Tram Crash - Please enjoy your day.

Joke #1 - "Park patrons holding a D ticket or lower are requested to kindly step into the Carnage Ogling line. Patrons with an E ticket are free to remain in the Corpse Poking line."

Joke #2 - "...and please enjoy the rest of your day at Questionable Maintenance Gardens."

Joke #3 - "Please leave the ride on your hands and knees, favoring any unbroken limbs, exiting towards the gift shop, where you will find a wide selection of reasonably priced release forms featuring your favorite park characters."

Joke #4 - "This concludes the not-getting-injured part of the tour. Please scramble for safety in an orderly fashion."

Joke #5 - Quickly, the tram passengers voted and unanimously agreed to derail the train, rather than hit the workman eating his lunch on the track.

Joke #6 - This section of track was supposed to be out of service. Ron looked up just in time to see the tram barreling toward him. He had no time to get out of the way before being struck by the lead car. Fortunately, he was wearing his hardhat.

Joke #7 - Subsequently, all park trains on elevated tracks were upgraded from monorails to the more expensive "duorails". A park spokesman defended the move, describing the trams as being "less tippy-crashy and passenger-squishy".

Joke #8 - In September of 1968, by calling in favors with union bosses, Goofy was given a cushy job as Supervisor of Park Engineering and Grounds Maintenance. After only two months in the position, he was under investigation for negligence and fraud. Violating his probation, he fled to the Cayman Islands in a cartoon airplane carrying more than $120 in cash and various novelty hats.

Joke #9 from Craig Craigson. Thanks Craig! - Tra-la-laa, tra-lalalaaaaAUUUUAUUUHGGHHHH!!!! 


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

1959 Ford Anglia - Whither now, Yankee Brit?

American car companies generally have a presence in the UK market. However, they usually sell totally different (some would say "better") models there, that are entirely unavailable here in the states. In the past, this has inspired many MANY shoutings of "double-you tee eff?" Ostensibly, this is attributed to "differing tastes". The car company will simply tell you that Americans don't like that type of car, and thus YOU don't want that car. Things were different in 1959.

This is a '59 Ford Anglia - a compact car designed for the British market. Smaller cars are more popular in Europe, where gas prices have always been high due to a lack of government subsidies keeping them artifically low, as we have here. Also, most cities in Europe are really old, many dating back to the middle ages, when the largest vehicles around ran on hay. The streets in cities like this are narrow and twisty, and are ill suited to a thing the size of a medieval house shooting around at sixty miles per hour. Streets in the middle ages were mostly filled with foot traffic. So, giant cars just don't work there.

So yeah. The British like small cars out of practicality. Some weirdo Americans like small cars because they handle like crazy and are basically fun to drive. And how bout that? This ad shows a mom picking up her kids in a non-SUV. Can this be possible? It's just a painting. It must be fictionalized.

The Ford Focus was released in Europe in a go-fast turbo version with 223 horsepower that never made it to the U.S. market. This is just one part of a long history of U.S. car makers snubbing their domestic market, which baffles and disappoints certain American car lovers.

Surprisingly, the new Fiat 500 WILL be available in the States in sportier Abarth trim. So, maybe this is a sign that things will change?

Anyway, back to the ad. The Anglia is a car that I'd have been interested in if I were a licensed driver in '59. The two kids in the picture seem divided on the subject. The boy is more concerned with picking up his fallen pancakes and his sister seems to maintain a serious relationship with the car... or maybe just her own reflection.

The other "foreign" Ford models are listed in the lower right of the ad. It's interesting to see that the Ford Escort has existed way back then. Also, the Ford Prefect is something that confused me back in high school when I read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*. The main character's best friend was an alien who, in a blunder of cultural camouflage, chose "Ford Prefect" as his "nicely inconspicuous" fake name. The humor of this was lost on me at the time, as I didn't know what a "prefect" was (It's a rank of authority in English boarding school), or that Ford sold a car with the same name in England. I just thought it was a misspelling of "perfect". FoMoCo ruined this joke for me by not selling the Prefect in America. Jerkholes.

*I cannot recommend the Hitchhiker books strongly enough. Funny, smart, and terribly clever. Also available in audio form read brilliantly by the author (before he died - not after), although the one by Stephen Fry is probably also great.

Jell-O Leftovers Salad - For the hungry insinkerator.

Let's say you're on a diet, or you hate yourself and your family or you're training for the Olympic gag-suppression team. In '59, Jell-O had you covered.

In the fifties and sixties, the culinary world was stagnating. Having achieved perfection with roasted meats thousands of years before, Food was ready for its next big hit. Instead, they did this: they started reducing anything and everything to a nutrient sludge. If it could be blended, pureed, emulsified, or whipped, and served in a quivering man o' war shape, they did it. Deviled ham, creamed corn, fish paste, aspic, and Jell-O were all shoehorned into the American diet, whether the diet liked it or not, right between the "solid group" and the "liquid group". It was the "goop group".

Jell-O was a favored medium of the culinary (or "cruel-inary") goop artist, easily suspending the heaviest meats, vegetables, and seafood in apparent weightlessness, like prehistoric beasts trapped in amber. As proven in Jurassic Park, these floating relics are best left imprisoned. Regardless of who eats who, the humans never come out on top.

In keeping with advertisers' habit of trying to brainwash innocent people into using their products in nonsensical ways, Jell-O wasn't satisfied with their position in the "dessert" category. They wanted to dominate the dinner hour, so their dark priests concocted unholy plans to put all manner of vegetables and meats into Jell-O, hoping for a foothold as a salad replacement. Then, they would travel backward in time to lunch, with their hideous ham on wheat jiggler, and on to breakfast, where they would complete the sinister trifecta of meal blasphemy by trapping corn flakes in a milky Jell-O medium. If advertising has taught us anything at all, it's that If you repeat it enough, people will do it.

Lime Jell-O plus green beans, celery, and onions equals a waste of Jell-O, green beans, celery, and onions. The result looks like vegetables that drowned in their own vomit. Must have been one hell of a party. Better to be one of the happy dead vegetables than the poor creature that has to eat them this way.

Nabisco Sweepstakes 1971 - Crazy rich.

If you live in 1971, you can still get in on this great sweepstakes from Nabisco. You could get rich. How rich? Crazy rich.

This artist's rendering is just a serving suggestion for how rich $20,000 would make you. You could be so rich that, for starters, your lawn would be several hundred yards across. Granted, the people in the picture might just live in the park, in which case the couple are homeless. Twenty grand would allow  them to move up to a really nice several-bedroom house in '71, but probably not a dee-lux apartment in the sky-y--y.

The man's Pat Boones are still a shining snowy white. No grass stains anywhere. It's as if he didn't even walk to the hammock. He must have been airlifted over from the patio. I guess he is allowing himself to enjoy a few creature comforts. Work doesn't seem to be a big issue for the husband. He's let his lawn turn a nice pale yellow color. That way, his money is easier to spot when it spills out of his storage hammock. Gotta keep track of it.  Look at wife, foolishly flinging it about the sward. She should follow her husband's example and wield the money in nice neat fans. That's how people can tell you come from "old money". You wave it around with dignity, not like some kind of spastic dork.

Dignity, people. This is how it's done. When you've made your fortune the old-fashioned way, you comport yourself in a way that tells people you're not going to blow the whole wad on die-cut crackers and aerosol cheese spray. With twenty grand, you could throw one hell of a snack-nic, but you don't. That would be ghetto. What you do is take it out into the back yard, pile it up and sit on it, just like the Rockefellers did. That way, you know it'll still be there when your daughter needs it for college... or bariatric surgery.

The wife doesn't seem quite as bowel-looseningly happy as her husband. She should share in the irrational joy of berserk, irresponsible wealth. Let's give her a hand.

Much better. Now they're on the same page. Looking good, honey. Now, would it kill you to bring out some more iced tea?

Little Ads - Record plane stamp.

Three little ads from the very back pages of a 1958 Better Homes magazine. The cheapness of the real estate that far back in a magazine makes for fertile joke soil. Time to get dirty.

Carry a Tune. 1958's iPod. Just imagine - three hundred songs in your pocket! Special "carry a Tune" pants sold separately.

Records carried in the Carry a Tune are not authorized to be carried in any other record caddy. Also, each successive version of the Carry a Tune will be larger, adding questionable functionality and will take exponentially longer to open. Records can only be listened to while stored in the Carry a Tune. Records cannot be removed from Carry a Tune. A smaller version of Carry a Tune will be released annually, until it becomes too small to use. Then, subsequent Carry a Tune's will grow larger and larger until it becomes too large to carry. Then, Carry a Tune will decide you need to re-purchase your record collection...

There's nothing especially funny about the picture, except that they might have chosen to rotate the airplane so that it was "hurtling skyward", instead of looking so "plummet-y".


Also, just out of shot, this plane is being chased by several blue planes blowing whistles and brandishing truncheons.

Free! U.S. Stamps. Scarce genuine postage stamp commemorating Debbie Franklin, first bald woman president of the United States. Also included, Cheryl Lincoln, Suzie Truman, Jane Quanika Adams, and Babs Roosevelt.

'59 Rambler Wagon - Are hue sure about that color?

Car ads are generally nice to look at. Sometimes hilarious, but sometimes a little odd, like today's ad for a '59 Rambler.

First, I had to look up this "Dedini" person. Apparently, he was such a "get" for Rambler that they proudly posted his name on their little comic. Eldon Dedini was an American comic strip guy, whose stuff tended to the ribald, but not pornographic. Swing, baby! So there's that. Moving on...

Rambler is now a dead company. First it was just Rambler, from 1900 to 1914. Then nothing for 76 years, and then Nash revived the brand in 1950 (that's weird). Then AMC merged with Nash in 1954, at which point we see this ad for their  awkwardly styled wagon, whose looks we've reviewed in the past as "blowy". Although, it's maybe not as bad as all that. The "big car" fins on a small-ish car are kind of charming.

The weird decision they made in this ad was to shoot a blue car against a sky of nearly the same color. As a result, the things that pop out of the picture are the red and pink clothes on the models. Few things in ads are mistakes, so this must have been somebody's decision. Maybe that's the only car they could get for the shoot and nobody could foresee that the sky would be blue that day?

Here's a down and dirty Photoshop of some different colors that I think may have served them better in this picture.

Changing a color in Photoshop is never a simple matter of rotating the hue around the color wheel. To do it right would take a few hours. A quickie job results in this silly pastel-y fake look, but it serves well enough to make the point. Almost anything would help avoid the polar-bear-in-a-snow-storm look of blue on blue.

Thinking about the lines on this car again, I kind of want to see this car sectioned to be a coupe, with a wheelbase so short as to be undriveable.

Much better.

Stewart-Warner Television - Your theater of the clown world.

Who-art Warner? I know. I'd never heard of the company either. You can find evidence that they existed, but just barely. It looks like their last year of production was 1955, so anyone inspired to make a purchase because of this ad would find themselves moaning a year later, just like the clown.

Actually, I may be motivated to buy a TV that was especially good at reproducing the performance of a screaming clown. Nobody likes clowns any more, even before John Gacy did all his raping, clowning, and murdering (not always in that order). So, watching the agony and sorrow of a clown sounds like quite a nice way to pass an evening. Perhaps The Screaming Clown Show could feature a different not-especially-sharp object being forced through Screaming Clown's abdomen each night. Such possibilities.

Well, the clown in the picture is more of a Pierrot type of character, which is part of the rich European history of clown-heartbreak-related entertainment. The Italians and French have been enjoying the comedy of watching Pierrot's wife, Columbine (hmm) cheat on him with Harlequin even since the 17th century. See? once again, the Europeans are centuries ahead of our culture.

While there's no price mentioned in this ad, other similar-sized TV's of the time (1954) went for around $200. This sounds insane, but the handy inflation calculator shows that this comes out to $1600 in today's money. Yes, you get a better TV for that price today, but at the time, this Stewart-Warner was a similarly badass piece of kit as your $1600 LCD.

Plus, for their $200 price of entry, the denizens of 1954 could watch an Italian clown screaming his head off. The closet thing we have today is Jersey Shore. Talk about your not-especially-sharp objects. Zing.

Update: Found their factory's address in an old ad. Found a news article announcing the plan to demolish and de-asbestos the site. Now we can see that it's all apartments and townhouses there. Not fascinating, but there you go.

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