, because you're frikkin weird), which I have deduced was from 1963. It looked like this:

Here's the game board from the 1963 Clue (or "Cluedo"if you're in Europe, where "Cluedo" is actually a portmanteau of "Clue" and "Ludo", which is Latin for "I play", because Europeans have more education than us Americans, who would never grasp the Latin reference in a bazillion years).

This is a pretty good match for our Air-Wick illustration, but if we go back a little earlier to the 1957 edition of the Clue box, we see this glorious little picture. It could not be found in a larger size, sadly.

There we go. There's our match. This was not the version we had in our house during my kidhood, so I don't know why I remember it - probably because the art style was pretty close on the '63 version and I got a lucky match when I glanced at an even older game box.

Good job, Eager Young Intern. You've got a bright future here at GO! Tower... but no way am I telling you that.

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Bell Telephone System - Just for fun

You don't call your out-of-townies enough. you should get in touch. Call them tonight. And, why aren't you calling them right now?

Donna Reed sure looks like she's having a ball, hearing a friend's voice and having the fun of sharing everyday news. "There's no need to hurry your call. the cost is small."

The next time you have to call an ambulance for your mom or dad because they heard what you pay monthly for your smartyphone bill, whip out this ad - best done on your smartyphone, just for the sake of irony. Then, enjoy their face while they have another grabber right there after seeing what they were paying for long distance in 1957... corrected for inflation, of course.

My mom used to love shaking her head at what they have the nerve to charge for a magazine "nowadays". The copy of LIFE that this was scanned from has a cover price of a quarter. Yeah, three bucks is more than a quarter, mom. What did you make per hour in 1957? Here. Let me get that for you. The average salary was about $3,600 per year. That's 2080 hours per year, which comes out to like $1.73 per hour. Roughly.

Assuming the CPI Inflation Calculator isn't completely off its nut, the price table from this Bell telephone ad would look like this, if you were paying these same rates in today's money:

So, your pocket computer wonderdevice, which probably costs you about $100 per month, allows you to talk to anybody in the country infinitely at no extra charge. While it is maddening that cellular carriers can be willing to try and charge you per text message, when the data burden on their network for a text message is almost unmeasurably small, in general, smart phones are pretty incredible. Also, ad no additional charge, you get a semi-functional robot voice that can look up nearly anything in the whole of the multiverse just by talking to it, and also a global co-pilot that can tell you how to get anywhere without asking for directions and possibly avoid getting involuntarily butt-sexed in the backwoods of Alabama because you spilled coffee on your hand drawn map.

I wonder: How many minutes of talk time would one hundred crisp, new,  modern dollars buy you back then? Well, $100 in current FutureBucks equals $11.79 in rusty old 1957 money. That would get you a little over three minutes of talk time from Miami to Pittsburgh with the Bell Telephone System.

CORRECTION! Thanks to Alert But Polite Reader Tim, it has been brought to our attention that I ran the math wrong. Derr! I'll let Tim explain...

"...when you say that is a little more than what 3 minutes on the phone with your steel magnate uncle before stepping out to the DuPont Plaza, you are using Futurebuck pricing with mid-50's money. You could talk to Uncle Walter for more than half an hour!"

Right you are, Tim! Thanks for keeping me honest, and for not being all snarky about it, which is more than one could typically say for me. Numbers are hard! Garr, my brain! Still, I'll leave the next paragraph as it was, because it's still a decent bit about the not-The-San-Diego-Chicken.

Wowzers. I don't know anybody in Pittburgh I want to talk to that badly... except maybe the Pittsburgh Pirates' mascot, the Pittsburgh Parrot. Could he explain to me in three minutes or less how his all-baby diet has been working for him? It may be worth $100 to hear him try. And, I could probably record the conversation on my smartyphone and post it on faceTube... OR, simply threaten to post the damning conversation and thereby extort $100 from the Pittsburgh Parrot, recouping my $100 loss for the phone call... and then I would then have a great story to tell people, gotten for free, effectively.

My mom would probably tell me that stories about talking to baby-eating mascots cost much less than free in her day.

Read Heart dog food. Fort-two to get Reddy.

Does any food manufacturer do send-away premiums any more? I never read the backs of packages when I buy food, so I don't know. This big stuffed dog from Red heart dog food would have been a pretty sweet one, way back in 1957. However, "Reddy" was far from free. First you had to send in six labels from their product (natch), and also mail in $4.95 in 1957 bucks. Let's see... accounting for inflation that comes out to. Jesus Christ! Forty-two bucks!

For forty-two dollars, you could probably frikkin' buy a frikkin' actual dog for frikkin' out loud... which you probably already had, if you were going through six cans of actual dog food to get this fake one. Weird. But, if you think about it, every kid has stuffed animals, and many families have dogs, so, that's not that scandalous. I probably shouldn't have said all those frikkin' swears.

When an Alert Intern plopped this 1957 ad on my desk, the first thing that occurred ot me was how frikkin' much Reddy looks like Cuddly Dudley, the puppety co-star of the Ray Rayner show. "Who the frikkin's Cuddley Dudley, you frikkin' jerk?" you ask? Thanks for calling me a jerk, and here's who he frikkin' was.

Chelveston, Ray, Random Dog, and Fake Dudley.

In The Sixties and Seventies, there was a brilliant kids' show on WGN, the best local TV station in Chicago. the show was Ray Rayner and his Friends. It was a perfectly low-budget show with a reassuringly consistent variety format that's a big hit with kids. (Kids like reliability.) Ray was the host, of course, and his show featured regular in-studio characters like Chelveston the Duck (actually a goose).

Real Cuddley Dudley and Ray.

Once per show, Ray would walk over to camera two and read the fan mail with Cuddley Dudley, a life-sized cocker spaniel puppet. The patter was nearly always improvised, sometimes had a subtext of dirty humor, and usually went over the heads of the audience. Ray's show was also a good source of cartoons, like Mr. Magoo and Looney Tunes, which were sprinkled throughout each episode. Great stuff.

Incidentally, you can see the puppets and other artifcats from the Ray Rayner show at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, down on State Street. I really gotta get down there and see it.


You could also get a Cuddley Dudley doll as a special promotional item for subscribing to the Chicago Tribune. Dudley looked exactly like Reddy, as I will now demonstrate with a side by side compariso...

Oh.

Not very similar after all.

Hell. Now I have no post for today. Double you tee eff am I gonna do now? Just run it anyway and post a few Ray Raynor videos? Sounds like a plan. See you tomorrow, kids!

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