Lutheran Mutual - The auctioned herloom.

Sarah couldn't believe it had come to this. Borbert's pelvis had been shattered in a freak gardening mishap, and without his income from his job at the inflatable furniture factory, their future looked uncertain. They had come to face the cruel truth… that they would have to sell off some of their heirlooms, like the football shaped phone, or that book of carpet samples they had found together on that donkey trip through the Ozarks. But the sacrifice that stung the most – that threatened to bring her to tears – was the sale of their flanged globe.

She remembered the day that she and Borbert had bought the flanged globe. They had gone on a second honeymoon to Brown County, and stayed at a little bed and breakfast run by that adorable old woman with the dueling scar and the club foot. It had been autumn, and the leaves were just beginning their seasonal chlorophylophiboc transformation. They found the little globe shop inbetween the sexual marionette shop and a store where a grizzled farmer made broken apple crates.

Sarah and Brobert had decided they should buy some kind of globe to remember their trip, and the globe man had shown them many varieties. There were ridged globes and isoplanar globes, and they had settled on a glorious knobbed fur globe, but then they saw the one they had to have. The flanged globe. Brobert loved flanges, and Sarah simply adored oblate spheroids like the one at the end of the flange. Oblate but not quite ovoid. It was like the little globeman had made this one especially for them Sarah couldn’t help but feel that it was meant to be.

The flanged globe had been with them for years. It had held the ashes of their former pangolin, Abbey, until they read that pangolin ashes made an especially good fertilizer, so into the garden Abbey went.

The flanged globe had held Brobert’s umbrella when they lived in Seattle for that long summer, trying to get the rights to make a sequel to Wargames. But Ally Sheedy had bowed out at the last minute, owing to her growing relationship with Johnny 5, so Seattle had been a bust.

The flanged globe had been there after their house had burned down. Somehow it had escaped the flames, probably because of the flange. Such an efficient heat dissipator.

Brobert and Sarah had turned down so many offers to buy their flanged globe, but it held too many memories. They wouldn’t sell out. Now, with Brobert in the hospital’s Baffling Injury ward and their nest egg of nuisance lawsuit money drying up, the flanged globe was just another item in a dusty cardboard box at the emergency pelvis auction. She was wistfully running a finger down the graceful lines of the flange one last time when a voice behind her gasped “Is that a flanged globe? I’ve been looking for one like that for months!” She had a hand like Saruman and seemed to really love the flanged globe. Sarah had a feeling the claw woman would give it a good home. First thing in the morning, Sarah would make a call to Lutheran Mutual to begin making a sound financial plan to assure they’d never have to sell the next flanged globe they bought.

However, there was a store down town selling bulbed toruses that were simply dear. Maybe it was time to begin rebuilding her dreams.

Antiques Creepshow - Cherish with gritted teeth.

The Garage Sale Assault Squad mistakenly invaded (with minor regrettable loss of life) several antique stores in the Midwest to offer you these possible heirlooms for a limited time only. Imagine these jimcracks gathering dust on your shelves, next to the other bric-a-brac and festoonery.

Who remembers the Seventies? I do, I do! This doll is a lot like the Seventies. Unrealistic to the point of being kind of scary, it kind of gives you a headache, and it's probably slightly damp. Treasure the many moments brought to you in the Seventies with this adorable saucer-eyed go-go girl. Neckless and cylindrical, her limbs are as limber and floppy as ever, ready to mashed-potato her way into your heart... probably via one of the ventricles.

Order today for fast delivery. Ships in a ziplock bag, to keep the smell in.

If your child doesn't have this train with rolling eyes, she/he/he-she is a wuss. Made from real dead trees, when you pull this little choo-choo across the floor, the eyes look up and down, everywhere at once and at nothing at all. If your dear one can sleep with this train in the room, nothing will scare her/him/herhim at all! For extra toughness training, wait till your child is asleep and put the train  right next to the pillow, staring him/her/shehe in the eyeballs. When the screams stop, your child is ready for camp. He/she/ will thank you some day, maybe even from a state run institution. Ships with gaffer tape over the eyes.

Who's this dapper little fellow? Its our old friend from the Neighborhood of Make Believe: woodworker and all-around noodge Cornflake S. Pecially.

After the cancellation of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, he took life kind of hard, going kind of wild without the structured life that forty years of TV production provides. He liked the nose candy, eventually losing all the cartilage in the region. Here is a rare figurine of ol' Corny without his prosthetic nose, dressed to the nines and still ready to entertain. He's ready to build you some chairs for all your puppets, which incidentally can't sit down. Won't you give him a home in your chair factory?

Four Roses - This bud's for you.

The picture in this 1941 ad for Four Roses seems normal, if a little drab, but there's been some painting going on.

There's not much of interest in the composition here. The colors are kind of "meh". The whole thing may look better if it were over a non-white background, like what if it were on a table in a dimly lit room with light from a window splashed across the product?

While that may make the photo more artistically interesting, the picture, as-is, DOES focus your attention on the bottle. It's the tall dark thing. I still think it could have been silhouetted nicely with a dark background if the art director were clever enough. Time is money, though.

Four Roses chose, instead, to pay an artist to "plus up" the bottle. Everything in the photograph is pretty much left as it came out of the dark room. The bottle, however, has been re-painted to make the glass extra shiny an dthe reflections extra watery. See?

Glass of product, tray, and roses - original. Bottle of product - retouched. The label was left alone (who wants to repaint all those letters?) but all the brown glass was beautified by hand. Earth-shatteringly controversial? Nope. Interesting? I dunno. Maybe.

What's more surprising than that is the fact that Four Roses (after changing hands a few times since it's birth in the 1800s is now owned by Kirin Brewing Company, of Japan! How bout that? Also of note is that a whiskey that is "a blend of straight whiskeys" is regarded, according to Wikipedia as "sub-par" or "rotgut". Hm! Funnier still, Kirin also owns Johnnie walker Black Label whiskey. The good old boys aren't going to like this.

Hopefully, something funnier tomorrow.

TWA - Props to you.

This ad made it through our strict editorial committee because the picture is so nice. Shiny airplane. Puffy clouds. And the ad comes to us from a time when air travel was an Exciting New Wonder and the airlines viewed luxury as a point of pride. "Not only can we fling you through the sky to Moscow, but we can do it in style." Now it's more of a dehumanizing forced march.

In 1954, the Jet Age was just about to happen, making this whole "travel in luxury" thing get even better for another decade or three. Part of the reason I like the James Bond movies so much is the coolness of airports, and the swankiness of air travel back then. Pan Am still existed then, and in my mind, epitomizes the coolness of jet travel at the mid century mark.

Anyway, this props-and-pistons plane is pretty nice too. Nice red stripes. Look at how happy the people are in the serving suggestion illustration, too. I'm sure a modern airline ad would have a similar picture, but it would be rather a huger lie than this one is, I think.

A plane like this is begging to be popped out of its ad and posted as a PNG. It seemed simple at first, because the shape of a plane is easy to trace with the old pen tool, but you know what? By the time I got to the propellers, I was already committed. They're spinning, of course. So they're blurry, which means they're not so easy to cut out of the photo. Soooo, I had to do it the hard way.

See? I can't just "cut around them". Not only is the edge hard to discern, but there'd be green grassy color mixed into the props, which would look stupid over transparency.

So, I cut out the plane, ignoring the props. (That vertical thing is an antenna, not a propeller blade.)

Then I painted in some pie-slice shapes of dark color, sampled from inside the engine cowl, just to be sure the tones match. Then I blurred them a lot, and erased the outer tips of the pie slices, because they should be moving round and round at a faster speed than the center of the hub, right? Also, I had to reverse the texts and flags on the flipped versions. Whee. Add some film grain to try and match the photo and ding, it's done in only twice the time I expected. Oh well.

Who likes airplanes? Yeah? What flavor? Did someone say PNG flavor, with transparency sprinkles on top? Get your spoons ready, left click through for full size, and then and right click them with your rude finger.

Red Cabbage Salad - From nature's mouth, into yours.

Today, let's celebrate the richness of nature's conrucopia's spewing bounty. Let's make red cabbage salad royale! (Spelling it weird makes it fancy!) You can't wait!

You'll need one large cabbage, (picked at the peak of turgid redness), three sticks of butter, four cups of vinegar, one cup of salt, and thirty-seven green seedless grapes.

Begin by slicing the cabbage into shreds. Why are you crying, ha ha? It's not onions! Place the cabbage into a large skillet, adding the vinegar and salt. Bring to a boil. Once the liquids have been reduced to a kind of vinegar-cabbagey syrup (usually about three hours), add three sticks of butter. Once the butter is melted, it's almost ready to present!

Heap cabbage into a serving dish, and add the grapes, arranging them attractively, as in the picture. Red cabbage salad royale is packed with vitamins and grapes, so your family will love it! It should be noted, however, that in high doses (5g/kg), raw red cabbage induces ataxia in canines, most notably in terriers, pugs, and beagles. So, when your children refuse to enter the room, try not to feed the remaining salad to any dogs you like.

Sometimes people just don't know what's good for them. Here are some ploys to keep in mind when negotiating with your family regarding red cabbage salad royale.

-"You're hurting my feelings."

-"Nature wants you to eat this. It told me."

-"I'm not signing any papers until you finish this."

-"You can't hide in there forever. The cabbage and I can wait all night."

-"It's called hydrogen sulfide, and it's part of nature, like love and screaming."

-"Today is not Halloween."

-"Yeah, well, you'll love me eventually."

-"But it's Grandma's family recipe, and her whole family smelled that way."

-"Oh, it's bath night anyway, so stop grumping."

-"Either you eat this or I'll need to you to sign these papers."

-"Fine. The starve. See if I care."

-"Aw, come on. You love grapes."

Barbed-asol Wire face - (See what I did there?)

Some nice Photoshop today, from the days long before Photoshop was even a baby program. In this 1962 ad, Barbasol uses the time-tested method of burning a striking image into your brain, and hoping their brand identity comes along for the ride.

A contemporary example of this can be... ooh, let's see... the bank commercials with the lovable vikings running rampant in our modern world asking us "What's in YOUR wallet?" Trouble is, I can't remember what bank made the ad or how the vikings tie in to the bank's services. This is a failure.

Barbasol chose to wrap a man's face in barbed wire by way of selling you their whisker-taming cream. Well done. THAT makes sense. Modern unknown viking bank, take note.

There's some REALLY good photo retouching going on here. I don't think they wrapped a real model in barbed wire, although looking for clues revealing the artist's technique only impresses me with the workmanship. I can't even tell if the barbed wire is a photo, safely wrapped around a dummy head and comped onto the real photo, or if the wire is completely painted in by the artist, from scratch, as it were.

The trick to getting this illusion right is all in the shadows. You'd think the rendering on the wire would be the key - and it has to be done right, of course - but the shadows are what "plants" the wire on the model and makes it look like it's digging into the guy's skin. Let's try to follow along.

First we need a black and white picture. W.C. Fields will do. The blue lines form a box around our work area.

Here's W.C.'s cheek, unmolested.

I'll be trying to use basic painting tools in Photohsop, to mimic the barbaric level of technology the Barbasol artist had to work with.

First, we "press" on the edge of his face in the fatty area where the wire would deform it a little bit. Here's is where I used the "smear" tool. It could be done with an airbrush, but I don't have all day. The rest of this process is all airbrush. I promise.

Next we paint a "trench" in his cheek following the path of the wire across his skin. Light comes from above, so shadow forms under the "cliff" formed by the depression in the skin. A little light forms the "ledge" that catches the light.

Here's the wire. First comes the dark, sampled from the inside of W.C.'s ear hole to make sure the tones match what's already present in the photo. Then some mid tones describing the curvature of the wire. Then white highlights showing us the shiny parts. This part takes the most time, not surprisingly.

Then we add the cast shadow under the barbed wire. The wire is close to the skin, an dthe shadow is traveling a short distance, so the shadow gets a clearly defined edge. Lots of people chicken out and make shadows soft, because they're intimidated with the task of figuring out where the shadows should fall, and don't know what else to do. Never blur because you're uncertain. Only blur if that's what's called for.

This last step is subtle. I blurred all our fakery in certain areas to match the very short depth of focus in the photo. W.C.'s ear is soft, so the wire is soft near there. His lips are soft, so the wire next to his lips is soft. I also sprayed some grey over the highlights in the wire near his mouth, noticing that the light mostly comes from the side in the original photo, and the lighting on the wire didn't quite match.

So, here's our little drunkard with a sprig of barbed wire garnishing his chubby face. The Barbasol guy had "classic" tools and more than an hour to do it, but the best tool is his skill, which is easily overlooked in an age when any oaf with a pirated copy of Photosop calls himself an "artist". Here's to you, uncredited Barbasol ad artist!

Remote Hands - Long distance dedication.

Joke #1 - Researcher develops sanitary chamber and manipulator arms with which he may safely interact with filthy outside world. Invention makes it safe for thousands of crazy people to become rich, thereby graduating to "eccentric" status.

Joke #2 - New remote mechanical hands allow serving of drinks, dealing of cards, in previously uninhabitable radioactive casinos.

Joke #3 - Through the miracle of modern science, these mechanical arms give hope for a normal life to this man, hideously born inside a glass booth.

Joke #4 - Remote manipulator claws finally allow safe handling of radioactive materials. Also effective in preventing the spread of cooties from objects previously touched by girls.

Joke #5 - New mechanical manipulator arms allow the performance of hundreds of ordinary tasks, with adjustable difficulty ranging from 300% to 46,000%.

Joke #6 - Advanced robotic arms allow  safe execution of hundreds of ordinary laboratory jobs. Ironically, they're best for just snipping off people's hands.

Joke #7 - "Then, Dr. Problak could only stare at the celebratory drink he had just poured himself with his new mechanical arms. His victory rang hollow in the near-empty laboratory, for he realized he now had to invent mechanical lips."

Joke #8 - In response to the development of new mechanical manipulator arms, today the Vatican issued a letter announcing "Yes, it's still a sin, even with mechanical hands." The Robopope was unavailable for comment."

 Joke #9 - New mechanical villain arms finally allow the strangling of the radioactive insolent.

Jokes #10 through 12 come from Craigf, just to show me how it's done. Thanks for making a monkey out of me, PAL!

Joke #10: Robotic arms invent fat, bald man installed in management role.

Joke #11: New Robotic Bartender(TM) pours drinks, listens to incessant blather, kills self in parking lot.

Joke #12: Come on 21! Daddy needs a new set of capacitors.


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