Bellas Hess "Package" Price Rock Band - The Plastic "Oh No" Band.

Until this little gem was flopped onto my desk, I'd never heard of Missouri-based Bellas Hess, but apparently they were a big deal in 70's mail order, right up there with Sears, Monkey Wards and J.C. Penny. These were retailers that did their best to sell you everything your life could need. The more esoteric the thing, the more questionable the quality. So, if you were looking through the appliance section of your Sears Catalog, checking out blenders. Those were decent blenders. Names you heard of. If you flipped to the musical instrument section... heh heh. You'd see Sears brand trombones, intended for indulging parents who were (incredibly) willing to permanently buy the cheapest instrument they could find, to satisfy their kids' curiosity about music. Kids are fickle. Why get a real instrument if it would only be left out in the yard and be forgotten in two weeks, to become home to a family of ground squirrels?

On page 11 of this 1969 Bellas Hess catalog, enter the store brand rock band. We mustn't judge it harshly. This could have been the gateway gear for Dave Grohl or something, in which case we owe Bellas Hess a debt of gratitude. That said, let's get to work. We've got some harsh judging to do.

Woooo! Yeah! Rock on, man! Fuck the establishment! At least until my dad makes me mow the lawn! These lucky little rockers are apparently rocking inside a really big microwave oven. Either that, or their first gig is fighting the establishment in a clean room at the CDC. Talk about your "INFECTIOUS" rhythms! HAHAHAHAHAhahahahah! You're right. That's a good one.

I think the guys might want to put some more thought into their band name. You don't want people to lowball you on all your gigs. So, "NO ONE CAN 'BEAT' THIS PRICE" might send a message of cheapness, despite the savagely clever play on the word "beat". It's also a little wordy. Maybe consider "Vincent's Price", or "No One". That'll be a great "Who's on first?" gag every time someone asks about your band...

"Who's playing over in the flesh eating bacteria lab tonight?"

"No One".

"Okay. I'll cut out early and send in the decon team to hose out the room as long as it'll be empty and there won't be any mail order poser band in there or anything. We can start the new Hanta virus cultures in there first thing in the morning."

"Wait. I mean 'No One' is the name of..... meh. Whatever."

I'm not a guitarist, but I've seen lots of them do their thing (I've even spilled my drink on a few), and I'm not familiar with this chord. It seems to be played with the palm of the hand and the fingers of the left hand hovering over the strings. Hmm. Must be some kind of weird open tuning.

One of the things I always look for in my cymbal hardware is approximate verticality in the area of being roughly perpendicular to the floor, or, failing that, for the stands to at least be parallel with each other, if not to a plumb line dropped to the center of the Earth. The crash and hi-hat stands look very approximate with relative respect to several things. perhaps in future explorations, we will find a new center of the Earth for these stands to be parallel with a plumb line to.

Come to think of it, at such an un-BEAT-able price, you could afford to flip over to the hardware section and maybe order up a plumb bob while you're buying your rock and roll band.

Incidentally, these pants are also available in the Bellas Hess catalog, but you'll need to look in the housewares section under "table cloths".

The snare drum, pictured here to the left of the actual drummer, is, in traditional rock convention, placed between the drummer's knees, and played with the left hand (if the musician is right handed). No, wait. That's not fair. He's not an actual drummer.

Hey! What gives? Girls can't rock too? Bellas Hess, you just stopped being my one-stop-shop for all my sterile labaratory-rocking needs. I bid you good day. I SAID GOOD DAY!

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Arrow Ties - Some obsolete British slang to go with your obsolete tie.

Hey! You know how most of our slang comes from advertising? No? Correct! Nothing's squarer than an advertising executive trying to be cool, or - God help us - define coolness. Although they would dearly love to be the arbiters of cool, advertising can never be that. This perfectly innocent ad for Arrow ties is trying to get us to adopt some British slang from a previous century. Nice try.

If Arrow is to be believed, "wizard" and "pip-pip" mean "great" or "terrific". This is the first I'd ever heard of "wizard" being used as an adjective and "pip-pip", in my experience, has always been what an embarrassing Yankee says when he or she is trying to pull off a British accent of Dick Van Dyke-caliber, and failing to do so with a Dick Van Dyke level of cringeworthy lameness. Van Dyke was a perectly serviceable actor, but a vocal chameleon, he was not. To perform your own Dick Van Dyke-style British accent, just talk with a golf ball in your mouth.

I could find no evidence that "pip-pip" means "good". My actual paper copy of British English A to Zed has this to say about "pip" (and has no entry at all for "pip pip"... possibly because no British person ever actually used the phrase with sincerity.).

This makes sense with the dfinition I found at EffingPost.com: "Pip pip - Another out-dated expression meaning goodbye. Not used any more." The beeps or "pips" heard during a telephone call may have come to be used as a greeting or "goodbye". But this is my own conjecture based on some bits of information I found out, and should not be interpreted as historical fact.

I have heard "pip" used to describe a person, usually in cockney slang, as seen here at Merriam-Webster: "one extraordinary of its kind."

As for "wizard". This one seems like crazy talk. A quick Google search shows that it was used in the early scenes of the movie Juno:

FLASHBACK - Juno approaches a boy hidden by shadow. He's
sitting in an overstuffed chair. She slowly, clumsily lowers
herself onto his lap.
A 60's Brazilian track plays from a vintage record player.
WHISPERED VOICE Do you know how long I've wanted
this?
JUNO Yeah.
WHISPERED VOICE Wizard.

I found this prehistoric blorg post from 2007, where Melora Koepke was predicting that soon all The Kids would be using "wizard" instead of "cool".

be warned, "Wizard!" may well be everywhere, soon. Move over, Napoleon Dynamite imitators: Juno is about to transform the teenage idiom once and for all!

Yep! Nope. It didn't. I enjoyed the snappy dialogue in Juno, but I forgot the "wizard" thing. First I've heard of it. What's my copy of British English A to Zed got to say about "wizard"?

Hm! I guess it does mean what Arrow says it means. It's just not sweeping the nation like Melora Koepke thought. "Wizard" has had its chance to become a thing since World War One-ish, and it just hasn't happened. However, it does show you how deep Diablo Cody dug for improbably kooky things for her characters to say when writing the script for Juno. Honest to blog.

Much to the chagrin of Advertising, I'm sure, you know where a lot of our slang and euphemism comes from? The Bible, Shakespeare, and the military. A LOT of the entries in my British English book cite military as the source of unconventional Briticisms. You can find that interesting all you want, but I wouldn't go so far as to thank Hitler.

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Emmett Kelly - Writer's block.

Yesterday's post about the "Disappointment" heirloom art plate prompted Craig to mention Emmett Kelly in the comments. I then remembered that I had this Emmett Kelly picture I scanned from a children's book my older brother had in the sixties.
Emmett Kelly was a famous clown that was famous before Bozo was famous for being a famous clown. This was back in the fifties, when you could conceivably become famous just by performing in the circus.

I remembered this picture being funny for some reason, but now I can't remember why, for the life of me. I can't think of a single joke about this picture. It's just an ordinary, wholesome photograph of a clown feeding a hot dog to a young girl. Sorry to let everyone down. Must be writer's block, or maybe I'm losing my touch.

Emmett Kelly's clown character was called "Weary Willie".

It's interesting that Emmett Kelly's son, Emmett Kelly junior, stole some of dad's thunder by also dressing up as a clown called "Weary Willie". Emmett senior didn't care for this sort of thing, and the two didn't speak for years. I guess they made up eventually, before Emmett Sr.'s death in 1979. Strangely, his death was in no way boxcar-related.


Here's a photograph of Weary Willie Jr., that I stole from Wikipedia. I think this picture should also be hilarious, but man, I've got nothing. Maybe it's part of the ineffable magic of clowns that they can make the most innocent situation funny in a way that transcends culture or social zeitgeist. That sentence sounds true, but then why is it that I hate clowns?



Sorry this is such an off day for me. I'll try to find something funny to post tomorrow.

Doubleday Book Club - Any 3 Smuts for $1.

So, you're probably sitting there thinking "Dirty thoughts have always been part of the male mind, and women only started thinking dirty in the last thirty years or so." No WAY hose A!
The ladies love the smut*. This 1951 ad from McCall's wants you to join the Doubleday book club and get one of a bunch of smutty books every month for a dollar or something. Maybe the sex scenes are tame by today standards? "Her mouth was on fire for him, and she could feel his need for her, in his fragrant, well-groomed beard. Oh, such Vitalis!" I dunno, but "Shireen...whose ways with men would make even Amber blush!" leaves only a teensy bit to the imagination.

Sure, the titles and language are more veiled than your average porn movie, but that's not saying much. Men's smut is intentionally overt and blatant. Women's smut is more subtle, spelling out almost everything you need to know, and then letting the imagination fill in the one tiny last detail, so you don't feel as naughty, apparently.

Rid shampoo now cures disembodied
floating head infestations as well as lice!

Anyway, there's an interesting little art thing in this ad. Look at the space created inside the luxuriating woman's arm and head. She's the one over the book "Infinite(ly odd) Woman". The line along the side of her face is strangely geometric. It doesn't look right. If this were the era of Photoshop, I'd think the artist did a bad job cutting her out of a background. Click picture for biggerness.
Here's a little secret. Realistic paintings of people are nearly always always HEAVILY photo-referenced. This means that they take pictures of people in the pose they want, and then paint the picture of that exact photo, embellishing details and adjusting the pose while they do so. Nobody paints realistic people purely from imagination. Even if you can pull it off, it takes a long time and you probably have a deadline anyway. So, the line of that lady's head must have been that way in the photo reference. Still, I think she'd look more natural if there were some variation, like with the contour of her hair. And if she had an ear. Just my two cents.

*Just to be clear. There's nothing wrong with smut.

Al Hirschfeld on Hollywood.

"Who's Al Horsechild?" you say. It's "Hirsch-feld", and you ought to know his work if you're been alive more than five years and are not blind. If you don't know who Al Hirschfeld is, the first thing you need to do is punch yourself in the groin for being a clueless jerk... or blind. Actually, if you're blind, don't punch yourself, because your life is hard enough. Just try to find someone who doesn't know who Al Hirschfeld is and punch THEM in random locations until one of their shouts of pain sounds like "Ow! My groin!" Well done, blindey.

Here is a self-portrait by Hirschfeld. He made a name for himself doing these simple caricatures of (mostly) celebrities, characterized by swoopy ink lines and a very minimalist sensibility. Mostly, I respect him for two things: A) Being really good at caricature and B) having a style that you could recognize from the moon with your space helmet full of jam. I know, I know. "He never did a drawing big enough to be visible from orbit, let alone the moon." How bout this? Shut up.

Caricature is pretty hard. You have to identify what defines a particular face and exaggerate those features while omitting others, all without letting your distortions make the subject unrecognizable. Caricature is a pretty complex mental process. Almost all drawing relies upon the aforementioned discipline of judging and editing what you're seeing, but caricature demands a LOT of mental editing on the fly. Do it right and people see things in your drawing that they recognize, but never knew were in the face of the subject. "Oh yeah, I never noticed how feathery Hirschfeld's eyebrows were before!" Stuff like that.

You may have seen Hirschfeld's drawings on a number of TV guide covers, Johnny Carson's title cards and lots of other places from the forties through the seventies. One Simpson's episode even had a drawing of Krusty the Clown done in a Hirschfeld-esque style. I don't know if they actually got Al himself to do it (he was alive until 2003) or if it was a staff artist doing an imitation, but it was dead-on. I think the episode was "Krusty gets Kancelled".

In 1949, Hirschfeld did a series of drawings for Holiday magazine in which he made fun of Hollywood's various stereotypes. Low hanging fruit, I know. But when your magazine had Hirschfeld doing some drawings for an issue, incisive commentary just isn't important. Just give him an easy topic and let him work. Hirschfeld was sort of the "cartoonist laureate" of golden-era hollywood. If you wanted a funny drawing of some actor, Hirschfeld was the one you went to.

Anyway, here are the nine drawings, plus their captions. Please forgive the light photoshopping. Some of the captions were positioned in inconvenient locations, relative to their corresponding drawings, and I paired them up to make them sit better on the page. These are just thumbnails, since they can only be appreciated by clicking through to the larger version. Enjoy.

By contrast, here's what happens when a mortal tries to do a caricature. It's a drawing of Bo and Luke Duke as done by me a few years ago for a "drawing of the week" blog my friend had. I hate the Dukes of Hazzard and everything to do with the redneck south. I think my drawing benefitted from that hatred, as well as the fact that I was in a hurry because I felt that any time spent on the Dukes was a waste of time. Enjoy the contrast between Hirschfeld - an elegant master - and myself  - a rushed, angry oaf.

Riverview Flying Cars - No injuries... yet.

A lot of my friends' parents talk with moist-eyed happiness about Riverview Park, a Chicago amusement park that existed from 1904 to 1967. Life ran this page about the Flying Cars ride in 1957. The safety precautions of the time are slightly hilarious.

Click on the picture for a high resolution version you can read for yourself. The ride worked like this: the drum was motorized and the cars were freewheeling, held onto the drum by a flanged rail and floating clamp system. The drum rotates up to speed and the cars let it roll beneath their wheels. Then, the cars' brakes are applied, quickly accelerating up to the 30mph speed of the drum's surface. Patrons spin around the drum for two minutes before the brakes are released, letting the cars wobble to a standstill while the drum also slows to a halt.

Looking at the thing, I'm amazed that no one was hurt (according to the article, which is according to the park, which is not likely to publicize any injuries). The patrons are asked to keep their hands inside, just like any roller coaster, but look how easily some idiot could reach down and grab the car's wheel. The people are "tightly strapped in" by one belt across their stomachs. Their heads are free to flop around well above the body of the car, enjoying zero neck supprt. When the brakes are engaged and the cars accelerate, what happens to your neck? Maybe it's a trick of perspective, but it looks like those waiting in line seem really close to the machine itself.

These are not complaints. I'm in favor of people with poor judgement being allowed to horribly mutilate themselves in public for the greater good. It's just that, from the perspective of a person used to having a yellow padded horse collar drop down over my head whenever I got on the Shockwave, the Flying Cars ride looks really... what's the word?... "homebrewed", like something a guy would build next to his doublewide, without any oversight or forethought. It not only looks homebrewed, but also "home-investigated-by the-local-authorities", "home-subpoena'd", and "home-subsequently-serving-time-at-a-state-run-facility'd."