Doublemint Gum - Chew yourself beautiful.

Here's an odd one from the Pages of advertising past. Chewing gum makes you beautiful! In 1938, the laws regarding truth in advertising must have been different in that they exist now and basically didn’t then. Hooray for wildly fabricated lies!

The Wrigley company was free to claim that chewing gum could tone up your face in that it “stimulates sleepy face muscles”. The muscles used in chewing are basically your masseters and orbicularis oris, and the probably get plenty of exercise anyway what with all the eating you do every day. The masseter is the one on the sides that makes your jaw go up and down. The orbicularis oris is a ring-shaped muscle that’s inside your lips. Without this one, you’d drool all the time like you just came back from the dentist. Also, you’d find Everyone Loves Raymond to be an unpredictable and clever show. The orbicularis oris is… dun dun dunnnnn!... a sphincter muscle. “Eeeeew!” Calm down. That just means it’s a muscle with a hole in it. There’s also a sphincter muscle around each eye. Sphincters are muscles that pinch shut, instead of just pulling in one direction. There are loads of them throughout your body, and they mostly keep various juices from leaking from one place to another accidentally.

Anyway, Wrigley expected you to believe that not only did their gum tone up your face, but it also “brightened” your teeth. Keep in mind that this was in the era before any plausible non-sugar sweeteners existed. So, chewing sugar brightened your teeth. Also, it made you fly and scared off communism. Maybe Doublemint could be said to “brighten” your teeth if they were covered with food or fur from that dead squirrel you sampled on the way home from the boutique. But, chewing almost anything would force saliva around your mouth, performing the same squirrel fur eradication as Doublemint does.

Let’s not forget that Doublemint “relaxes tense lines” and keeps you “streamlined”. Wow. Streamlined. I guess people got around much faster back then before we built all these highways and filled them with parked cars. So much so that facial wind resistance was a widespread problem.

Corn inspection

Joke #1 - Henry and Doris heard Farmer Maggot's hounds barking, getting closer. They'd have to run for it... probably off to some weird land or something to destroy a ring or whatever.

Joke #2 - "Now, you may notice, Doris, that an ear of corn is longer than it is wide. That remind you of anything, heh heh? I said THAT REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING?"


Joke #3 - Doris wanted to leave Henry. He was inattentive, slovenly, and not romantic at all. But when he started talking about corn, she remembered all the reasons she married him so many years ago.


Joke #4 - "Sometimes I like to stroke the leaves like this, just to check the hydration level of the plant. It also stirs certain feelings in me that I could never tell my wife about, heh heh...    Wups."


Joke #5 - "...And remember, Doris, that each stalk of corn reproduces by having sex with itself. That's why baby Jesus hates corn."


Joke #6 - Has been brought to you by the letter Dave and the number Pryor. Thanks Dave! "I've smoked enough of this to make even YOU attractive mister!"


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

DeSoto Firedome V8 - Brown is the color of my true love's nothing.

Jeez! That took while! I figured I'd just scan this two-page ad of this old DeSoto, then paint out the magazine's crotch/binding, then pen tool both cars out of their backgrounds, poke out their windows, reverse the badges for the flipped versions, and then post them. By the time I'd finished all that, my license had expired and I needed a shave again.

For some reason, DeSoto chose to feature their car in brown. I've never known anybody who owned a brown car and loved the color. Brown cars are the ones you inherit from your grandmother, or the ones you buy at a discount because the dealer couldn't get rid of it otherwise. They should have put the two-tone green car front and center. I've never daydreamed about buying a new car, or fantasized about the day I get to drive my shiny brown status symbol into my driveway for the first time.

Anyway, for all our zygote readers, DeSoto used to be a car company. I didn't know if they had gone out of business or if they were bought out by somebody else, but it turns out they went belly up in 1960, or so says Wikipedia. Chrysler bought them in 1946, but the brand was dropped due to economic blah blah blah 1960 blah...

Who wants a graphic gift? Okay, everybody line up and show me your rude finger. get ready to right-click-save with those fingers in three, two one...

Kooking Kornir - Beef liver bolus steamers.

Today we're going to make a cold-weather favorite to get you through the long hot summer - beef liver bolus steamers!
To get the right shape and consistency for your beef liver bolus steamers, you'll need to build an extrusion apparatus. It's a bit of work, but it's also heaps of fun and not too expensive!

In a large mixing bowl, combine three pounds of beef liver, 1/4 cup salt, two eggs and 1 cup molasses. Mash into a fine paste with your hands, so that it can be squozen through a 2" aperture. Try making a tube of one hand and pushing some of the mixture through it. Will it go without undue pressure? If so, you're ready for the fun part. Building your extrusion apparatus!

All the parts for your apparatus can be found at any laboratory supply shop. Assemble as shown in the diagram. You'll need a Tupperware #12 extrusion bin with 2" threaded mouth on the bottom. The #12 model is ideal because its asymmetrical design helps the mixture find its way into the aquarium hose.

Attach three feet of PVC aquarium hose - or better yet, silicone surgical tuning - onto the #12 bin with the threaded collar. You can use your hands to force the liver mixture into the hose, but you may have better luck if you use a gourmet plunger. This ensures that none of your delicious liver mixture is wasted. Plus, you'll have little trouble generating the necessary pressure with the help of the plunger.

Squeeze the liver mixture out of your tube into neat boluses. Don't push too hard! You don't want to strain anything, or, heaven forbid, split the tube!

Catch the boluses in a roasting pan and pour some beef bullion under the grating. Roast at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and your beef liver boluses should be positively steaming!

Your family will love the heavy warm feeling in their bellies. It'll remind them of the cozy days of January... perfect to help them forget the heat and humidity outside! Aloha!

Music Class

Joke #1 - At the Saint Stevie Wonder School of Music and Soul, students are taught to rock out before being chemically blinded.

Joke #2 - "No no, Marjorie. It's '...to any god OR government'. Not 'AND'. Let's try again from verse five... No his mind is not for rent..."

Joke #3 - "Wait! Father Charles! I heard it again! I think someone's here. Or, did you just cough and say 'this is boring' in a low whisper?"

Joke #4 - "...happy birrrth-day Father-Released-Pending-Further-Investigaaaa-tion. Happy birrth-day, too youuuuuu."

Joke #5 - "Excuse me. I don't think there's anything wrong with the action on this piano."

Joke #6 - "All right children. I'm blind, but I can still smell, you know."

Joke #7 - "No, I'm sorry Randy. Your armpit solo isn't until after the second chorus. Let's try again. 'The king of glory comes, the nation rejoices...'".

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

Joke #8 is from Sue. Well joked, Sue! - (Did you get a good look at the little girl on the left?) "Cindy, we do not bitch slap like those hoodlums at The Ike Turner School of Blues and Funk!"


Joke #9 come to us from Fil, with a new spelling. Thanks, other Fil! - Father Joe's Music Outreach provided the chance of a lifetime for culture-deprived crackers: A week-long stay in the homes of various 'almost was' bluesicians. In this photo, Blind Lemon Pledge, notorious foul-mouthed junkie, threatens to stop playing and start punching 'blindly' if someone doesn't get her a smoke, pronto.

West Bend - Alumi-nummy!

West Bend had a metal pot, heater, or cannister for every type of food that required more than a candle's power to prepare. If they had their way, your kitchen would require an extra kitchen to store your coffee maker, mixing bowls, coffee warmer , coffee cooler, tea kettle, tea re-heater, electric ovenette, electric ovenola, eletcric ovenasium, corn popper, and corn un-popper. That's the business they're in - selling you as many thermal doo dads as they can.

Mom always just made popcorn in a huge coveted skillet. Following her efficient lead, I now use an identical skillet to make popcorn, pancakes, roast turkeys, and to fry up my special Christmas soup. Eff you, The Marketing Department of West Bend!

West Bend seems pretty excited about their colored appliances, available in sunset gold, delphinium blue and cherry red, in addition to plain old polished aluminum. This last one is a clue. They're making most of the things on this page out of aluminum, which is a fine idea. Aluminum is very light, super-conductive to heat as well as electricity, it doesn't rust, and you can anodize it. Say what? You heard me: "anodize".

Anodizing is a special coating that can be applied to certain metals - most commonly aluminum, but also titanium and zinc and a few others. It's not paint. It's cooler than that. Anodizing is a process using electricity and acid to seal up the surface of the metal, forming a very hard, "skin" of oxide on the surface a few nanometers thick. This skin makes the surface of the metal resistant to abrasion, because the oxide (which is ironically similar to rust) has a crystalline structure about as hard as diamond. This is handy, since aluminum has a great strength-to-weight ratio, but it's not especially hard. It scratches and dings pretty easily.

Untreated aluminum will form an oxide layer all by itself pretty quickly, but by anodizing it, you can make the coating thicker, and make it happen as fast as you want. A polished piece of aluminum can be anodized, and the part will stay shiny pretty much forever ("clear" anodized), while a non-anodized part will revert to a dull un-polished state over time.

More importantly, aluminum can be dyed after the polishing stage and then anodized, trapping the molecules of dye inbetween the crystalline structure of the metal. Not every metal has the proper crystalline structure to do this. Aluminum anodizes the best.

 To show you how well aluminum takes to anodizing, here's an anodized titanium bike pedal. Titanium can be anodized in colors, but the results are sort of "meh". The pale yellow color of the titanium always shows through, and the color isn't very deep or rich. Also, titanium doesn't polish up very well either. It's a useful metal, but hardly ever pretty. It always wants to be a dull grayish yellow.

By contrast, here are a couple of aluminum carabiner clips. Shazaam! I spent lots of money on candy-colored bike parts in the nineties, when the boutique hi-tech component market really took off. Purple was the most garish color of choice, and I bought lots of it. In the 2000s, people came to their senses and less crazy colors like red, black, or blue took hold of the custom bike fashion world.

Anecdotal testament to the hardness of anodized coatings: After I got over my purple semi-functional bicycle parts fetish, I decided to polish a pair of cranks down to shiny metal. Dad set me up with a bench grinder with an abrasive nylon wheel. The wheel just skated across the surface, no matter how hard a leaned on it. This went on for a few minutes before the wheel got through the anodizing and bit into bare aluminum. The sound of the wheel changed and it almost pulled the crank out of my hands when the wheel finally got traction on the soft, vulnerable aluminum. Dad had explained it all to me before, but that was a real eye-opener.

This ad is from 1952, which makes sense. Aluminum production cranked up for World War II, and after the war ended, there were a lot of aluminum makers looking for something to do. That's when aluminum entered the consumer market in a big way. Aluminum dinette sets and appliances like the ones in this ad became available and desirable, especially when you could get them in exciting colors.

Maybe your family had these aluminum tumblers? They're really nice, but don't put them in the dishwasher. Wash them by hand. Aluminum can corrode. It just does it differently than you're used to. Instead of forming orange scaly rust like steel does, it forms a dull chalky film that, over time, can become rough and scaly. Ever see a car with wheels like this?


Aluminum wheels are usually sprayed with a thick coat of clear lacquer to protect them, and when it gets chipped, road salt will begin to eat the wheel (salt just loves aluminum). You could anodize them instead of using clear paint, but wheels live a hard life, and an  anodized coating would get nicked pretty quickly too, and then you'd be back at square one.



If you're in love or something, and you and your lover or something are gearheads or into aerospace, you can even get titanium wedding rings with anodized details. Get an anodized coffee maker instead. If the relationship ends, you're less likely to sell it to a pawn shop at a significant loss.

The Frontiers of Science Redoubled!

New virgin-powered camera only functions within three feet of camera's inventor.

New "tele-radion-o-graph" listens around corners. Maximum range, four feet. Developer is seeking funding to improve device to hear around two corners, two feet apart.

Lions in captivity have learned that, by merely donning a human hat and glasses, their food will assume a jaunty posture prior to consumption.