Fiberglass House - Just be careful not to touch it.

Joke #1 This year, instead of building your own house, why not save money and get "groovy" at the same time by purchasing the former set from The Monkees?

Joke #2 Flesh-eating virus: The only real threat to the house made from flesh!

Joke #3 Bobby had to take a time out by the refrigerator. He should have known better than to misbehave today. Daddy was always like this after he'd had a few furnace filters.

Joke #4 Bobby, you really ought to play nicer with The Hulk. You wouldn't share your train with him and now I have to repair the wall.

Joke #5 "Son, you're almost four now. You're nearly a man. Soon you'll be wondering about girls and things like that. I think it's time I teach you a little about fiberglass."

Joke #6 "Look what I got, son! It's a new furnace filter. Ssssh! Don't tell mommy. It'll be out little secret. Let's hide it here in the fridge where she won't see it. This is going to be the best Valentine's Day ever!"

Joke #7 "Becky, you finished your homework early today. As a little treat, how about if you feed The Giant Cone some fruit and maybe the teapot?"

Joke #8 The least popular tile pattern in history: Giant College Ruled Loose
Leaf.

Joke #9 "Becky, you finished your homework early today, so why don't you pick what we have for dinner? ... as long as it's fiberglass."

Studebaker Avanti - And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them?

In October 1963, Motor Trend ran an article on some of the new model year cars. Among them, the Studebaker Avanti.

In the sixties, the car industry was still woozy from the "cars should look like airplanes" trend of the fifties. Fins were shrinking and pretend rocket engines were slowly turning back into normal tail light lenses once again. If you ask me, the fifties were a  time of juvenile car design. Everybody was thrilled with the "space age" and anything that could be made to look like a rocket, should look like a rocket. Nobody seemed to bother to ask "why?". Why should a family car, that rarely if ever exceeds fifty miles per hour, have little wings on the back? Answer: Because grownups are just large children.

To be fair, this motivation hasn't really gone away. Four out of five 1990-something Honda Civics have a giant picnic table wing pop-riveted to the trunk because it "looks cool". never mind the fact that the car is front wheel drive and a rear wing is intended to provide downforce for the rear wheels which tend to break loose under hard cornering if and only if the car is rear wheel drive.

So, there we were, in 1963, with the entire American auto industry just staggering out of bed, wondering what it drank in the fifties, and tripping over an empty bottle of "Tail Fin Tequila". Then, Studebaker bursts in the front door, morning sunlight beaming in. Studebaker is bright and cheery, wondering if Buick, Chevy and Ford want to go jogging. This was the Studebaker Avanti. The Big Three invited Studebaker to go fuck itself.

The Avanti has always been a very modern car, especially considering the age of the design. There's not much to explain. You look at it and you think it's a 1986 something or other. Then somebody points out that it's a '63 Studebaker and you go "Whaaaaaaa??????". That's what I did.

When you say "Studebaker" to most people, they think of the '51 Studebaker Commander that Fozzie and Kermit drove in The Muppet Movie. This makes it even weirder that in 1962, Studebaker came up with the Avanti, a design that would look more at home twenty or thirty years in the future. I don't mean that in the "That car look like it's from the future." way. I mean that from the perspective of someone several decades in the future who thinks the design would be more at home here and now than in 1963 America.

By comparison, here's a picture of a 1964 Mustang - one of the Avanti's competitors and a car that enjoys a much bigger following than the Avanti. It looks pretty clunky by comparison, if you ask me.

The Studebaker factory closed in December 1963, two months after this issue of Motor Trend hit the shelves. There can be lots of reasons a business calls it quits, but one way of interpreting the closure is that people weren't ready for the Avanti. The rest of the industry still had to go 28 years before saying "Oooooh, I get it now!" and making a car that looked even a little bit like the Avanti.

After the death of Studebaker, the Avanti was still produced in small numbers through 1987, the tooling having been purchased by one entrepreneur after another, being built in small quantities for collectors and enthusiasts. That tells you something.

I'm trying to think of a current car that won't be appreciated fully for another twenty or so years. Well there's plenty of unforgivably ugly cars out there. The Pontiac Aztek, Toyota Venza, and any given SUV spring to mind. Does that mean we'll come around in a few decades to give them their due? I doubt that. What's super modern and misunderstood? Errr. If I knew that I'd be rich.

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.

Teleyeglasses (1963) - Keep you from looking in any mirrors.

Joke #1 Gernsback shows off a pair of "teleyeglasses", an idea he first dreamed up in 1936, a punishment for which he feels the world is now ready.

Joke #2 For crippled soldiers returning from war with forehead amputations, the electric forehead brings the promise of a normal life once again.

Joke #3 Every time Gernsback put on the Cool Detector Goggles, both screens read "zero". They must have been receiving interference from a nerdy satellite.

Joke #4 Gernsback shows off the "Make You Look Cool-O-Tron", an idea he first dreamed up in 1936, for which he feels the blind are now ready.

Joke #5 Now, gentlemen, using my new Enhanced Virtual Reality Visor, I can see, in three dimensional stereoscopic simulation, how my friends would treat me if I had a box on my face.

Joke #6 Still better than a Virtual Boy.

Joke #7 Finally, Science has developed technology that makes a bow tie seem cool by comparison.

Joke #8 DARPA feels that the Micrex Plus is now ready for deployment in Afghanistan, where American forces are suffering from a great need for technology that will allow them to inspect the backs of small knobs.

Joke #9 Now, gentlemen, I will, for the first time in history, be able to see INTO THE FUTURE! If you'll just bear with me while I engage the system, like so. Now, I should in a few moments be receiving the first images sent back through time from the future! Yes. I think I see something. The image will become clearer, you see, as the tubes warm up. Yes. The image is stabilizing! I can see it! It's a word! Focusing now. Please turn up the gain, assistant. yes, that's better, thank you. Okay, now I can see the text! It says... "dick" "head".

Joke #10 Virtual reality goggles allow dorks to see what their life would be like if they had friends. Ironically, the goggles always show the user not wearing virtual reality goggles.

Joke #11 Birth control goggles. 0% failure rate.

Pipe Organ Guitar - Primordial Goth Rock

I found this little news item in the back of Popular Mechanics (1960) for a "pipe-organ guitar". I NEEEEED to hear what it sounded like, but for the first time ever, the internet failed to have something.

"Arranged in assorted sizes, like a church organ, the pipes produce a distinct, resonant tone..." The idea is interesting, but a pipe organ uses at least one individual pipe for each note on the keyboard. Different combinations of pipes are used to create tambres (kinds of sounds), so the same note can potentially use lots of pipes, depending on whether you're using the piccolo sound or the trumpet sound.

This guitar only has six "pipes", presumably one for each string. However, each string is used to create many different notes depending on where the musician puts his/her fingers on the fretboard. So, I'm having trouble imagining how the pipes would work with every possible pitch. Maybe I'm being too literal-minded about it. Maybe each pipe is tuned to respond to a specific range of notes, covering all the possible notes created by the instrument?

The only guitar manufacturer I could find in Bavaria was Framus. They were active from the early sixites (ding!) through 1975. No mention of this weirdo guitar though. Vox made what they call the "V251 Guitar Organ", and it existed in 1960, but it was an electric model. Boo.

Here's the Framus logo, and a closeup of the headstock of the pipe-organ guitar. I'm not sure if it's a match or not. For one thing, it looks like it's italicized the wrong direction, slanting to the left instead of right. It's possible that Pop Mech flipped the picture for more convenient page layout, but back in '60, that wasn't effortless like it is now. It would have required some photographic processing, and probably wasn't worth the trouble for this little blurb in the back of the magazine. Also, the guitars in the shop behind him are normal right-handed guitars. Nothing funny back there. So, no flip.

Any guitar people who have some insight into this are welcome to leave comments. Maybe there's a video out there of the pipe-organ guitar in action? Does anybody know of another guitar company from Bavaria owned by a very tall hobbit (look at him!)?

Oh, also, if you look at the ad, apparently there was trouble with invisible horses for some reason. Whatever.

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.