The Wedding Joke.

Joke #1 - "...You mean we're all pregnant and engaged to the SAME ten year old boy? Hahahahahahah! Well, it looks like we're off to Utah!"

Joke #2 - Oh that mischievous Timmy. What a naughty boy! He simply wouldn't tell the brides where he had gagged and hogtied the grooms. He would only say that they had better find them before the high tide came in. What a wedding day THIS was going to be!

Joke #3 - Grace and Marge had to admit that they were a little jealous of Mary's youthful groom, but they sure didn't envy his addition of the "cooties clause" to the vows!

Joke #4 - Oh that mischievous Timmy. It turned out he wasn't really a priest at all, so none of them were actually married! What a wedding day THIS turned out to be!

Joke #5 - Timmy had only been pretending to be a girl, so he could marry any of the brides he wanted. It looked like they could stay in North Carolina after all!

Joke #6 - "...so then I says 'what would a priest know about being married?' and my mother says 'If he's the priest, then who's the groom?' and then the priest says 'If she's your mother, then where's my wife?"

Joke #7  - "...You mean we're all engaged to the SAME pregnant ten year old boy? Hahahahahahahahah! Well, it looks like we're off to Florida!"

Joke #8 comes from Anonymous. Thanks, whoever the hell you are! - "No, Timmy! You cannot look under there. Your soon to be brothers in law are busy preparing your sisters for the wedding." 


Joke #9 is from Sue. Thanks, Sue! Also, pow! Take THAT, mormons! - Young Joseph Smith LOVED what he saw. However, he'd spend the next 15yrs looking for that darn hat.

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

Big version is in here.

U.S. Naugahyde - Your wife will see you now.

Another decorating idea today, from your non-porus friends at U.S. Naugahyde! They want you to use naugahyde for everything... including wallpaper and doors. And why not? It's all hoseably easy to clean! And it makes every room of your house look like a waiting room at a doctor's office.

I actually like the look of these rooms. Could I live with it every day? Uncertain, but it'd be a nice - if expensive - experiment. They both have the tidy formality of a doctor's office, even ignoring the fact that all surfaces rinse easily free of blood and pools of flop sweat.

By contrast, if you crack open a grocery aisle magazine offering a complete redesign of your house, you'll see everything covered with clutter and fabric curled into bows. Also, you'll see nothing that a guy can use: no tool rooms or slop sinks. Just mountains of beige pillows and cubic meters of foofy stuff piled on top of the curtain rods. I have a feeling that, in the fullness of time, that's how "the look of the 2000's" will be remembered: clutter and lint production. So, this ad looks refreshingly tidy, and it's over forty years old.

Good for commuting, and parks neatly on top of any SUV.

When I was house-hunting, I found a really cool mid-century place that had  a fire place like that one in the bottom picture of today's ad. It didn't have the copper thing, but it was a 3/4 kind of deal built into a wall in the center of the room. However, the house was in a neighborhood that would have had me spending half my income on riot gear, to safely make the dash from my front door to my South African-sourced military vehicle in the driveway.

The seat cushions are all covered with something called "Breathable Naugahyde". Nice try, guys. Since when has any Nauga- product failed to stick to your ass when you stand up? Notice that both of the designers are proudly STANDING in the rooms they created. The Margaret Thatcher lady cleverly had that green couch screwed to the floor so it wouldn't need to  be repositioned every time you got up off of it.

Also, don't miss the door in the bottom picture covered with "U.S. Naugawall". Clearly, these are two products that really caught on, which is why everyone you know is still talking about them. If Naugahyde was so damn breathable, I wonder if Mr. Nauga (the presumed CEO of U.S. Rubber), had a Naugahyde suit custom made for his comfort?

Click for big.

Kooking Kornir - Grapeherd's Pie

Does your family think they've seen it all? Are they world-weary eaters who think that life's not worth living any more because they've eaten it all? Well, tell them to untie that noose until after dinner, because you're serving up our surprising grapeherd's pie!

Begin by combining some stuff you normally use for a pie crust. I dunno. Maybe flour and salt and some kind of lard or whatever. Combine it somehow in a bowl or helmet  and randomize it with a large spoon until it looks like dough. Roll it out on your counter and cut it into ten -inch circles. Tuck these into bowls to form the crust things. You know.

The previous evening, you should have gone out to your grape tree and dew-picked the season's best grapes at their peak of grapeness. Oh, you didn't? I guess you should have read this yesterday.

So, tomorrow, I guess, take your season's best hand-chosen grapes (either by you or some of your grape herders, if you live on a grape ranch) and include them in a saucepan with two cans of grape gravy. Grape gravy is much like chicken gravy, except that you hold the can up and say "This is for grapes! Shut up!". With the grapes and grape gravy fully included together, place it over a low flame or an overheating iPad 3 for fifteen minutes until the grape gravy begins to simmer. Now it's grapeherd's pie filling!

Spoon the filling into the pie crusts and add the circles of pie crust dough - that we should have mentioned you need to cut earlier - on top, to form kind of pie lids. You know, how pies have dough on top? Well, do that now. Bake in an oven, or four stoves arranged into a cube, at 300 degrees for 20 minutes. The pie crusts should stop looking like dough and begin looking like pie crusts... with that golden flakiness? They should look like that.

Serve as the main entree after a hard day in the grape fields. Offer a side dish, but don't expect anybody to have some, because they'll be too full of grapeherd's pie. Get ready for your family to stare in wordless astonishment! Opa!

Bubble Boy.

Joke #1 - "Here. You'll need to wear this for the next year. If you take it off for even a second, you'll get pregnant. Enjoy your congressional internship, Jimmy!"

Joke #2 - New product protects wearer against enormous viruses, like Tyrannoherpes Rex, Dinorrhea, Stegotitis-C, and Carl Rove.

Joke #3 - "Jimmy, is your immune deficiency getting better yet? Do you feel immuner now? Grampa's arm is getting tired."

Joke #4 - "'Place over the head, and roll down to the base of the boy...' Whups! You've got this on backwards! Better just wear your old raincoat to church today."

Joke #5 is from Anonymous 2, ripping on Rip Taylor. So very anonymous. So very ripping. Thanks, Anon2! - Photo taken of Rip Taylor as he unwrapped the "Life-like Boy Scout" doll he received at his 56th Birthday Celebration - He commented: "This should make Scouting F-U-N!", - he immediately threw a handful of confetti at the onlooking guests & managed a "silly" chuckle through his drool.

Did he order a second one to keep Mint In Box? -ed.

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

Click for hugeness.

Contac - Name the logical fallacy.

This ad is not interesting or cool-looking for any reason. That should bring it up short against the granite editorial policy of P.A.G. and relegate it to the "reject" pile of post fodder. However, it does present to the reader a fairly huge misdirection to the consumer that has always bugged the crap out of me even since I was a kid. So, in it goes. Get ready to help us Name That Logical Fallacy

"All the aspirin in the world can't do for your cold what one Contac capsule can." This pitch is a long-time favorite of the ad business. It's lazy and insulting, and represents a big logical fallacy.

As far back as I can remember, me and my dad used to enjoy tearing apart the retarded logic of commercials. We would watch TV and point out the wild assumptions, misdirections and general lies that the ad business feeds the viewer. We never cited the list of logical fallacies, mostly because we hadn't heard about such a list. But it's good to be able to put a name on the type of bullshit someone's is asking you to accept as fact.

This Contac ad features the "one of ours does what all of theirs could never do" fallacy. It's a confusion of quality for quantity that makes for a striking picture. One little pill going up against a Limbaugh-sized jug of the competitor's pills. The pills in the jug aren't meant to address the same symptoms as the single little hero pill, but that doesn't stop the advertiser from implying that they try but fail massively to measure up to just one little Contac.

Advertisers are so in love with this deception that they still use the hell out of it today. One notable example is the Total cereal campaign, which uses the "You'd need to eat sixteen metric tons of Special K to equal all the fiber in one thimble of Total" argument. Special K is marketed to people who are trying to lose weight, not people trying to "get the train going". This is the pitch that was so exquisitely satirized by the Colon Blow parody on SNL. It demonstrates to the consumer that advertisers hope you're soft-minded and easily fooled. In short, they hope you're stupid. Thanks, ad men.

So what logical fallacy is this? There are a lot of them, and I don't have them memorized. I think it's a "straw man" fallacy, in which an argument is "based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position". The name implies doing battle with a thing that doesn't exist. Nobody made the claim you're trying to dispute. Straw Man fallacies are pretty common. People often attack each others' standpoints incorrectly - either by intent or misunderstanding. It's an easy mistake to make, but there's no excuse to build an ad campaign around it. That's just dishonest. Maybe someone can name a more appropriate logical fallacy for this Contac ad in the comments?

Here are some other ad campaigns that use the same reasoning as today's ad...

-"All the corn in the world won't carry as much lawn furniture as the new Ford F150."

-"You'd need to eat over fifty carpet samples to get the vitamin C found in just one cup of Langer's Apple Juice."

-"I hope you like badgers. You'd need to buy over seven hundred badgers to equal the iron found in just one box of dry wall screws!"

Nabisco Toastettes - What the filter?

In 1968, Nabisco had the idea to paint their toaster pastries with  melted sugar, banking on the proven idea that it's hard to go broke feeding people sugar. This made the top of the pastry shiny, which gave Nabisco the opportunity to call them "dazzling". But how to make it obvious in the product shot?

They could have shot the product really close-up and carefully lit the product to make the shinyess obvious, but then you'd just have a close-up of shiny dough. That makes for a lame ad. Solution - star filter!

A star filter is basically a rotatable glass filter with fine lines etched into it in such a way that bright areas in the image kind of "explode" in geometric patterns. They are available in lots of different styles. The one in this Nabisco ad is a standard cross filter, but they are available in lots of different styles that produce up to sixteen-pointed stars.

The History Team was unable to find out when star filters first became available, even after spending literally minutes Googling the question. However, my guess is that in 1968, they weren't quite as played out and silly as they are now. To the eye of Future-dwellers like us, the use of the star filter looks corny, but at the time this ad ran, the star filter still had the visual shit storm The Seventies and Eighties to look forward to. It still had a good run ahead of it. Almost any music video from The Eighties will remind you how people treasured their star filter effects.

The simplicity of these toaster pastries seems quaint. They're your basic dough jacket with fruit goop filling and a sugar varnish. They actually look pretty appetizing, especially if yo're a little hypoglycemic like me and benefit from a bit of sugar in the morning.

Toaster pastries have, uuh, "evolved" into cartoony monstrosities that give your eyes diabetes just from looking at the box. The word "tart" seems a little understated. The pink thin on the plate to your left is more like a "Pop-Skank". Yesterday I just managed to choke down the last in a box of generic Pop-Skanks that looked a lot like the ones to the left. Yes, I know they're marketed to kids, but they were on sale and I bought them to eat as a dessert. The filling was Strawberry in color only, and tasted like it had been made from congealed Nyquil. Much like Nyquil, it tested my gag reflex and I'm not exaggerating. So why didn't I just throw them away? Because I paid for them and I wasn't raised to waste food. The Pop-Skanks qualified as "food" in that they could be chewed and swallowed without obvious lethal effect.

The comparatively innocent Toastettes in today's ad seem to be overselling themselves with the trippy star effect and unnamed white powder, but having been softened up by the store brand Toaster Migraines, I think I could happily eat one of those retro pastries without the aid of any white powder to dull my senses.

Click for big.

f

Magnavox True High-Fidelity - Life in the rainbow.

Back in Yore, what we call a "stereo" was called a "Hi-Fi". That's because equipment capable of accurate tonal reproduction was kind of a new idea, having been introduced to the audio market in the Fifties, to distinguish snooty products that try to sound good from cheapo products that satisfy themselves with just trying to make sound.

Do we even call our audio setup a "stereo" anymore? It seems we're overdue to replace the term with something else, since stereo audio isn't exactly front page news any more. What's the new term? "Music thing"? "Audio system"? That sounds a bit douchey. Consider the P.A.G. staff on watch to identify the new word for whatever people use to listen to music... whenever they're not listening to it on crappy ear buds or crappier computer speakers.

Anyway, Magnavox promises you will live in a "rainbow of music". Where do the people in the picture live? Judging by the weather and vegetation, it kid of looks like one of the pinkish-violet regions of Planet Purple.

I hope the rapturous couple is either heading out or just came back from a gala dinner. They didn't get all dressed up just to listen to their Magnavox Brittany while staring out at the blue fog, did they? Who knows? I guess that's life inside the rainbow. Are jobs easy to find there? It looks like the real estate market is doing pretty well in the rainbow, so whatever Mr. Overposed does for a living, it must be paying pretty well.

The car's running. Are you guys coming or what?

So how do you photograph a fantasy in the days before Photoshop's blur filters? Lots of Vaseline on the lens. But you can't just smear it everywhere. You have to smush it around artistically, so you don't obscure the talent or product. The P.A.G. Image Analysis Squadron has detected the areas of the picture effected by the magical Vaseline smudge, which we now present to you for your interest:

So how much did Mr. and Mrs. Overposed pay for their Magnavox? $650 in 1957 dollars is the modern equivalent of $4975.70! Holy jeez! There isn't enough Vaseline in the world to make that look good.

Big one is in here.