Timken Bearings - Roll your own... jokes.

Any medium shows you who it thinks it's audience is by the ads it runs. The Saturday Evening Post was a big deal in 1949. It was read by the wife as well as the husband. It had fluffy romance stories and ads for industrial products like Timken roller bearings.

Roller bearings (you know: with cylindrical rollers) can take much heavier loads than ordinary ball (spherical) bearings, due to the larger contact surface between the rollers and the races. The bearings in this ad are tapered rollers, which, when paired in mirror configurations (see the very bottom picture) improve on cylindrical rollers by offering longer life through reduced wear.
Before Timken's patent of the tapered roller bearing, railway cars were carried by wheels mounted on a broom handle stuck through beef hearts. The smell was awful and the beef hearts needed to be replaced every hundred yards.



The first illustration offers many ponderables. The customer in the hat looks like he's under duress, haggling for a price with one of Iowa's slick, devious farmers. "Three cents a bushel? I was really hoping to pay two cents. I'm a senator and I work hard for my money. You couldn't come down at all, could you?"

And who's the kid in the background with the green "X" on his shirt? Clearly, he's the Village Prurient, forever branded with the Viridian X for his unholy relationship with his own mother, who happens to be a cow. Incest! Sickening.

Lastly, there's the creepy little boy on the left, staring directly at us, as if he can see through time and knows what we're doing. "I can see you, snarky future people, and I know what you do with our pictures. I want my iPad, you son of a bitches!" Shudder.


The boy in the bottom picture seems really agitated at the sight of the train. Either he knows something about tapered roller bearings or he thinks the train is guilty of something. Since he's a corn-fed hayseed, we'll assume it's the latter.

Joke # - "Paw! That's the dragon that done ate our chickens! He's gittin' away! Throw some 'maters at 'im, quick!" "No, son. Dragons breathe fire. Stay back!"

Joke #2 - "Father, the horse with a thousand legs runs free. Why do we live imprisoned behind this impenetrable fence? I long to run free with my thousand legs, also."

Joke #3 - "Look, son! The Great Yellow Sun Serpent has come again. It must be pleased with our offering of a maiden tied to it's metal road. We have truly earned this harvest's bounty of 'maters."

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

Jokes ahoy! From Craig...

Joke A: Lookee, Paw, that hobo is equipped with Timken's latest roller-bearing-equipped stink-producing device!

Joke II: 1949: A young Karl Rove invents the "Pull my finger" gag.

Prudential Christmas - No coverage for head melting.

This non-Norman-Rockwell-painted-but-very-Rockwellian Christmas ad comes to you from the Prudential Insurance company, circa 1950.

It shows us the Typical American Christmas Preparation Ritual. Christmas tree hogited in the corner to prevent one of it's daring escapes. Daughter performing the Native American "hey-a-ho-a"  star-shaped cookie dance. Son removing his foot to throw at his sister for making a mockery of his heritage. And the father, Arnold Ernst Toht (of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame) has just nailed his finger to the wall to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus.

Just look at his grimace of Holy Agony. Or, that could be Daddy Toht's best attempt at a loving smile. After all, he's looking forward to the best Christmas gift a Nazi could hope for: yet another ark of the covenant. This year Dinka got him an ark with appropriate History Club stripes and matching tie, so he can wear it to the annual alumni dinner without getting stared at. Doctor Jones won't have to tell Marion to keep her eyes shut this year. Toht will look ark-sharp!

"Oh tanenbaum, Oh tanenBAAAAAAAAAGGH!"

But Toht's got  to be careful what he does with his various arks, because prudential doesn't cover you for "acts of God". Talk about "Do not open until Xmas"! Keep the lid on those arks until you find a company that covers head melting, Toht! That's just being a smart consumer.

Wrangler Jeans - Passive-Aggressive child abuse, fifties style.

The Law of decade Permanence states that any given decade's real identity lingers around two years into the next decade, like the way Xanadu came out in 1980, but was basically a hideous monstrosity of 70s trends and flakiness... kind of like a 70s afterbirth. So, in 1950, cowboys were all the rage, as a holdover from the forties. Davy Crockett hats hung around into the fifties a bit, but basically, I think the whole "pretending to be a cowboy" thing was in it's prime in the forties. You know, like Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story wanted a Red Ryder BB gun. No wait. I do remember a lot of 50s TV shows with various little brothers playing cowboys. Okay, scratch that. I'll make a note to have the Retractions and Redactions squad delete that part about cowboys. But the Law of Decade Permanence still stands.

So anyway, here's an ad for Wrangler jeans pushing the whole cowboy thing. That's all well and good, but children's denim as I remember it was a punishing horror until the mid-seventies, when they figured out the technology behind soft denim.

Because kids are careless spazzes, jean companies see it as their mission to fabricate jeans that will last until the boy is of drinking age. Generally, this means making jeans out of 1/4 inch plywood, with all seams and joints held together with drywall screws... countersunk for comfort, of course.

I never had Wranglers, but I got Sears "Roebuckers" which looked exactly like the jeans in this picture. Roebuckers had the value added feature of knee reinforcements, to prevent the "fabric" from wearing through. This was applied in the form of vinyl sheets ironed into the INSIDE of the pants at the knees. This meant that you could always feel them there, protecting the denim from your presumably jagged knees. They breathed like vinyl too, so if you sat down for more than a few minutes, your knees would sweat. In short order, these vinyl reinforcements cracked and began to peel away from the fabric, creating a hundred little scratchy flaps, constantly poking and scraping at your knees. It became a TV watching task, turning your jeans inside out to peel those goddam vinyl things off, in hopes of wearing the jeans without dreaming of sawing your legs off.

Knee protectors seem like overkill, since this looks to be 14 gauge denim, which could stop a bullet, and the rifle thrown at it when you run out of bullets. I don't know who the boy is shooting at, but those bandits are screwed unless they're wearing jeans like his. If you look closely at the picture, you can see how stiff it is.

Here's a secret for rendering clothing: soft fabric has small wrinkles. Stiff fabric has big wrinkles. If you want clothes to look comfortable, paint the fabric to look as though it conforms to the shape of the body, with small creases and wrinkles at points of articulation, like elbows. Now look at the jeans in this picture. You can't see the shape of the person underneath. It's all triangular folds and panels, like the kid's wearing a denim skyscraper. His elbow is bent around five degrees, which is probably as far as he could manage without breaking his humerus. He's probably pointing the gun at the Wrangler rep who forced him into those jeans.

It's just as well that all my jeans lasted long enough for me to outgrow them. My dad saved up six pairs of my old Roebuckers and built a deck out of them.

Morrell Ham - Un-scary dolls.

This morning I found this ad on my desk, courtesy of the Phil Are Go Effigies and Homunculi team. Well spotted, guys! Wonder of wonders, it's an ad featuring little puppet children that I don't want to stab with a wooden stake! Look!

Unlike the unsettling Borden cows, as ably documented by our humble blorg, these dolls aren't creepy, disturbing or otherwise counterproductive to the ad they inhabit. Their faces are cherubic, if a bit jowly, and their hands are appropriately chubby but not steroidal.

It's still a strange decision, to go with puppets instead of humans, because you'll need to build a miniature set for them to be photographed in (Photoshop didn't exist in 1961). Mini goblets, plates, silverware, chairs, etc etc. I dunno. Maybe it's cheap to find this stuff? Maybe when you're doing an ad with miniatures, you hire a photographer that specializes in miniatures and has all this stuff on hand?

Look at the little boy. He's peeking at his dinner when he should be praying to the twin deities of Rankin and Bass: "Thank you for this enormous ham, and please let me get the part in that Christmas special that starts shooting in spring. By next winter, this gigantic ham will be gone, and we'll need the money to buy another impossibly huge meal, even though we're made of wood, string, and wire, and can't possibly feel hunger."

The product shot has some gorgeous brushwork in it. The highlights on the blue plastic wrap have that loose-but-realistic thing going on where I can see them as A) quickly done brush strokes or B) glints on the shiny plastic, depending on how I look at them. It's great work, there.

I think the Rudolph special is on tonight. The year-round availability of DVDs hasn't changed the fact that I like to watch these stop-motion Christmas shows when they're broadcast. I can't explain why. Tradition or something? It's interesting to note that Rankin-Bass did their best work in stop-motion animation. Their hand-drawn work , like Frosty or that one about the family of mice and the broken clock is terrible. Ugly bucktoothed characters and character animation as stiff as if the drawings were articulated with wire.

So, what have we learned today? Errr, dolls don't have to be creepy, brushstrokes and something about Christmas. Let that be a lesson to you or whatever.

Clay Car Model - Learning through smooshing.

Joke #1 - "Soooo, Kent, you DO know you don't need to use glue when making a clay model, right?"

Joke #2 - "While I do like your use of clay in making the body, I have to question the wisdom of cardboard wheels."

Joke #3 - "Uh huh, uh huh. I like your design, Kent. Howsabout we go crash test your car out the window, shall we.?

Joke #4 - "Kent, I cannot criticize you for wearing that shirt, but I really feel the need to point out that the market for a car this gay is really really small."

Joke #5 - Finding that plastic body panels made their cars rust proof but simply too durable, engineers at Saturn experiment with cars made of clay, to better match the life span of the engines."

Joke #6 - "Kent, I'm going to need you to reduce the 'blowfulness' of your design by, say, this much.Hang on, I keep a baseball bat in my office just for this purpose."

Joke #7 - "Ah yes, excellent design. Will there be a larger model for the obese?"

Joke #8 - "Know what, Kent? These cardboard wheels are wasted on your F minus car. I'm going to give them to Rory for his groovy pickup truck."

Joke #9 - In 1992, designers at Pontiac desperately tried to come up with a body shape that would keep the paint from falling off the Grand Am.

Magee Carpet - Honeymoon in the park.

Here's a happy young couple newly married - possibly to each other. They're about to begin a new life together. The vows have been said. The cake's been cut. And the guests and well-wishers have all gone home. Now it's time for Vestor to carry his new bride across the threshold of their new Cathedral patterned carpet by Magee.
Vestor had taken full advantage of all the G.I. bill had to offer. He'd secured a loan for the carpet, as well as a 12 x 15 foot patch of land near their church, where god could judge them whenever they needed it.

Their new Cathedral by Magee was everything Denise could want. It was long-wearing, and woven of wonderful nylon fiber in a pattern that was a modern classic. And best of all, it was a deep, vibrant beige... her favorite non-color.

They could sleep over on the left, closer to the tree, and they could eat on the opposite side, where the sun was brighter. When their friends came to visit, they could all relax in the middle and share their evening in comfort. When it rained, they could hide underneath it and emerge when the world was washed clean and new.

Vestor couldn't imagine sharing a rug with any girl but Denise, and now the greatest moment had come. He easily lifted her in his arms, so dainty was she, and stepped over the triple-stitched edge of their new rug, and into a bright new stain-resistant life together.

A frisbee whacked him in the back of the head.

RCA / Du Mont Miniature TV camera - It's nearly invisible.

Joke #1 - "Oh, and one more thing. The New iPod Mini comes with video, twelve pounds of extra weight, and a cord. Sorry, we were out of ideas. Please buy it anyway."

Joke #2 - Disguised as an ordinary space heater, this miniature video camera was used to collect critical data on the Soviets during the cold war.

Joke #3 - Replacing your glasses with the new PureSight 20/20 is as easy as looking through a hole in a metal box plugged into a wall, held up to your face all day long. Medicare reimbursement eligible. Also comes in yellow.

Joke #4 - In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU! (Sorry. -Mgmt)

Joke #5 - Disused Soviet TV cameras find new life as personal eye heaters. Use only as directed by ophthalmologist. Note: Do not use.

Joke #6 - A triumph of miniaturization, this new ultra-portable television camera makes it faster and easier to record TV footage of the user's eye anywhere in the world.

Joke #7 Sue joked like this - "Natasha, Moose and Squirrel will NEVER notice the new hi-tech video bug on the side of the lamp!"
-Borris 

[[[commenter jokes will be added to the body of the post]]]