Internet 1.0 shirts - Obsolete online.

Are you old enough to remember when "logging on" to anything was a tingly thrill? Games were mate of text, and every online service was a walled garden because everything outside it was the hard vacuum of space. In case people can't tell you remember those exciting be-mulletted days, we've put together some obsolete tech t-shirts. How did we know there was a shortage of these shirts? Because we wanted them for ourselves and couldn't find any. Niche filled.

All are available in our Spreadshirt shop, with choice of shirt type and color. In the case of the Compuserve shirt, you can pick the print color as well. Such a time we live in!







Netscape shirt.
This shirt features the original 64x64 Netscape launcher icon. Even at seven-or-so inches wide, it's still 64x64 gigantic pixels, for your 1200 baud browsing pleasure. Warning: The shirt's print is low-resolution, and meant to be that way. Do not come whining to us if you're horrified by the pixels.

See? Pixels. The shirt's print is exactly this, but shirt-sized. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Zork shirt.
Theatre of the mind, man. We don't need to fancy pictures to have an advanture. Text is where it was at. Don't get eaten by a Grue. At least, not without your Zork shirt on.

No, Zork wasn't an online game. Far from it. But it is now! If you want to Zork it up in a web browser, here you go. Knock yourself out.

Compuserve shirt.
It was AOL for boring business people. Don't worry. AOL and Compuserve are both equally obsolete now, so no need to argue about it. Spreadshirt's terrible vector art uploader managed to interpret this file properly. That means you can get it printed in one of a bunch of colors on whatever shirt you like. Use your freedom of choice... your freedom of choice! Da na na na na na na nana nah.

Anscoflex Camera - Hideously Beautiful

My dad was an engineer. No, not the kind that wore a funny hat and drove a train. He designed machines. He never designed a camera, but if he did, I think it'd look a lot like this Anscoflex.

Anything dad built, he overbuilt. Knobs had to be big... big enough to operate with mittens on, maybe even while wearing a pair of catcher's mitts. If it was made of aluminum, it could be left bare. If it was made of steel, it'd be painted this same shade of Institutional Grey-Green (I.G.G.) that you see in the picture. Everything must be screwed together, so you could take it apart if you had to. The screw heads were left exposed, and as such, all had to match. You could never have mix-and-match screws in my dad's school of design. It must also be able to tolerate a three story drop without major malfunction.

Durability and repairability were the watchwords of my dad's design ethic. Elegance and minimalism were not. There was no Apple-esque, breathtaking, fragile other-worldliness to my dad's machines. he saved that for his woodwork. In the parlance of Tolkien, his designs were more dwarven than elvish.

This is not a criticism. It's just a fact. This is why I think this Anscoflex is both hilariously ugly and great at the same time. It's an almost perfectly un-stowable squaretangle. It fits in no pocket. Any bag used to carry it can carry nothing else unless the bag is really huge. It has that leather strap that, if you look at the little illustration in the lower left, might be long enough to go around your neck. Fine. So you were to carry this thing around your neck, having it's three-pound bulk thumping you in the sternum while you walked around Santa's Village, spilling food on it while you try and eat. This is what they call a "box camera". It's meant to be worn around the neck, so you could look down into the viewfinder to line up the shot. See the gray door on top?
It's not a missile silo. That's the viewfinder in there.

It looks like it was designed for the person who is normally intimidated by overly-fiddly cameras. THere aren't many controls. There's a giant knob to advance the film and a button to take the picture... and the button is bright red. No focus or exposure. I like the textured metal face behind the lens garage door thingy. It could be flat aluminum, but instead it's textured, like metal burlap or something. Style!

Come to think of it, most of the hardware on Thunderbirds looks like this. Clunky and lumpy. You can tell what parts are meant to twist and what parts are meant to be pressed. There's no sneaky disguising a button as a piece of decorative trim, like on my Logitech Harmony universal remote. You can operate it without looking, because no operable part is flush mounted or smoothed into the surrounding surface. Things like that are designed to be looked at, but not used. So, my mixed review of this camera would probably be that it's a joy to use and manipulate, but a huge pain to carry around.

UPDATED: Here's a funny thing - looks like if I were a bigger jerk, I could try to sell this ad on Ebay for ten dollars. I bought the whole magazine for four at an antique store.

Norelco Carry Player - The iPod of 1968, or never.

Yes yes, we have it pretty good right now. More music than we really need can fit in our pocket, blah blah blah. Whatever. This is all news to precisely nobody. But it's still fun to read some ad copy trying to hype up a weak product that found a way to be ugly, despite being designed in the sixties. Behold! The NorelcoCarry-Player! The iPod of 1968. Not bloody likely.

First, it's ugly. Lots of things in the sixties were cool looking. In the second half of the decade, designers started to go a little rectangular, which is fine. Almost any style of design can be done with cleverness and efficiency. The Norelco Carry-Player looks as though it was thrown together on someone's lunch hour. They started with a sketch of a suitcase and just scaled it down, somehow making its proportions look awkward in the process. Either go with 45 degree angles or 90 degree angles, but don't mix them. Ug!

This basic kind of cassette recorder sorry, PLAYER can still be found in stores. The shape is just as uninspired and dull. The sound is pretty feeble, too the single speaker inside is capable of a frequency range of 500Hz-5002Hz. You like the Beatles? Get ready to enjoy Lennon singing to you through several wet hankies and the cardboard tube from a roll of gift wrap.

The one real benefit offered by these machines is that they make it easy for dorky little kids to record their own pretend radio shows (not that I would know anything about that), and for easy dictation. This one only plays. Wow. Cassette tape pretty much appeared on the consumer market in 1964, so the Carry-Player had the benefit of four years of improvement by the time this ad ran. I don't think a record function was science fiction. The ad claims it retails for less than thirty dollars, which is $101 in today's money. Oof!

At the time, if you wanted to listen to your own music, something like this was the only game in town. If you were a real audiophile, you had a reel to reel machine in your house, sorry, "pad", and that wasn't portable. You maybe had a cassette player in your car, but that would require you to sit with your car doors open and the volume cranked, and what kind of asshole would do that??? So you ponied up a hundred bucks to carry around the Carry-Player, and maybe a bag of cassettes, so you could listen to Herb Alpert in mono, rocking through a speaker cone that sounded like a dixie cup. I can't believe I'm holding out for a 120 Gb iPhone to hit the market, so it'll be worth my money. I am such a jerk.

Anyway, here's the list of available artists from te bottom of the ad. Click for a readable version and get ready to go "who?". I know most of them, but I'm going to tell you that.

Thermofax - They could do that back then?

I had read this ad twice before realizing that "Thermofax" is just the company's name, and that they're using the word "fax" in the actual sense of the word: a facsimile or copy. At first, the idea of a commercially available fax machine in 1958 had my brain doing somersaults. While it's less exciting that this is just a copy machine - albeit a copy machine from 1958! - I'm glad the universe still makes sense to me.

So no, this is not a fax machine. Even if it WAS a fax machine, how many people could there have been who owned one of these? Who could you fax to? It takes two to tango, faxfully speaking. You'd probably have your little clique of fax owners and you'd send smug little faxes to each other... "I love my Tele-Picto-Printo-Pronto-Tron, don't you? It was totally worth the six squillion 1958 dollars I paid for it." "Yep" would come the lazy response." Then you'd sigh and stare at the machine, wishing you'd just bought a experimental color tv instead (with a five inch screen).

Anyway, this was 1958, and somebody made a copy machine. Even more interesting, they made a copy machine that printed thermally. That means that, instead of ink or toner, it carefully burned the image onto the paper, which was special paper you had to buy just for this purpose. Remember early fax machines, how they printed on that weird paper that was kind of slippery and sticky at the same time? That's the stuff. Sometimes you still get receipts printed on that paper. While most companies try to make machines that work with regular paper, it was pretty amazing back in '58. Hell, I'M pretty amazed they had copy machines at all that far back in the mists of time.

Also, it's kind of great that the machine was enormous and had a giant knob on top. I wish every electronic device were available in an alternate version that has the exact same functionality of the normal version, but in a clunky retro case. Can you imagine how cool it'd be to walk around with your iPhone in a weird turquoise case with a tiny gold knob in the corner to flip between pages of aps? On the back, instead of the normal apple logo, there'd be an apple logo that looks like the badge on a fridge. That'd be great, right? When I'm elected Supreme Emperor of the Universe for Life, I'll make this happen. I hope I can count on your vote.

Servel Refrigerator - Ice is H.O.T.!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the idea of using sex as a sales motivator is super new. We just thought of it a few days ago, in a lab, and the shrink wrap has just come off of it. Brace yourself.... INCORRECT!

Behold! The Servel Electric Refrigerator with Automatic Ice Maker! Who? I know what you mean. I'd never heard of them either. Well, they're still around, it seems, filling that nice market for propane refrigerators. What? I know what you mean. Apparently early fridges were gas powered, and worked via evaporation. Fire heats ammonia which circulates throughout the unit and then evaporates and goes to the bottom for more heating. Weird, huh? That explains why Servel was excited enough about electricity to put a badge in the fridge bragging about it. It's there in the picture, below her boobs.

So yeah, boobs. Look at this ad! Then please make a growling cat sort of noise to yourself, because that's clearly what the designers of this ad had in mind. She's getting ice cubes... for two! She's in her nightie, and wearing makeup. There's only a couple of reasons a woman would be dressed for bed with makeup on. She's not getting ready for a Playboy shoot.  She doesn't look like she's in a photo studio (even though she is). She's in her kitchen, and it's bizness time! And it kind of looks the photographer is the lucky fella. Either that or she's one hell of an actress. Look at those eyes. I guess the implication is that, if you're getting ready to "make the sexy", you don't want to fumble around with ice cube trays.

This ad looks funny because it's part of a two page spread. Here's the other page.

Nothing super funny here... just Junior at the start of a habit that will have him undergoing bariatric surgery when he's thirty. What a lovable little scamp. Stealing cake.






This window AC unit is great. It looks like a drawer. Great job disguising the thing, guys. It looks like a perfectly ordinary window drawer.
 "Nice window drawer, Gordon." "Thanks, Chuck! It makes me feel like I've captured the world and stuck it in my drawer as punishment for being so very naughty." "Uh huh. I gotta go, Gordon!"


It looks like a filing cabinet got caught breaking into their house.

Lastly, the logo is great. It's cool enough to put on a supercar. There's a free font out there that's pretty similar to this, called Dragonwick.

Young Men Typists - Heh heh.

Why did Smith Corona feel the need to sell typewriters based on  helping young men get a job? Well, the ad ran in Popular Mechanics, I suppose. And it being 1940 and all, everyone knows that only men read Popular Mechanics. Strangely, though, you'd think that "everyone knows that only women type" would be the standard thought in 1940.

So, I guess we applaud Smith Corona with one hand only, for their progressive "anybody can type" philosophy, even if they're just trying to sell more units.

Their choice of head shots is pretty funny. It looks like they chose three young men who look like they couldn't drive a nail or hold a rifle to use as typewriter candidates. Did they choose extra-wimpy guys on purpose? "TYPING AIDS YOUNG SISSIES SEEKING OPPORTUNITY". Why not have a young guy with a beard and a duelling scar or an eyepatch? "TYPING AIDS YOUNG CONVICTS IN WRITING PAROLE ESSAYS"

It seems that, nomatter how hard they tried to be fair and non-prejudiced, companies in the old days couldn't help but be insulting and prejudiced.

I do like their use of quotes around the adjective "tops", as if the phrase had just been invented and they needed to use finger quotes when reading the copy to each other in the brainstorming session. Wait. Did they have finger quotes in 1940? When were those invented? That may be an interesting research project, if I can figure out how to research it.

UPDATE: Hey, guess what? Finger quotes can be traced back as far as 1927, according to The Phrase Finder, which cites a 1927 article in Science magazine...

"Some years ago I knew a very intelligent young woman who used to inform us that her 'bright sayings' were not original, by raising both hands above her head with the first and second fingers pointing upward. Her fingers were her 'quotation marks' and were very easily understood."

Here's the picture shown in the article on Phrase Finder. Hah! That's great.

Fiberglass - May be hazardous. Have your daughter do it.

Fiberglass is weird stuff. It's still debated whether or not it's a carcinogen. Mostly, the anti-fiberglass people are bothered by it's similarity to asbestos fibers. The difference is that, when glass fibers break into smaller particles, they only break across the fiber, giving you little crumbly bits. Asbestos fibers can only break longditudinally, or along the length of the fiber, resulting in ever thinner, pointy little spears. When inhaled, your body can't shake them loose. You can't cough them out, and they stay there forever, irritating your lungs and possibly killing you as a disease called mesothelioma. Glass fibers can be expelled from your lungs, and as of yet, fiberglass is not considered a carcinogen.
Yeah, great and all that. Fiberglass still has lots of other unpleasantness to offer. Fibers can lodge in your skin and cause irritation. Inhaled particles can cause coughing and nosebleeds. OSHA guidelines recommend wearing a respirator, several pairs of gloves, a space suit, and a backup spacesuit in case you snag your first spacesuit on a nail crawling around your attic, which you will. Of course, the sticker on your hammer insists that you wear goggles and a hardhat every time you even look at the thing. So, grain of salt.

Apparently, in 1958, the hazards of fiberglass weren't understood. At the time, fiberglass had been on the market for twenty years, but apparently everyone blamed their itchy skin on communism or something. Until I saw this ad, I didn't even know fiberglass was used to make air conditioner filters. That's kind of horrifying - blowing air through fiberglass to distribute fibers into your house for easy inhalation all summer long.

In panel three, they show the little girl (with the creepy retouched eyes) holding the filter with her bare hands. Yikes. When I insulated my attic, I wore a bunch of clothes to keep from touching the stuff, and when it accidentally brushed my wrist, it brought on a barely suppressible attck of the heebie jeebies. After the attic ordeal, I had a cold. brutal shower like in Silkwood.

Incidentally, if you get fiberglass in your skin, it's better to wash the area with cold water. Warm water will open your pores, encouraging the fibers to work their way farther in ...unless you're a darling little girl, I guess. Then it's okay to have an Owens-Corning sandwich for supper and sleep under a blanket of R-30.

Magnavox TV Credenza - Yee Haw!

In the era of Gunsmoke and Bonanza, is it any wonder that televsision sets looked like they were built by the Apple Dumpling Gang? Everybody's couch had twisty armrests and everybody's kitchen table had wiggly spindle legs. At the time, colonial styling was so popular that you could buy pants with wainscotting around the lower legs and crown moulding in place of a belt.

 

In 1968, if you wanted a home theater experience, you probably bought an all-in-one package like many people do today. Unlike today, after lugging home a giant box in your Rambler, you dragged the thing into your living room, had spinal surgery, and then opened the giant box. You then pulled out... a giant box only a few inches smaller than the box it came from. This box wasn't made of cardboard. It was probably made of wood and some plastic that looked like wood. If yours was a real fancy family, it maybe had barn doors on the front that could hide the screen, for when cowboys come to visit.
The screen was no bigger than about 24" measured diagonally, and was roughly hemispherical, like watching TV projected on the surface of an astronaut's helmet. Not only did this make you feel more excited about the upcoming moon landing, it also allowed people to view the screen from 90 degrees to the side of the TV set. Also, it reminded you that you were futuristic, because, as anyone will tell you, by the year 2000 everyone will live in domed cities.

In the top of your new entertainment console was a record player, for all your Johnny Mathis needs. Or, you could watch I Love Lucy while listening to The Doors in case you wanted to go insane. If the turntable broke, you had to call in a carpenter to come fix it.

In 1968, entertainment was simple. Cowboy shows and family comedies for mom and dad. A picture of balloons for the kids. This was mostly because they were all hopped up on "the drugs". It hardly mattered what was on. They'd be just as happy watching a box of cereal. Just to mess with them, mom and dad would apparently lay down some sod in the family room instead of carpet. This way,  the kids would think they were watching TV in the back yard. Don't ask why - it was the sixties, and the seventies wouldn't make much more sense.

Columbia Cartridge Club - Squarin' the Night Away

Many people old enough to have a mortgage or buy shamwows with a credit card still aren't old enough to remember record clubs. But, they used to be the most popular way to buy music. Well, they were a popular way to buy music. That is to say, they were a way to buy music. Actually, they were a way for several people to buy music once and then immediately hate that way of buying music.
For everyone under 30, here's how they worked.

1. You subscribe to the club and immediately get from one to ten albums free. You chose from maybe a hundred or so albums listed in the ad. Nomatter what you chose, your shipment would always include one Captain and Tenille album. This is the last time you ever have a choice in your life as a club member.

2. Every month, the record company sends you The Monthly Selections, and you pay full price for the albums. It was usually around four albums, and every member gets the same records. No choice. Why would you want to choose? What's wrong with you? Giving people choice is bad for business, you communist.

3. The very day you receive your first set of shitty albums, you regret ever signing up and begin a life-long resentment of the record industry that still shows you new facets to your capacity for loathing to this very day. You can send the records back for a refund, but in discovering how shitty the albums are, you had opened the package, and now you could enjoy repacking the albums and paying shipping charges. The business model of the record club relies heavily on people's laziness and procrastination, as there was usually a time limit on returning your albums. How's that for customer-oriented marketing?

4. Upon quitting the club, the record company would send you a friendly letter reminding you that your membership obligation didn't expire for one to one thousand years in the future, and as such, suicide would only transfer your membership obligation to your heirs. Because of this clause, there is a woman in Baraboo, Wisconsin who is responsible for purchasing over six hunderd LP's, 8-tracks, and cassettes every month featuring bands she neither likes, nor has ever heard of, apart from their occurrence in the monthly music shipment, delivered via CH-47 helicopter to her roof, courtesy of the Columbia Music Club. Due to the financial burden of her inherited contractual obligations, she declares bankruptcy every four hours, and the record company has resorted to claiming her monthly membership fees in organ "donations".

Now, in 2009, record companies are still finding new ways to punish their customers. From Sony BMG's rootkit disaster, to DRM, there's always another way for music publishers to make music buyers angry and take away their choices.

Yeah yeah, big deal. Look at these happy squares, swinging away the night, thanks to Generic Man's two new 8-track cartridges. Well, presumably he owns a third one, which hopefully is already playing. Otherwise, the couple in the background are doing what, exactly? Are they in their pre-dance pose, ready to rock, as soon as Generic Man chooses between Little Green Apples and Goin' Out of My Head? Maybe the man with Tiny Legs Syndrome (TLS) is just standing around looking normal, and the lady in the groovy dress is recoiling in horror? I'll assume that Little Green Apples is playing and she's recoiling in horror.

Polaroid - Choose? No thanks.

Earlier this fall (10/2009), after previously announcing it would be halting production of it's instant cameras and film, Polaroid announced it would once again be in the insta-photo business. This was mostly because loads of people went "Nooooooo!" Then Polaroid went "Really?" Apparently, there are still lots of people who need a picture of something really quick, even if it looks like crap. Crime scene investigators and construction guys were the two that stood out most in my mind. Polaroid pictures look like hell, and so do the cameras. The pictures don't have much of an excuse. The technology's as good as it can get. The cameras don't have an excuse. They're designed. By people. Who have eyes. I think.
Polaroid says "Choose". My answer is "Do I have to?" I guess they're proud of the completeness of their product line, from cheap and ugly to sort of expensive and frikkin hideous.

When I first turned the page on this ad, just because of the way the cameras are arranged, I thought it was a series of teardowns. You know, where they show you the inside of a device by taking off some bits and snapping pictures. That was about a half a second of my looking-time. Then it became horribly clear that these weren't pictures of a camera in progressive states of disassembly. These were a row of five complete cameras in saleable condition! I flinched.

Polaroids have never been attractive cameras. However, at least they looked "finished". They looked like they were done being assembled. This line of Polaroids look like a normal camera with the shell taken off. Each looks like it was  made out of pieces of five or six different cameras of better breeding.

It takes a real force of will to make boxes and rectangles clash with each other. Polaroid's designers found a way! Any shape you find on one of these monstrosities will not be repeated anywhere else on the thing. Make a notch on one side and don't balance it with a feature of similar shape on the other side. Add a box on the top and be sure not to use a texture from anywhere else on the camera to tie it in. There are brushed metal surfaces, painted silver surfaces, textured black plastic, smooth black plastic, ridges and unnecessary lines everywhere.

Many things from 1968 were beautiful. I can't believe Polaroid found a camera mighty enough to take a picture of their cameras without cracking the lens.

Smith Corona - Microsoft word, Ver. Minus44

Copy and paste, undo, fonts, formatting, etc. It's easy to list the things we can't live without that are all things this thing can't do. Don't care. I love this thing, and I'm not just being a grumpy luddite.
Undo, and all the rest, are things that I agree we can't live without. I can't either. That's why it's called progress. But when was the last time you typed on a fossilized machine like this? They feel great. When the keyboard was integral to the mahcine itself, much more engineering effort was put into the feel of the keyboard. If the keyboard failed, the whole mahcine was dead, so better switches were used underneath every key. The whole thing feels more solid and smooth. Of course, the whole machine eighed as much as your desktop computer, but meh, so what?

Currently, your keyboard costs about twenty dollars and is kind of disposable. And, if you ask me, it feels that way. It feels like thin plastic with silicone domes under each key. Yes, this makes the action very light and silent, but each key has a lateral wobble that doesn't lend my fingers any confidence. Old typewriters and to some extent, old keyboards (more on that in a minute), work on a mechanism with metal springs and mechanical switches. The feel is much more solid, smooth, and can still have a light action.

The popularity of retro-looking, but otherwise completely modern, products should indicate that there's a market for more. The new Camaro and Mini Cooper show us that people like modern engineering with classic styling. I'd pay a little extra for a super fast computer with a case and keyboard like this Smith-Corona. I'd love a two tone mint green computer with clicky cylinder keys. The closest I have come, short of doing some custom frankenstein case mod, is my IBM Model M keyboard. You can get one of your own if you're weird like me. My keybaord is from 1995, the tail end of the beige era in personal computer design. I think there's a crying need for something that looks like 1964, but works like 2009.

Magnavox - Children, Obey HypnoClown.

Wendy and Eggbert stared, feared and continued to stare. HypnoClown seemed to see them right thruogh the glass of their spectacular 400 square inch screen. Their hearts quivered. It seemd like days since they had felt  two evenly spaced  heartbeats. Blood barely crawled through their little veins. Jaws slackened, and a thin filament of spittle shivered in their otherwise imperceptible breath.

HypnoClown would tell them when to breathe again. HypnoClown would reveal the wisdom of their next heartbeat only when they were worthy. An age passed and they fell into the inky depths of his loving eyes. They fell for days it seemed and still they continued to fall. No bottom to those knowing, understanding eyes.

Surely HypnoClown would reach for them. His fingers would inevitably grasp the edges of the screen and he would step beyond the bounds of the Provincial Fruitwood cabinet, and then he would be with them, possibly forever. Then HypnoClown would preotect Wendy and Eggbert from mother and father. Protect them from the cold light of day. Protect them from the terrifying agony of ever making a decision again. HypnoClown would decide what was best for them. Wendy and Eggbert would simply live forever in the warm, loving mind of HypnoClown. Then everything would be okay forever. All they had to do was... just.. let...go.

Kodak - Rejoice, We Are Spoilt

Christmas, 1961. A camera under the tree. "Weeeeee!" goes little Rufus. "Weeeeee!" goes little Agda. "Weeeeee! Why'd we give our kids weird names?" goes mom. "It was your idea. This marriage is a lie! Weeeeee!" goes dad.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your mobile phone can do 90% of what this family wanted this camera to do for them. Your pocket-sized point & shoot can do 90% of what all the stuff on the right could do. Maybe 92%. This is definitely great. All this capability owes it's existence to these guys, who just won the Nobel Prize for inventing the CCD chip that has made basically every non-filmy camera technology possible.

Look how cool all those cameras are. All boxy and chunky. In some way or another, each resembles the front of a semi truck. Hilarious and great. So, in a way, it's kind of sad that the era of this stuff is now gone. You can find really good film cameras in antique stores for not much money at all, maybe 15-50 dollars, even for a European brand. They are tempting, but I'd only be buying it to worship the engineering. As always, all of these images can be clicked and viewed at insanely high resolution.

Lastly, look at the plug for Disney's TV show "The Wonderful World of Color". BAH hah hah! That's adorable. Color was still enough of a thrilling novelty that they put it in the name of the show.

Jeez. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll have to get an old film camera. You know.. just to worship the engineering of it.

Analog Retouching - The toolbar of 1966

Here's what they had to work with in 1966: an airbrush. A real airbrush made out of machined brass and plated with chrome. Just like Photoshop, it was a beautiful tool that, in the hands of a dedicated idiot, could do some real damage.
This was an article in Life magazine about some new Truman Capote novel about a murdered farmer in Kansas. The murder actually happened, and here's the mangled newspaper photo to prove it. The picture was reprinted in the Life article about the novel. I can't tell if the photographic pummeling was done by a Life staffer (unlikely, as Life was a national publication that probably had decent artists in-house) or an artists working at the local Kansas paper that ran the original story. I'm guessing it was the latter.

There's a site I visit daily called Photoshop Disasters. They post unbelievable photo molestations found on the web and in print, out in the real world. PSD pretty much has  made it their mission to call out terrible artists who have no business doing art. Some may call it mean, but I think that people who have no business sticking their nose into Photoshop shouldn't stick their nose into Photoshop.

The digital revolution, like so very many technologies, has brought the tools of production within easy reach of nearly everybody. Who should have the tools of production within easy reach? Something less than almost everybody, if results count for anything. Back in '66, there were more excuses for bad retouching. The local Kansas paper had a small talent pool to draw from. The picture may have needed to go to press really quickly, allowing very little time to do the retouch. Mostly, though, I think skill with the tool can be blamed. I have an airbrush, and they  are hard to control. Granted, I didn't concentrate daily on improving my skill like a career airbrush guy would. Still, getting the feel of a tool like a dual-action airbrush is something that takes years to get decent at, to say nothing of mastery. At least in the digital realm, there's CTRL+Z to help you get the hang of it.

The moral of the story is, the digital revolution has brought the tools of shitty art within easy reach of nearly everybody.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Endorsed by The Munsters

Finally! Someone found a way to sell encyclopedias: with wacky sitcom tie-ins. It seems so obvious now, I can't believe nobody thought of it sooner. Of course, that's the way it always is with genius. It seems natural and easy only after the visionary does it.

I imagine it went down this way. Britannica had this old Munsters license lying around the office that they paid tens of thousands of dollars for and never exploited. Then a temp worker found it while dusting off a few thousand pounds of obsolete volumes of last year's product. The Munsters license was stuck between M and N. "Hey, why don't we use this thing? It looks expensive." the temp said. "Oh, that thing" marketing guy replies. "Sure, just make up some feeble tag line and call a few magazines. We don't really need to try real hard to sell these things. People will always need paper books for information. There will never be a superior technology. You'll learn that once you've been here a while."

The very young reader may not remember the era of printed encyclopedias. We are spoiled. Don't let anyone tell you different. Back in "yore", any kid who needed to find something out either asked one of the parents (whichever one wasn't wasted on cooking sherry or plain old brandy) or went to the library to look it up in a book. That was the smart family (apart from the being drunk part). Let the library buy the books and go use them for free. Or, the really rich / foolish family spent upwards of seven hundred dollars on a set of encyclopedias that would be inaccurate and useless before they were don't making payments on them.

Seven hundred dollars in 1966 money comes to 75 million dollars now. So, family pays 75 mil for books that should be mostly accurate for several days, and until mom and dad send in the last check for 288 thousand dollars, there will be no new and more accurate encyclopedias. Meanwhile, Susie still thinks that Namibia is still part of South Africa and she has never heard of Burkina Faso. What a poor, dumb kid.

Britannica is very careful not to mention the price in the ad. They only ention "easy payments." On top of all this, Britannica's accuracy is right about on par with Wikipedia. Either Britannica's editors have gotten sloppy or Wikipedia actually works. Or paper encyclopedias are something we should be happy to see go the way of the dodo.