The March of Science, #11

Sta Safe Eye Mask - An clip art and gaff?

Good news, too-much-sex-havers! Your days of sexual peril are at an end, thanks to the Sta Safe Eye Mask! With the Sta Safe strapped to your face, you will stay safe from any and all sexual contact.

"Safe", that is, unless your're somehow into sexual welding, in which case you will completely not be protected from having a puddle of molten Sta Safe bonded to your head. Lastly, if you can only get turned on by third degree burns and searing hot face plastic, you're in luck. Sta Safe has you covered.

"Built to stand the gaff of hard service,..." Hmm. "Gaff"? This is a new use of that word. Did the tradesmen of 1946 use "gaff" as part of their eye-melting jargon? Let's see what the laziest of dictionary searches can turn up.

Definition of gaff
a :  a spear or spearhead for taking fish or turtlesb :  a handled hook for holding or lifting heavy fishc :  a metal spur for a gamecockd :  a butcher's hooke :  a climbing iron or its steel point used by a telephone lineman
:  the spar on which the head of a fore-and-aft sail is extended:  gaffe

Nope. Unless the copy writer for Sta Safe just forgot to add the "e", which would mean "a mistake or fumble", the mystery goes on. Just for the sake of curiosity, let's assume it was spelled right, and it is meant to be "gaff", as printed.

What does my copy of Partrige's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English have to say about "gaff"? Completely ordinary bookshelf - DEPLOY!

Let's see...

So, "gaff" either means "a criminal affair or enterprise", or "a dwelling-place".

I think the guys at Standard Safety Equipment Company just forgot the "e". So, the ad seems to intend that the goggles are tough enough to stand the "gaffe of hard service" (meaning mistakes and abuse). That's a bit anticlimactic. I was hoping to unearth a bit of arcane terminology, but instead we got ordinary sloppy grammar from goggle-makers, just like always. Dammit, goggle producers of the world! When will you tighten up the screws on your verbiage?!?

You'd think a nerd with glasses like that would be a better speller, wouldn't you? Well, GOOD NEWS, poorly-spelling nerds! We've got your new profile picture here! Use it on all your InstaFace accounts! You're welcome!

Click for 1000px jpeg.

Now how much would you pay? Well, shut up, because here's another Graphic Gift! See those tiny serving suggestions down the right side of the ad? Well, one of them obviously shows a person being comedically crushed under a car! Ha ha ha! You need that as a nice clean clip art, right? Yep!

It kinda makes you want to open up a car repair service and use this image in your logo, just so you can see all the customers totally fail to stampede to your garage, doesn't it? "Your car's not fixed until one of our technicians dies." You're extra welcome!

"'Slingshots' Pace the Drag Strips" - Full 1959 Popular Mechanics article.

In 1959, purpose-built dragsters were kind of a new thing, and drag racing was very much a homegrown motorsport. Teams were experimenting with every aspect of the car's configuration, which is kind of fun to see in this 1959 article in Popular Mechanics. We now present the whole damn article.

Most conspicuously, these old dragsters placed the driver behind the engine, and often behind the rear wheels. As the article explains, this decision was made for reasons of weight distribution and traction.  In later decades, this decision was un-made for reasons of not having red-hot exploding motor pieces shooting into your face, as was often the case, among other motivations. See? Safety!

You may recognize Mickey Thompson's name as a record holder with his twin-engine car, mentioned toward the end of the article. The company he would later form still makes tires and wheels for all types of motorsports. Neat!

Anyway, there's also a 1959 documentary on the "exciting new sport of drag racing" at the bottom of the post, too - Ingenuity in Action. It's got exact music you think of, when dreaming of doing a pass in the high tens in your home built drag car: a sort of Holiday for Strings type of thing that was the soundtrack for everything in The Fifties, no matter how badass or potentially lethal the activity. It's frikkin' adorable. Don't miss it.

Christy Trades School - Earn big money, Pac-Man.

So you're Pac-Man, and you've graduated from high school, and you're wondering what's next. Maybe you could get a desk job, but that's just not for you, am I right? You're good with your hands. There's hope for a man like you.

If you're good with your hands, Christy Trades School can teach you to fix appliances at home in your spare time. That's not such a bad opportunity, is it? Better jump at it while you can. I mean, it's not like someone's going to pay you to just eat all day, are they?

Here's your Handypacman avatar, ready for all your social networky, chat servicey, online profiley type of things. Everyone will assume it's something Japanese, but everyone are jerks. Why do you hang out with jerks like that? Stop hanging out with that "everyone" crowd. You can do better, buddy,

Click for 1000 px.

UPDATE: Helpful Reader Gunnar did himself some P-Shopping and extracted Pan-Man from this ad, and then extracted Pac-Man's eyes. He didn't mention what he did with Pac-Man's extracted eyes, but the world's probably better off not knowing. There's also a serving suggestion for what kind of fun you could get up to with the PNG he created. Thanks, Gunnar!

Short cuts for the clever homeowner.

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Solving Home Problems

Servicing the machine.

Joke #1 - "Okay, you're nearly there. Hold it. Good. Aaaaand three, two one... clench!"

Joke #2 - Developers are still searching for a less-disgusting replacement for the working name of the "Groinal Sackulator". Current favorite is "Crotchotron".

Joke #3 - "Hey, Don, we're getting some funny readings from that beam you're grinding on, but it could just be some cheese in the waste basket."

Joke #4 - "Done, come down, buddy. I'm sorry for what I said about wave/particle duality."

Joke #5 - Don was snagged again - this time, over eight feet off the floor. He didn't know how this kept happening. He would really have to start watching what he did with his nostrils.

Joke #6 - "Yes, right there. It looks like a good fit. All you have to do is wear this unobtrusive apparatus until we can take the stitches out. You need to be more careful around floor jacks, Don."

Joke #7 - Runner up in Fermilab's 1956 Funniest Accidental Penetration Photo contest.

Joke #8 - "You know, Don, some day people won't need machines like this any more. I think there will be little pills that do the same thing."

Joke #9 - "Nope, it's still radioactive. I'm reading 1200 CPM down here. How do your sperm feel?"

Joke #10 - "We were gonna position the oil filter down here at floor level, but that would have cost ninety cents more per unit. Isn't that funny, Don? ...I said ISN'T THAT FUNNY?"

Joke 11 comes to us courtesy of Mr.FancyPPPants_2. Thanks, MFPPP! - Joke #11: Then Sam realized "That machine is entirely electric!,...Don didn't say 'PISTON', dammit!"...Then he went to get the blow-dryer....

[ Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

Shinola - Know things from it.

So, even if you're a millennial, and you think the universe began in 1990, you have probably heard a colloquialism implying the importance of knowing "shit from Shinola". If you've heard that, well done. "But," you may cry "what ever does it mean?". Cry no more, little one.

So, Shinola was a brand of shoe polish that, according to Wiktionary, had the look of poo. Missed opportunity. The makers of Shinola could have easily gone with the name "Shoe Poo". But anyway...

know shit from Shinola
A colloquialism which dates back to the early 1940s in the United States, sometimes ended with "that's why your shoes don't shine". Shinola was a popular brand of shoe polish, which had a color and texture not unlike feces.
Verb
know shit from Shinola(US) To have the most basic level of intelligence or common sense.

Well, that's another case wrapped up tight, but it does raise an odd question. Did Shinola, Inc. come up with this weird little swear-laden slogan? This seems unlikely, as the ad comes to us from a 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics, and swears were just as verboten in advertising as they are today. Hmm. Two things make me suspect it's from the military. Number A) shoe polish was important to those in the service - especially in decades past. Number B) soldiers love dirty talk. Let's see if The Ultranet knows anything. Phrases.org.uk seems to have an idea...

The 'ola' suffix is popular in the USA as part of trade names, e.g. Crayola, Granola etc. This leads to the pronunciation of Shinola as shine + ola. That spoils the alliteration a little as it would work better as shin + ola. 

This phrase is typical of the barrack room vulgarity of WWII, which is where it originated. Other "doesn't know" phrases, also mostly from the military are, "doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground" (or elbow, or a hot rock, or third base), "doesn't know enough to pee downwind", "doesn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass". The tone is lifted a little by the English conductor Sir Henry Wood who expressed a similar opinion with "he doesn't know his brass from his woodwind".

Aaaah, the good old military does not disappoint. If it's clever enough to be a jingle, but filthy enough to be funny, seek your answer in the armed forces.

But this 1935 Shinola ad is innocent. They're just selling shoe polish. The picture is interesting, though. She really likes the look of his super-shiny shoes.

That's quite a leer on that guy's mug. That's quite an appreciative lady sitting next to him. Good thing this picture isn't taken out of context or it could be really suggestive.

Hey! I got an idea! Let's take this picture out of context so it can be really suggestive! Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade! Assemble! PKSHOWW!!!


All right team! On my mark! Hut!

Make selection of dot pattern!...    Complete!
Copy dot pattern!...    Complete!
Fill in background behind man's head with dot pattern!...    Complete!
Improvise outline of man's hair!...    Complete!
Pattern Brush lady's dress where the tin overlaps it!...    Complete!
Pattern Brush man's suit where the tin overlaps it!...    Complete!
Crop image!...    Complete!

I don't know what you citizens will do with this newly enfilthened picture, but I hope you disappoint all your spouses and associates with your adolescent shenanigans. God's speed, prurient readers. You're welcome! Get your rude finger ready to right-click this naughty jpeg into your digital smut bucket in three, two, one, RIGHTCLICK NOW!

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Inventions - Amusements for your bemusement.

Toy bullhorn helps children enjoy the fun of shouting, screaming, wailing, howling, yelling, caterwauling, shrieking, yammering, babbling, making a godawful racket, and wearing bow tie. Runs on two D batteries.

Security door chain locks with key, can be installed with screwdriver in minutes, is guaranteed to keep out home invaders weighing less than 94 pounds, but more than 60 pounds, and are unequipped with screwdriver.

Odd Ogg teaches children the importance of playing willingly with anything smiling,with its arms out, and offering toys.

Miracle shoe lights are powered by battery in the heel, help feet clearly see an area fourteen inches in front of feet. Excellent for feet that stay out too late drinking with the boys' feet and want to sneak into bed without waking the wife's feet.

Masonite Presto Pegboard bedroom suggestion - Dot Pattern.

What do you do if you have an eleven year old boy who owns twenty-three objects? Where to store them? Masonite has your answer. Hang everything on the walls, leaving the floor completely empty, because - you know, it's hot lava.

With Masonite pegboard's beautiful handsome "tracery" design, not only will your boy human be able to hang most of his twenty-three of his objects on the walls, but with the optional Gaming Pack, he will also enjoy playing tic-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-tac-toe, right on the wall! This way, when a really hot game session reaches into the small hours, he can leave the game state undisturbed until tomorrow, leaving him free to plot his strategy about where to place his next "O" while he drifts off to dreamland.

With your "grandpa's" old-timey tic-tac-toe game, played on the floor, players had to wrap up the game any time someone had to walk somewhere. What a loser way to live. Grandpa was a stupid loser.




What did eleven year old boys own in 1962? Never made it without biting. Let's find out...

Here is everything a boy needs in Masonite's 1962:

- One Indiana pennant, to show support for Indiana... or triangles.
- One rifle, to fend off communists.
- One football helmet, to fend off being a nerd.
- Various books, to keep his football helmet from rolling off the shelf.
- One... horse?... statue, now with child-bearing hips! Car geeks will just call this leg configuration "staggered fitment".
- One tennis racquet, to fend off tennis balls, or play some "air banjo".
- One S.S. Minnow model boat, due to popularity of early Sixties reality shows.
- One lantern, to check the shed for chupacabras.
- One black oblong, to commemorate the Oblong Wars, and the ensuing Oblong Famine, which we must never forget.
- One boxed, store-fresh baseball, for nailing nerds with.
- One scale model of the sun, which orbits the Earth, the center of the universe. Hey, it's in the Bible, heathens!
- One H.O. scale boxcar, with hobo cockroach, "Alabama Tcxhixtor": Poet of the H.O. Rails.
- One H.O. scale tanker car, filled with Zippo fluid, soon to blow a crater in bedroom floor.
- One chemistry set, unopened.
- One travel backgammon set, "chess for idiots".
- Various books that probably say stuff in them.
- One Masonite brochure, featuring new "Masonite Pressboard Trousers".
- One three ring binder, with baseball cards, to be thrown out in two years, spelling the end of mother-son relationship forever.
- One desk set, given annually on Birthday, by grandma.
- Four wall-mounted cars, VW Beetle, '49 Ford, 1960 Dodge Dart, and paddy wagon, all for non-stop wall-mounted fun.
- One mid-century modern lamp, despite the fact that bedroom is lit like a cafeteria.
- One chair, shaped like maxi pad.
- One bed, for making baby Jesus cry.

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Jerry Woodward's Vortex 2000

Your car has too many wheels. Knock one off already, okay? An intern dropped this 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics on my desk this morning, which has a little feature on a three-wheeled car built by one Jerry Woodward of Provo, Utah. Bravely, he chose to put the single wheel in front. More on that after the article.

So, yeah, the end of the car with just one wheel is the front end. It looks better that way, of course, because cars should be dart-shaped. Even a senator with a nose full of coke and a yield sign through his temporal lobe will tell you that.

The trouble with a single-front-wheel design is braking related dive. See, most cars lack the power to mash you back into your set while accelerating, but almost every car can squeeze the brakes hard enough to throw your weight forward with the equivalent of a few hundred horsepower, if you get what I mean. When that happens in a regular car, the nose of the car squishes down on the front suspension as the weight of the vehicle dives forward with the force of several engines. This is called "brake dive". Think how long your car takes to accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour. Unless yours is a particularly sporty model, it's probably around nine seconds. Now think about how quickly you sometimes need to get from sixty to a dead stop without wrecking anything or dying. In those situations, three seconds feels like an eternity. You want to stop, post haste. Your brakes are powerful. This from what-when-how.com:

The brakes must be capable of decelerating a vehicle at a faster rate than the engine is able to accelerate it. Normally brakes have to absorb three times the amount of engine horsepower energy in its equivalent form.

If you jam on the brakes in your square car while turning, it will maybe slide straight anyway, regardless of what you're doing with the steering wheel (understeer), or maybe spin around (oversteer). But, if your car has one wheel in the front and two in the back, braking while turning will throw the weight of the car (with lots of force) to one of the front corners of the vehicle, where there are exactly zero wheels. In addition to understeer and oversteer, this introduces a potentially thrilling new driving dynamic called "rolling your car onto its roof". If this happens, you can't always rely on Phil Oakey from the Human League to stroll on by and roll you upright again. (See the video below.)

In The Seventies, personal ATVs had three wheels, with one in front and two in the back. The tallness of ATVs relative to the width of their base made them prone to rolling over on top of you if an unlicensed pilot (You didn't need a license to use one.) made the mistake of braking while turning. This design was abandoned in 1988 in favor of the more common four-wheeled design we see today.




The most notable production vehicle with the pointy-at-the-front three-wheeled design was a British thing called the Reliant Robin, famously made famous on this side of the pond, courtesy of television,  by Jeremy Clarkson as one of the most baffling design decisions in automotive history. Observe...

You can still buy a vehicle with three wheels, but they tend to put the single wheel in the back. This looks less intuitively "right", one may say, but it is much less potentially "head scrapey", as a design.

A T-Rex and a Can-Am Spyder. Motorcycle guys will probably tell you your training wheels are cute.

So, as part of our standard due diligence, the P.A.G! Research and Googling Brigade spent several seconds and literally tens of keystrokes checking up on Jerry Woodward and his Vortex X-2000, the car of The Future. Guess what? He's still around! He owns an auto glass shop in Provo, which features a museum of not only the Vortex, but a number of cars, all built by Jerry himself, with various wheel counts, including five and six wheels, because why not? Right on. There are enough "customz" around consisting of slamming the suspension and sticking on a set of hideous wheels and calling yourself a hot rod builder. Here's Jerry's shop.

As it states in the Pop Mech article, Jerry has done hard turns at 60mph without undue upside-downiness. Why's that? Well, details are unavailable, but casual speculation suggests it may have something to do with the wheelbase of the car being comfortably longer than the Reliant Robin's, and the positioning of the hefty V8 at the back of the car, helping to keep the rears on the ground. Job one, when pencilling out your three-wheeled car design, is geometry and weight distribution. Jerry seems to know what he's doing.

Little Ads - Planning your entire life.

Labor day is over. It's time to get back to work. What work? These works! Popular Mechanics has enough careers for you to plan out the rest of your life.

Before you learn the secrets of the "samurai suicide warriors" (hint: it's killing yourself and letting the guilt tear your enemies apart), consider that the information in the 35¢ pamphlet is a year out of date (surplus 1960 printing). The Oxford Studio is prepared to teach you totally outdated methods of killing yourself. Caveat emptor, baby. There's no telling what could go wrong with your combat suicide.

Your opponents may resent your passive-aggressive suicide combat techniques, and beat the crap out of you anyway. Learn to put your teeth back in with a fulfilling career in Dental Mechanicry. Richard Kiel endorses the program.

Crime detection. Gun not included. Hand possibly included.

This ad confirms what we all suspected about attorneys. They're taught with "law-free books".

Modem Family

Joke #1 - "Okay, I've cycled power, and brought him back up after two minutes. He's still tumescent. Now what? Pardon? What? The pills didn't come with any 'special pliers'!"

Joke #2 - "Yep! It's cancer. Thanks doc! This was much more convenient that driving to the hospital."

Joke #3 - "Good news, honey! The doctor says the infection has 'ksssshhhht', whatever that means."

Joke #4 - "Ooooh, I see that your firmware is updated already. Verrrry up...dated."  -I.T. porn scene.

Joke #5 - "Okay, I've extracted the basilic vein from his forearm and stuck it up his nose. What? Shark fin powder on his nipples? No, I don't have.... sigh. Honestly, I was never asked to do anything like this before our clinic's help line was outsourced to Guangzhou."

Joke #6 - "Wups. I'm sorry, sir. With your coverage, your healthcare provider says no procedures will be covered for any claims involving your health, or care, of any kind. Please leave your wallet with the receptionist and, if you could, please throw yourself on the pile of bodies behind the building. Thank you so very much!"

Joke #7 - In 1963, much money was made by clinics offering reverse de-electrolysis treatments, or "rug jobs",  using The Sean Connerizer.

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

Popular Mechanics - Science Bryce.

Guess who advertised in Popular Mechanics. Popular Mechanics! This 1961 ad features a terrific standard issue Eisenhower-era Generic White Man doing science. Using science like this, you could build a garage, make a burglar alarm, or build a bunk bed!

You need this guy, whom we will call Science Bryce, on your hard drive. You can use him to punch up all your best memos and notes. Such memos and notes as...

• It's your birthday, so I'm making dinner tonight, honey.
• 
  
• Good news! My genetic simulacrum is pregnant with our doppleganger! Call the replicants!
• 
  
• We're out of coffee again.
• 
  
• Whoever took it, please return my bubbling vial of glowing fluid. Urgency: medium.
• 
  
• I'm leaving you, Gordon. He's twice the man you are and his name is Dwight... or Yngwe. I haven't decided yet.

We've got a graphic Gift for you, because your experiments came in on time and under budget this morning. His name's Bryce. Science Bryce. He's got an alpha channel background and he's ready to science the place up. Who's your buddy?

Get your rude finger to right click this gent into your privately funded research facility in three, two, one.... RIGHTCLICKNOW!!!!