Ow!!! My frikkin' pen tool! Okay, you better appreciate this. It's another ad from a 1935 issue of Fortune magazine - the daily news for the guy on the Monopoly cards.
Mimeographs. If you're Of A Certain Age, you'll recall that, before photochopiers were cheap,reliable, or even existed, if you wanted a duplicate of a document, you had a Mimeograph machine in your office. They printed in purple, for some reason (or, at least the one at my grammar school did), the copies came out really warm, and while they cooled, you could smell the solvent evaporating from the ink. When the teacher handed out new, uuh, "handouts", as she called them, you could whiff the solvent, and for some reason, most kids enjoyed that smell. It was probably benzine or something that slowly causes drain bamage or something. Anyway, muy broin forls foine..... guh. So, yeah. Mimeograph. Anyway, this ad is all about decorative frames and ornaments. Something like that could come in handy down the road. It had damn well BETTER, after all the selecting and pen tooling it took to extract the elements for harvesting. You're goddam welcome!
Aaaah, gypsum! Is there any part of your life that hasn't been improved with the miracle of gypsum? While you're working on that question, here's a free Graphic Gift of an impressed lady!
Yep, she's blown away by the smoothness of her new walls, since they're not plaster applied to a wooden lath substrate with a trowel. Wow! Such dirty talk for so early in the morning!
Anyway, she's pretty funny. She could probably be a nice addition to your ever-growing Graphic Gift collection on your hard drive of choice. Howzabout we pop her out of her ad and give her an alpha channel background?
Click for 1600 px PNG.
Yeah, there we go. She could be impressed with just about anything you care to position her next to. With her original word bubble in place, she could even deliver a compliment to a particularly deft bit of public grace. See?
So, we'll also need to have a version of her with her "smooth" in place...
Click for 1600 px PNG.
There. Oh, she could have ever such wonderful adventures in your Graphic Blandishment application of choice. What will you do with her?
How do you market those little adhesive paper corner things that (sort of) hold the pictures in your photo albums (until they completely don't)? You show the customer a few serving suggestions how they might enjoy their photos so they go "Oh yeah! I do like looking at photos." And, don't forget to come up with a pointless mascot made of your product, for some reason!
Meet Sir Cornerlot. He has a sword, and is gallant, or whatever.
There's lots of useful clip art to be salvaged form this ad. Let's get on that, post haste. We'll just blank out the text and make these people slightly more re-purposeable, shall we? We shall.
See? Aren't they nice? What in the world could they be looking at? Oh, the usual...
You might think, at first glance, that this record recorder was made by Hohner, the famous musical instrument company, but nope, there's no "H". It's "Honor". Also, there's a "House" after it, so, really "Hohner" doesn't look much like "Honor House" at all, really.
Anyway, yeah, recording records at home sounds kind of fun, if you're stuck in 1964 and there's three channels on your TV. But just like your inkjet printer, they could give you the device for free and still make money off of all the ink / blank records you'll be buying over the next three years until the thing breaks.
I have a bunch of old radio recordings downloaded from Archive.org, and I now have to wonder how many of them still exist thanks to nerdy people with home record recorders like this one, sitting next to their radio, with the mic' shoved up against the speaker. Plenty of those old radio shows definitely sound like they were recorded not from an original broadcast master, but rather from an inexpensive microphone inside a plastic bag stuffed into a dead raccoon... shoved up against the speaker.
Anyway again, hey, clip art lady! She has a sassy attitude and deserves to sass around on your hard drive for a rainy day. Here you go. I need another coffee you're welcome or whatever grumble grumble.
In 1974, Hot Rod magazine chose to offer to pretty much anyone with a stamp the secrets of complete violence and personal demolition. A reckless decision, I think you'll agree.
Wow. We can't have this kind of power fall into the hands of just anybody, can we? I mean, what would the world be like if every man became aware of the destructive forces they already possess?
You hear that? "Demolish anybody"! What are you waiting for? You've got lots of demolishing to do!
And, then there's the national nightmare of guys scoring with any woman at will. What kind of dystopian hellscape were Hot Rod magazine and Universal Self Defense trying to create?
Click for 1600px PNG with alpha channel background.
If the dystopian hellscape on offer in this ad sounds like your kind of dystopian hellscape, there's good news! The Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade have whipped up a new T-shirt design from the art in today's ad. It's up at our Spreadshirt shop right now. Loads of color options available, too. Just imagine all the cool fights you can have while wearing this shirt...
That's right! He's doing the famous Dynamite Punch, right in your face! Yeah! Either nobody will mess with you, or everyone will mess with you. Don't you want to find out? And don't forget about the babes you'll score with. We can't promise you that, but we totally promise you that.
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.
"Mopar or no car" is something you may see on a bumper sticker, proudly worn on a Chrysler pickup truck from the Carter administration, covering one of the larger rust holes on the bumper. Let's see if Miss Mopar can get you to wear her proudly in a nice, safe corner of your hard drive?
Here's a fun fact from Wikpedia.
"The name derives from a combination of letters from the words 'MOtor' and 'PARts'."
Really, guys? That's how you came up with the name? Well, I'd call that "frame", which is an adjective that derives from a combination of letters from the words "FRikkin" and "laME".
Here's a funny thing I just noticed about the illustration in the ad. Look at the feet of Miss Mopar, and then look at the bottom of the stack of batteries that she's leaning on, all sultry-like. According to the rules of perspective, her feet are about six inches closer to us than the batteries are, yet her hands are squarely centered on the top battery. That sounds either really uncomfortable, or physically impossible.
That means it's up to us to put Miss Mopar in a more spatially plausible situation! Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade, ASSEMBLE!
Pen tool!... DEPLOY! Pkshow!
Create selection!.....Zam!
Copy.....Plowsh!
Paste on new layer!.... Thooom!
Here she is, all PNG'd on a trabsparent background, ready to lean on whatever you think would look best. Why not give her the right-click she deserves and save her for a rainy day? Be sure to click through to her full-size 1600 px version first, though.
But what could you use to replace that questionable stack of batteries? Oh, so many things. here are a few serving suggestions to get the ball rolling.
A very large Twinkie.
A slightly enlarged Tom Cruise, who's not sure he gets the joke.
Inside the front cover of an issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine from 1990 (whose cover is plainly ridiculous but we haven't been able to figure out a joke to write about it yet, so stay tuned), there's this ad for the then-upcoming book Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. I haven't read the book, and don't plan to.
The clip art in the corners, however, is probably worth harvesting.
Robert Jordan has stated that he consciously intended the early chapters of The Eye of the World to evoke the Shire of Middle-earth in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Okay dokey. Well, at least he's honest about his influences. I think I'll just go and re-read The Lord of the Rings, then, instead of reading The Eye of the World. The cover art is by Darrell K. Sweet, anyway, and his paintings always bugged the crap out of me. All the people are stiff, like they have a broom handle shoved up their ass. Not at all naturalistic. Nobody has posture like that.
Anyway, the other art in the ad is pretty neat. Two trees and two birds. Some courageous Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade trooper should pull those out and maybe clean them up... just a little, not too much.
Each icon has been scanned an 800 dpi, tidied up just a little, vectorized in Adobe Illustrator, and saved out as PNGs with a transparent background. CLick through each to see it at 1600-ish px. Get ready to right-click these medieval little icons onto your enchanted hard drive in three, two, once, RIGHTCLICK NOW! You're welcome!
Chicago's got some cool hotels, and Chicago had some cool hotels. This ad from the March 1969 issue of Esquire is for The Sherman House, apparently remodeling at the time. If the Sherman House was advertising in Esquire, it was either very groovy and hep, or desperately wanted to be perceived as such. So where was it, and where'd it go?
The address is strange. Three streets and no numbers. What gives? No, wait a second. That means the place occupied an entire city block, right in the middle of downtown. Jeez, that's big.
Randolph, Clark and LaSalle puts The Sherman House either on the site of city hall (not bloody likely), or right across the street from it, which is now the Thompson Center, also known as The State of Illinois Building! It's kind of famous, having been featured in a couple of movies, like Running Scared (1986). But the Thompson center was built in 1985. When was The Sherman House demolished?
Turns out WTTW has a nice page on The Sherman House, and it says the place was flattened in 1973. Yikes. Sounds like the 1969 remodel didn't really revive business.
Here's a picture of what seems to be the 1969 remodel (picture found at Forgotten Chicago). Very groovy! I approve.
But what happened between the demolition in '73 and the construction of The Thompson Center in '85? Forgotten Chicago has it:
After sitting vacant for the remainder of the decade, the Sherman House, along with this entire block, was demolished in the 1980s for the State of Illinois Center (now James R. Thompson Center), which opened in 1985.
Oof. Downtown Chicago is really nice, currently, but certain grandparents will tell you there were dark days for the downtown area, with vacant buildings and not-so-great places to see - or, if you were thinking more clearly - avoid, in The Seventies. It sounds like the Sherman House was one of those places contributing to the overall shabbiness of the downtown area. And it was right across from City Hall. Imagine a major city with a derelict hotel across the street. Great. So, in 1985 they built the Thompson Center. Good deal. Here's what it looks like now: ZZZ
That radiused glass corner of the building you're looking at? That's a ten-story glass atrium. From inside it's fairly amazing. If you're coming to Chicago, you might make an excuse to pop in and see it.
It seems I've been there, taking artsy pictures...
Here's a less artsy-fartsy and more descriptive picture of the atrium:
There's a link on the WTTW page for The Sherman House with a short video about The Sherman House. Apparently, The Sherman House was one of the first places in Chicago that a lot of people heard jazz music, was back in the early 1900's. Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey played there. It was also originally founded by the son of the Civil War General Sherman. Whoa. Their embeddable video code seems incompatible with Blogger, so you'll have to go look for yourself to see the clip.
But here's a clip from the climactic shootout scene in Running Scared, which was shot in the State of Illinois Building's atrium...
Anyway, The Sherman House still has something to offer to the ages: clip art! Here are the semi-concussed-Cheryl-Tiegs-looking lady and romantic couple images from this ad, all dressed up for you in their alpha channel backgrounds, ready to be used on your party invitations or divorce settlement documents. You're welcome!
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