Try shoes.

 

Outies Magazine. June,1970

 

Locked Myself Out - May, 1970

 

Simulated Person Monthly

 

Involved Father

 

Dad Helped Me with my Diorama

Hardy Boys Diving Emergency

The Hardy Boys Punch.

Up Your Decor - Holiday redecorating!

Hey there, decorators! It's your interior design spirit animal and lifestyle coach Vorbia, here, with some crucially urgent news! Now that Halloween is a dim memory, the holiday season has just transitioned from "breathing hard" to literally "coming"!!! WooOOOoooo! Holday times! Uh HUH! And you know that means all your relatives walking around in your house, eating your food, and most importantly, JUDGING YOU! So, guess what? It's time to decorate your house for the holidays! Thank god I'm here! Let's get it going!

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Your Silent Night will be full of the jealous screams of your guests when you re-vision your house in this super chic Exmess Noir theme! Start with thick, rich black pile carpet, and then compliment it with thick, rich black pile wallpaper! MmmmMMmmm! You and Santa want to just wallow around in your walls! Some kind of dead thing on the floor will warm up your feet those cold winter nights! And lastly, a star-shaped mirror makes your bed the perfect manger where the animals kept their watch or something!

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Who doesn't love Early American decor? Not nobody! That's who doesn't! This gorgeous holiday dinner experience starts with vinyl parkay flooring and a majestic colonial dining set that every last one of your relatives will be positively fighting to gather 'round! You know what the early Americans would have wanted? Wallpaper with a nice, gigantic Edwardian pattern!

After dinner, you and your guests will retire to the sitting room to reminisce about the fan-damn-tastic meal you just bought for them in this restful retiring chamber! The floral pattern carpet sets the scene, while the wallpaper in a tastefully restrained "Baroque Brocade Circus Stripe" truly entertains the eye! Compliment the reds and oranges with a green dinette set and your relatives will all want to stay forever and ever! Holiday magic! YOU'RE WELCOME!!!!!!

Someone on our street likes jazz.

The Attack

Can't Go

Now There's Your Problem!

Great! It's Puberty! - Grownup rehearsal.

Up Your Decor - Spring prep!!!!!

Hey there, my little urgent decorators! As you can probably tell by looking out the old window on the wall, it's almost springtime!!!!! That means you need to start planning all your decoratings now, now, NOWWWW!!!! Fortunately, your pal Vorbia is here to help you get on that shit with some mind-hurtling decorating ideas! We begin!!!!!

This superfun rumpus room is perfect for your precocious child, Eod! Little Eod will simply adore deciding which of its personalities is dominant at the moment that they are needing to store something!  Where oh where did Eod store its recreational apparatus? Was it the green personality, the yellow one or, god help you, the red one? Only Eod can tell you!

Hey! Just because you live in Mordor, it doesn't mean you have to be an old fuddy-duddy! This intimate and dynamic entertainment hall will make sure all your minions know you're the grooviest dark lord since Morgoth! The striped shag on the floor will keep things fun when your little goblins come over for some chip-n-dip, while the cork or carpet or whatever that is on the walls keep the draft out! We'll find those halflings after the pizza rolls come out of the oven!

Everyone knows that springtime is also new wardrobe season! This efficient sewing room concept will keep all your sewing needs handy! It even has a wall rack for all your sewing guns! What's got two thumbs and is ready for a fashion blast? Wooo! This girl right here!

Up Your Decor - Add eye-food!

Howdy-do, my hungry little lookers! Guess what? I've decided that you are all starving your eyeballs! They need color and pattern to grow big and strong! Yes they do! No, your house is NOT fine the way it is! SHUT THE HELL UP! Don't take away my joy or I will KILL YOU! Let's get started!

Starting with your kitchen, you need to realize that if you like your wallpaper, like really like your wall-
paper, you'd just wallpaper it right up onto your ceiling! See? Now don't you think you owe your wallpaper
an apology?

What time is it? Daytime? NO!!!!! It's time to cover those windows with decoration! These screens are
easily made from other screens, or even panels! Then, just fill them with stretched fabric in whatever
pattern drowns out the voices inside! There! Now you can't even hear them at all! Just the blissful racket
of your children playing, completely unaware of... things! Nice!

Have you found where your husband goes all weekend? Is it some kind of stupid workshop that is outside
your control? Yay! You found it! And he's a silly goose! You control everything! Now's your chance to teach that whatever he gets up to in that shop of his is just as pointless as a toddler playing with blocks. Paint the whole place in fun, bright colors! What's that? He won't like it? Awwww, what's wrong? Doesn't the widdle baby like his playpen? Then he can come back in the house and help you wallpaper the television like an adult!

Now that he's back in the house, you both should spruce things up in the rumpus room! Let's start with a fiberglass elephant-foot table... only because the goddam World Wildlife Fund won't let you buy a real
elephant foot on the open market! What do they know about decorating? Psst! Here's a pro tip! They'll never know if you just cover a real elephant foot in fiberglass, but you didn't read it here! Now just cruise the rummage sales for a plywood rooster, a tambourine, a wicker reindeer and some blacktop buckets made into stools! Paint it all in a pleasing red and fuscia motif and you're ready to pumpus that rumpus! I think that's enough for you to do until next time! See you soon, decorators!

Man, I hope these are

RCA Quadraphonic - Flew like a lead zeppelin.

Gather round, children, and listen to a story of hope and disappointment.

In 1970, RCA wanted everyone to buy a new audio system for the new four-channel (which came to be known as "quadraphonic" or "quad") music system. At that time, consumer-level stereophonic (two-channel) systems were still sort of new. Anyone with a stereo "hi-fi" system would have been considered an early adopter.

This RCA ad wanted you to drop everything and rush straight out and buy a new quad system. Now, stereo systems have twice as many components as mono. Two amplifiers, twice the speakers, twice the everything, pretty much. As a result, they cost about twice the money that a monophonic system did.

Along comes quadraphonic, and they cost roughly twice as much as stereo, with four times the components as a mono system, of course. How much was that? Well, the system pictured in the RCA ad sold for $250. Run off to the CPI inflation calculator page and we can see that $250 was about $1300 in today's money.  Yowza.

Having just bought a stereo hi-fi a few years previously, would you be prepared to jump to a quad system already? To the well-heeled douchebag subscribers of Esquire, it may have been a no brainer. It was also 1970, so, amazingly bad decisions on the part of pop culture were coming fast and furious. Maybe a $1300 bookshelf music system (look at the size of the speakers in comparison to the cassette slot) seemed like a solid decision? Maybe you would have looked forward to throwing this in the trash when hexaphonic sound systems came out a few years in the future? I mean, why wouldn't you assume that was on the way, right? Spoiler alert: that didn't happen.

Time would show us that not many people were into quad. Not very many albums were recorded in quad, and before too long, Dolby Labs would figure out how to make a stereo signal feed four or more speakers through clever phase detection. Stereo was pretty good enough, it seemed. Five-channel and seven-channel surround systems, which extracted multichannel audio from a two-channel encoded audio signal, would embarrass your lame-ass quad system by simply being more cleverer with less hardware. If you haven't listened to music on a surround system, you're missing out. It's pretty cool.

Of course, we are now looking at an entire generation raised on hyper-compressed music played through twenty-dollar computer speakers or came-free-with-my-iPhone craptacular earbuds, so, hi-fi, or "high fidelity" is sort of a dead thing for now. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the superpopular bass-is-all-I-care-about Beats brand of headphones, which are as close to high-fidelity as the squeaky earbuds they, in many cases replaced, to be honest. People love those too, because they're expensive.

Come to think of it, hi-fi early adopters at least cared about accurate sound reproduction. Maybe those douchebags weren't so silly after all. Is the idea of four speakers more ridiculous than choosing a pair of headphones because you like the color, or headphones that are engineered with permanent bass-all-the-way-up circuitry? The last time I tried to buy a pair of headphones in a store, the clerk looked at me like I was nuts when I told him I wanted to hear them before buying them. Apparently, caring about how accurately a music system reproduces sound makes you an eccentric outlier.

Maybe the douchebags weren't so silly.

Space Toilet

Who would Steal a Sprinkler?