Knob Fondler.

Joke #1 - August 1948. The U.S. Air Force begins testing of tactical hors d'oeuvres in the fight against the red Menace. Previously, military-grade canapes and ballistic aperitifs met with initial success, but were found lacking in the face of the Russian "tapas threat". This was the American military's last-ditch effort in the most delicious, but not too filling, stage of the cold war.

Joke #2 - August 1985. As widespread pig-killing becomes an ever-greater problem, The U.S. Air Force adopts the "bust a deal and face the wheel" method of court-martial.

Joke #3 - August 1978. The U.S. Air Force's Dungeons and Dragons team begins testing the new MG-1A flight glove for "dice recognition and sensitivity".

Joke #4 - The U.S. Air Force's training of blind pilots was made faster and more thorough with the advent of the "feely wheel". Fatalities due to"Catastrophic Knob Mis-identification" plummeted.

Joke #5 - Tailhook, 1990. A U.S. Naval officer relaxes in a side room , practicing with the "grope-go-round".

Joke #6 comes from Mr/Mrs Anonymous. Thanks, mystery joker! - Mabel started having second thoughts about sending Johnny to military school and the effects it might be having on his OCD after observing the results of asking him to arrange the crudite platter for Thanksgiving dinner.

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

Multifilter - Stinking up the great outdoors.

"Aaaah. Smell that? That's Nature. That's why I became a tobaccoman. I love the outdoors and fresh, clean air. Y' know, spending all day out in nature like this makes a man a man. And, a man leads with his groin. Let me explain."

"Out here in Nature, a man's got room to spread out. Air out the crotchular region, you know? My junk can't live in a cage like some 'modern men'. Nope. Not me. Not my junk. See this here tobacco corral? I built it with my own two hands. I spent weeks squatting, sawing, re-squatting, hammering, and squatting. Now I can hitch my leg up on it anywhere I want and spread out my thighs, showing the world what God gave me. Lets me kinda... open my legs and think clearer, ya know? Feels like I'm hugging the world with my upper thighs and lower abdomen."

"Multifilter understands. Y'see, when I'm drivin' a herd of tobacco, I don't want my flavor all mucked up with tar. Nope. Not me. I need that stuff filtered out, and nothing but acetate fibers will do. And Multifilter only uses the finest acetate fibers, grown right here in the U S of A, harvested at the peak of freshness. Those dew-picked acetate fibers make Multifilters multi-filtered. It's like inhaling the wind, and you can't get that any other way, and that's a promise. It's like a fresh summer breeze blowing between, around, and through my various portions down below."

"Maybe when you're ready, you'll spread your manly thighs and hitch a leg up on my fence? Come breathe with me. I'll be here, swingin' in the breeze, with Multifilter."

Stinkin' up the Great Outdoors.

Three groovy offers - Thanks, The Seventies!

Our drunken idiot friend The Seventies is back with some wonderful consumer products for us. Thanks The Seventies, for always being both tasteful and well-reasoned! Let's see what you have for us today!

Hey, it's the driveway flame thrower! I remember that from our last post about it. The price has gone up a bit, which is odd, because both ads are from 1971. However, this ad is in color. Models in Abba boots don't work for free you know. The other ad just has a line drawing, and everyone knows artists will work for free if you promise not to shove them into a locker.

I have to admit, I'd like to have one of these flame throwers to keep the P.A.G. plaza clear in winter. I'm sure they're illegal now, right? Google doesn't show any current availability of such an item except for this British Ebay posting. The "buy it now" price is 144 L's, whatever those are.

To show us how easy and possibly safe it is, they show us that pretty Greta can use it while wearing a skirt. Here, she's melting some pesky gravel in her photo studio. "I don't know who keeps bringing it in here and arranging it in a neat path!" she sighs. No matter. Just melt it into liquid hot mag-ma! We in The Future can't have it. The Seventies is such a tease!

The Seventies knows fashion! In 1971, Hush Puppies were the shit. See? An ordinary middle aged sex worker can afford one in each color. The brown suede ones- he has the left AND the right one. That's some life you've got there, Prosperous Male Prostitute (or Steve Carell's dad).

 Last night he wore the patriotic bowling shoe to play squash with a client. Delightfully scandalous! The Seventies knows how to show a lady a good time!

Wow! such sexy language to sell a vinyl envelope of mineral oil and metal dust. If I had one of these, I'd spend hours staring into the depths of it's "exotic red material", waiting for it to stop being so blue. You know what? The blue is in your mind, man! The Seventies knows how to tune in and drop out.

Thanks, The Seventies! Time for your nap.

Holga, Diana, CCTV - Cheesy lens test.

Today, we have a special feature from the P.A.G. Photo-graphy team. We bought three intentionally crappy lenses for an Olympus Pen E-P3 to show you the different results from each. I spent literally minutes searching the web and couldn't find a side-by-side comparison of three low-fidelity lenses. If it doesn't show up on the first three pages of a carefully-worded Google search, it doesn't exist, baby. So, let's fill that void.

What kind of lenses? For those who don't know but are interested, what follows is a brief summary. For those who don't know or care, come back tomorrow, when we'll probably say some mean things about a defenseless old picture.

If you have an iPhone or Android smarty-pants phone, you've probably heard of or downloaded a program called Hipstamatic (iPhone) or Vignette (Android). These are camera apps that simulate the look of old obsolete cameras in your nice, modern, advanced phone camera. In the same way that some people like the crackle of vinyl, lots of people like the old faded look of Polaroid photos or the light leaks, streaks, and blurs of a Holga or Diana camera.

The Holga was an inexpensive plastic camera produced in China in the Eighties. Even the lens was plastic. It leaked light onto the film and build quality was questionable. This all contributed to the randomness of the photographic results. You can still buy Holgas at hipster stores like Urban Outfitters, but it'll be a film camera. You still have the cost of buying and developing film, and of course you can't see how your photos turn out until you spend the money to have them developed.

The Diana was also an inexpensive plastic-bodied, plastic-lensed camera made in Hong Kong in the Sixties. Pictures taken with the Diana were similarly wonky and unpredictable as with the Holga.

Both of these cameras have been enjoying a kind of renaissance in the last few years, in addition to their softwarey dopplegangers for various camera phones.

Well, you can also just buy their lenses and stick them onto your digital camera. This is what I did. In addition to the Holga and Diana lens, I bought Photojojo's "Lo-fi" lens. So what are the differences? Well, the Holga and Diana lenses can be bought for about $20 - $30 on Amazon (which is where mine came from) and Ebay, plus maybe fifteen dollars for an adapter which I needed to get the Diana lens onto my Micro four-thirds camera. If you really want to, you can buy the same Diana lens from Photojojo for sixty dollars, if that's what you're into. In exchange for simply dtriple the price, you do get their cutesy "Yay! Your goodies have shipped" emails. The Photojojo "Lo-fi" lens costs $90, and is clearly marked as a CCTV (closed-circuit television / security camera) lens with a specially made adapter for your camera. Turns out you can get the exact same lens for $30 on Ebay. It even comes with a micro four thirds adapter to pop right on a non-CCTV camera. Of course, Photojojo does not mention that the lens has the words "TV Lens" inked right on it, or that the box it comes in also obviously designates it as a repurposed security camera lens. If a customer knew that, a customer might go and look elsewhere for the exact same product at one-third the price. "Yay! I'm a sucker! Wheeee!"

Left: Ebay, $34.99   Right: Pjotojojo: $90, plus shipping. Wow.

"I'm worth every penny, Tee-hee!"

Lesson learned: see something nice on PJJ? Check Ebay before ordering, unless you find it's worth a 200%-300% premium to have things sold to you by a company that talks like an Anime schoolgirl. "Aw, shucks! We lost your business!"

The Diana and Holga lenses are totally plastic and are very light. They feel as flimsy and junky as you'd expect, but that's what you sign up for when you buy these. They each have a focus ring.

 The CCTV PJJ lens is all metal, is much heavier, and even has a little iris in it, which you can adjust via a ring on the lens. There is also a focus ring. Note that the aperture created by the iris is not exactly round. Again, build quality is not what you should be hoping for when you buy things like this. You want some wonkiness in your retro pictures. This lens is pretty cool. I just wish I'd done more homework before I ordered.

Anyway, here are some sample pictures. Generally, the Holga requires much more light, due to the tiny pinhole aperture on the back. Pictures have a lot of vignetting (dark edges). The Diana has the "dreamy" look everyone talks about, due to the soft-focus quality of the cheap plastic lens. Pictures are brighter than the Holga. Also, the Diana is more likely to have random light blurs coming in from the side of the frame, as in the bird picture below. The Photojojo lens is the most adjustable, thanks to the built-in iris. Pictures tend to have lots of concentric smearing at the edges, like you see in the tree picture.

Kooking Kornir - Loaf meat.

Hey eaters! Of course you grew up eating your Mom's meat loaf. It's an old fashioned favorite, right? You betcha! Well, it's time for Mom to learn a thing or two about loafing up meats. This is 1971, so there had better be room in her recipe book for a modern take on good old meat loaf. We're going to "sock it to her" with our Loaf Meat! Yeah!

To start, you'll need a loaf of Italian bread 16 inches long by 10 inches wide. Remove the lid and scoop out the center (or "bread guts"), after first making a lid by slicing off the top of the bread.

The bread guts are not meat in any way, and therefore nutritionally irrelevant. So, out it goes. Throw it in the trash or set it on fire at your leisure. Now, back to meat!

Mix four pounds of ground beef and four eggs in your best beef mixing bowl. Also, some onion or whatever. When mixed, stop mixing. Pour the beef into the bread shell to a depth of two inches, then include six wieners on top of this beef base strata. Also, include a few pickles or small fish (The picture isn't very clear, but play it safe and put in both!). Resume the beef mix inclusion until the beef is completely included in the bread shell.

Replace the bread lid, cover with high quality beef foil and bake at 375 degrees for two hours in your favorite beef oven. The beef will shrink in size as it cooks itself. This extra space will be taken up by the flavor juices that renders out of the beef. It may form pockets in the boundary layer around the wieners and pickles or fish things. This is normal and desirable.

If you scooped out your bread guts properly, leaving the bread shell just the right thickness, the flavor juices will seep through the bread right up to the durable Italian crust without dripping out. Did it stay in? Hooray! Did it drip out? Well, just remember that water only makes grease fires worse.

Just wait 'till your family puts a fork in this Loaf Meat! They'll think it's an ordinary bread roast. Then they'll be all "Whoa! Beef!". Then they'll go "Hey! Wieners!" and "Pickles or some small fish I'm not sure! Wow!" and then they'll find the flavor juices and go all "Flavor juice pockets! Slurp!" Mom's meat loaf might as well admit defeat. Mom has surely had it socked to her by this! Loaf Meat's socking-it-to-mom abilities will surely go undoubted! Opa!

Superzapping in Computer Land - The ride of the "Dalton Gang".

This article comes to us from the January 12, 1981 issue of Time. (Actually, "TIME" always spells their name in all caps, so I guess they want you to shout it whenever you say it.) The article covers the antics of four thirteen-year-old boys and their proto-hacking adventure.

Since this is 1981, and most people only understand computers as crazy things that huge companies have, the author (Frederic Golden) takes on the task of teaching some new words to TIME's audience. This is always hilarious. It's unclear whether Golden himself had heard the new terms only recently, but it's easy to imagine him using quotation fingers around strange new words like "access"... hopefully just for the benefit of the readers.

New "jargon" taught to TIME's readers in this article:

"accessed"

"seized control"

"bits"

"garbage"

The four hackers in the article were all students at a New York private school called Dalton School, and they had hacked into Datapac's (an ISP) system. This, of course, was a softball opportunity for TIME to call them The Dalton Gang. I'm sure there were high fives all round the office at TIME when they thought that one up. Sadly, The P.A.G.  Research and Googling team was unable to find any updates about who the kids were or what they've been up to since then. Since they were only thirteen, their names weren't mentioned in the article and records of this crime are probably sealed or whatever. Incidentally, the amount of data the hackers destroyed: 10 million bits. That's 1.25 megabytes. It would fit on a floppy disk. That's adorable! Like a kid who had his lollipop stolen. Better still, that 1.25 Mb was one fifth of Datapac's computer's total storage capacity. So, a 1981 ISP's computer had 6.25 megs of storage. BAH hah hah, snort! Hang on. Let me go get some coffee so I can properly laugh it out my nose.

In '81, high-profile computer crime was still a curiosity. Back then,  Kevin Mitnick was just getting warmed up and even the FBI didn't know his name yet. Sure, it had been about ten years since John Draper had started his career by phone phreaking and by '81, he was already developing software for the Appe II. However, computer security was still a kooky sci-fi idea to most people. How kooky?

Jeez oh man. "Some" users are resorting to coding devices and "changing passwords". "What has the world come to?" they must have thought. I'm sure that, back in 1778 when the first tumbler lock was designed, people hung their heads in disappointment. What a sad day it must have been for people to realize that if you leave your front door closed with a nice heavy chair leaning against it, somebody might just find their way in and mosey out with your harpsichord under his arm.

I try to be in favor of any effort to remove money from dumb people. Still, the naivete of 1981 is maddening. That must be how most of the world looks from the perspective of guys like Anonymous.

The illustrations are by Kimble Mead. The name sounds familiar, like I should know who that is. 

A Google search page on the name is pretty much a bunch of art-related sites all stumbling over each other to proudly announce they've never heard of him. Nice work, Google. Here's a book he's illustrated on Amazon. Aah yes. That's him. Still beating the dead horse of bulbous, post-Yellow-Submarine Peter Maxism after all these years.

For further reading on early hacking, I recommend watching some TV. This wonderful documentary on Discovery Channel is... well, wonderful. Surprisingly, Discovery will let you watch the whole damn thing online via that link. It tells the story of Draper and Mitnick and pals with interviews and not-too-annoying reenactments. It also tells the story of the blind kid in the 60s who could whistle the control tones into his telephone to "seize control" (heh) of the phone system. Careful though, Discovery may try to sell you a DVD or something. I carry this doc around in my phone because I love it so much. I watch it a few times a year, because it's interesting to see how things get started.


Maaaaybe somewhere in the future, someone is reading this very post on an archived compilation of the entire internet stored on a 75,000,000 petabyte nano-USB stick while they're riding the hoverbus to their job at the space cafe? I wonder what we're starting...  right... now? WooooooooooOOOOOooooo!

Homko Lawnmobile - Doing lawn donuts.

I never heard of Homko. It looks as though they're out of business, or they were bought out by Beatrice Foods or something and rolled into their Spreads and Condiments division and outsourced to Thailand. But look how happy this dad is on his luxurious lawnmower in this 1959 ad.

Homko is dead set on convincing us that this mower is like a car. Well, it's got four wheels and a motor, I guess. Well spotted, there.

I this journalist's opinion, one of the laziest names one can give a company is "something-co". A -co name proclaims to the world your lack of imagination. Best name for a company is the family name of the person who started it up. Soichiro Honda. Henry Ford. Charles Virgin Atlantic.

At the other end of the spectrum are the shittiest overdesigned names dreamed up by "naming companies". I'm not kidding. When a large company with more money than they know what to do with changes it's name due to horrible customer service, or just comes up with a new product, they sometimes hand over millions of dollars to a third party company who invents a stupid name for them. Often, these names sound like they were made up by the same douchebags that name paint colors (gentle harvest, sunset mallomar). Sometimes, they try to sound like a word or emotion that they would like you to associate with the product, but actually has nothing to do with it. Celebrex is an arthritis medication. Abilify is the market name for Aripiprazole, an anti-depressant. Xfinity is the new name Comcast came up with after they appeared on The Consumerist's most-hated company lists too often. Altria used to be Philip Morris, until one too many massive cancer settlements put a certain stink on the company image.

I have to remember that. When the feds come knocking on the door, demanding to know whether I paid any taxes on those illegally imported ostriches, I'll just tell them "Phil's not here any more. Meet Innocentstopher Jones! How are you guys?" Problem solved. Scott free. Hey wait! Scott Free is an even better name than Innocenstopher Jones. Gotta make a note to have an intern go back and change that for me.

Anyway, this "special needs" mower guy in the picture is looking mighty free and festive. Ah, The Fifties. Back then, you could look super happy, wearing highwater chinos  and no one would assume you're a high-functioning assisted living patient. People would just think things were going your way, like this mower guy. "Look at me honey! I'm driving! Ha-ha!". "Yes, dear, I see you."

Actually, with his super-long shifter (or blade height adjuster maybe), he sort of looks like Rat Fink, the cartoon rat who, I'm sure, this nerd never heard of. Also, Rat Fink wouldn't really appear in pop culture until 1963. Even after '63, I'll bet the lawnmower man, here, never moved in any of the same circles as Rat Fink types. But Lawrence Welk... definitely.