Learn karate at home faster this easy picture way!

You at reading! Yes you! Stop read and get karate at home and learn this easy picture way! Not words way! Self should be defend against all! Words bad! Go karate on words, POW!

Are you tired of being bullied by giants, with their baffling quotation marks and words they say that aren't easy like pictures are? Learn karate! Not with words! Picture way!

Fear no man or giant! Brutes and muggers are also not a problem. However, no mention of knolls, goblins, orcs, or bugbears, though. It's possible they all have some sort of anti-karate AOE spell that nullifies your picture-way karate. Beware all non-brutes, non-giants, non-muggers, and non-mans.

No "mumbo jumbo". It's possible that mumbo jumbo would be effective against orcs, goblins, etc., but cannot be taught in easy picture way. For proper mumbo jumbo training, see Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz, or Gwyneth Paltrow.

Karate expert splits 1" x 2" board with one swift blow of hand. Once again, the karate ad is foiled by its greatest enemy, the quotation mark. A one-inch by two-inch board would indeed be hard to split with your hand, but simpler still to just throw it away. If that's a one by two inch board in the picture, it's good to know our President once found work as a hand model. Zing!

This practice dummy is "suitable for mounting". Assuming that the mounting in question is of the "stick it on a wall" type and not the "humping like a baboon" kind, the same could be said of the beer-soaked cocktail napkin that is stuck to the ceiling of my basement rumpus room. It better be suitable for mounting, cause it's definitely mounted to the ceiling.

It seems that the wiener punch is an attack - wups, sorry! - "attack" that you can only learn from intense picture training, with the benefit of a paper poster practice dummy.  Don't all toddlers learn this special move by dint of simple trial and error? Could it be that all children have special karate picture-way training? Are we to assume that all kids also are expert in the nostril punch and the formidable thumb attack?

Best to just avoid kids, people.

Junior's Errand Cart

Readers, I hope you're sitting down. Please stand up and sit down again to be sure of your sittingness. Now, observe with horror this monstrosity from our past: plans to build a cold-war-era shopping cart, just for a boy! Yes, that's right. Children... CHILDREN!...were allowed out of the house, unaccompanied. Wait. it gets worse. The children were sometimes sent on errands DOWN THE STREET... ON THEIR OWN!... to BUY GROCERIES for their PARENTS! You will also want to shout in all caps when you see the horror. Prepare to witness an atrocity. Here are the stolen plans to construct this most hideous of weapons.

These "parents" (humph!) probably didn't even dip the boys in sunscreen before sending them out into the wastes of suburbia. Oh, the humanity. Citizens, it is because of the abduction and presumed devouring of all our school-age boys in The Sixties that the human race died out and there are no more people left. Irresponsible parenting, child slave labor and lack of round-the-clock protection were directly responsible for our extinction. Now you know why you're extinct. You're welcome.

Ed Roth's Outlaw Hot Rod

A loyal staffer dropped this two-page spread on my desk this morning, knowing my love of 1960's hot rods. Well done, whateveryournameis. That's why I pay you however much I pay you.

Building hot rods used to be a "from scratch" sort of thing. The current trend in hot rod fabrication (as can be seen on the many car mod programs) mostly consists of this: 1) Pick car. 2) Fix rust. 3) Slam suspension. 4) Bolt on some ghettotastic wagon wheels with one millimeter of tire stretched around them.

Ed Roth was one of the big names on the west coast car scene in the Sixties, and his designs were always berserk and had a good sense of humor. The Outlaw was his first experiment with the new miracle material, fiberglass. Here is Mechanix Illustrated's two page story on the Outlaw from 1960.

Caption: "PROUD OWNER Ed Roth designed and built the door-less Outlaw. Front wheels are converted motorcycle wheels with extra-strong spokes for added safety." Yes, safety. Good thing he made the car totally safe with those spokes.

Good news, everyone! The Outlaw is still around. Here's a nice color photo. I have to say I like the colors he chose.

Charles Beseler Company - Capture those moments.

Citizens, you're not capturing enough of your moments. Every day, perfectly cherishable moments are going completely uncaptured, which means they're going uncherished. You monsters. Stop the madness of uncherishing. Send away to the Charles beseler Company right away for your Complete Home Darkroom.

For just $195 (or $1500 in modern FutureBucks) you can get everything you need to develop your own photographs. Don't let your moments go uncaptured. You must go all Pokemon on your various moments by capturing them all! Such moments as.....

Man, those are some great moments, huh? Aren't you glad you were able to capture them with your Complete Home darkroom?

No? You're a cheap bastard? Okay, fine. Have this happy card-holding guy for free. Get your rude finger ready to right-click him into the folder on your hard drive where you imprison your happiest clip art. Our PNG version of him has a transparent background and a blank card, so you can make him say all those things for which you just can't find the words... except that you'd better find the words, because his card is blank. Just find the damn words and write them on the card, okay? Jeez. Such words as...

"I'm sleeping with your sister"

"We're out of pills"

"Your baby is whining again."

"The realtor says our house is sinking."

"I'm sleeping with your brother."

"Guess who lost his job!"

"Thanks for the wonderful bowel obstruction dinner!"

"Hooray for senate subcommittees!"

"Guess who lost your sister!"

"I'm not Fred MacMurray goddammit!"

Little Ads - Get careered! Or huge!

Serving suggestion. Actual pedestrian may be murdered by any model car, or wearing trousers, or a man.

Serving suggestion. Beating self on head with half barbell may not result in fitness. Cash bal cod fob plant.

Serving suggestion. Training may also work on galoots, jamokes, lugs, palookas, goons, lunkheads, doofs,

and bohunks. Training untested on oaves.

Trial lesson: "Gear comprehension". Twenty minutes to complete, excluding review and testing.

Planning Your Basement - Do up the dank.

Marfak - Know your lube.

Urgent news now, from 1945. Lubricant advertiser uses baffling image to sell lubricant!

The P.A.G! Imagery and Usage team has been unable to determine the importance of being on a swing with a steering wheel. One thing's for sure, we're tired of being disappointed when beating our grease with a hammer. Those of our readers trapped in 1945 are urged to use Marfak in all their hammer machines and when lubing their automobile's chassis, stat!

Click for big.

Science News! - Like news, but sciencey!

Steam-powered, butane-fueled motorcycle is somehow preferable to one that is just butane-powered. Inventor dislikes questions. Very slowly sped away after igniting boiler, waiting for water to boil, and adequate steam pressure to build.

Home-made baby terrifyer is cheaper than commercially-available forms

of baby torment, allows you to capture magic moment of adorable horror.

Graduated tempered-glass monkey mug is tough enough for monkey use,
accurate enough to prevent accidental over-roofieing of monkeys.

Tire-Flator fills leaky tire from spare, resulting in two tires at half-pressure soon, two flat tires later.

Peele P50 in Mechanix Illustrated - As eventually endorsed by Jeremy Clarkson.

If you're a faithful viewer of Top Gear*, The best Thing ever Made of Any Kind by Anyone Ever, you're probably familiar with Jeremy Clarkson's hard hitting review of the Peele P50, the Smallest Production Car Ever Made so far. Well, look what was plopped on my desk this morning, cleverly hidden inside a 1963 copy of Mechanix Illustrated (which shouldn't be confused with "spellers illustrated"). A Peele P50 writeup! It had to go up as today's post.

And, just to be thorough, here's Clarkson's road test of the Peele P50 in and around (but mostly in) BBC Center. Please enjoy.

Click for big.

Concept Cars 1956 - Gimme some bubble dome.

The June 1956 issue of Mechanix Illustrated (no relation to Spellin' Illustrated) featured a report on the new cars for '57. As ever, there were concept cars aplenty, brimming with cool ideas and promises nobody intended to keep. Thanks, Detroit! Reproduced here for your entertainment is the full article, even the trailing pages that have no pictures and make you flip randomly around the magazine to finish reading:: "Continued on the spine of the magazine." I frikkin hate that.

Giant versions of all pages are at the bottom of the post.

A "trend to SMALLER wheels?!?" I know all those words, but they don't make sense to me when placed all next to each other in that order.

Notice the hyphenated whitewalls, which save weight. Also, the tail fins keep the car moving in a straight line, eliminating "cornering" and other undesirable "European" handling traits.

New for '57, spewing soot all over the side of your car! Also notice the clever folding hardtop, which doesn't so much "fold" as it just slides into a nine-foot section of the car completely given over to roof storage. For added convenience, when not storing your car's roof, the trunk can be used to store other things, like perhaps a different car's roof.