The fall girl.

Joke #1 - Fortunately, Little Julia's insurance agent saw her fall. He offered to help her up... for a price. Of course, he would have no choice but to charge her a little more per month for his services, now that the company knew she was a "fall risk", even though she had been a policy holder for years and had never made a claim before, having already paid thousands of dollars in premiums and received basically nothing in return. Also, she had scratched his bumper with her baby carriage when she got herself backed into by him, and she would have to pay for the repairs. But, at least she had him to look out for her.

Joke #2 - Julia had fallen while pushing her dolly's carriage up the curb. Her knees hurt ever so much, but not half as much as when the man from the "D.C.F.S." came along and told her she had to give up her dolly because she was an "un-fit mother", whatever that was.

Joke #3 - Ralph Nader, exposing the dangers of poorly-designed strollers for his hard-hitting book: "Unsafe at Nanny Speed".

Joke #4 - "Julia was unhurt, but awfully shaken up after taking a tumble on the curb. Thankfully, the nice engineer happened by and explained that her endo was the result of inadequate suspension travel, and that she should re-tune her stroller's suspension setup for 30% sag, and that if she upgraded to shock with speed-sensitive valving, she could back off the rebound damping a little bit, so that the suspension didn't "pack up" over high frequency stutter bumps, all without bottoming out on big hits like that curb that threw her just now. What a nice man he was."    -Excerpt from "The Mountain Biker's Radical Compendium of Sleepy-Time Beddy-Bye Stories for Gnarly Little Hammerheads."

Joke #5 - Mitt Romney, explaining to a lazy 47-percenter that it's really up to her to get up on her own and dust herself off, because her problems are none of his concern.

Jim D. Delivers joke #6 to us, skidding to a stop in the middle of the intersection. Thanks, Jim! - "Please Mister, just play along and tell 'em I swerved to avoid hitting a kitten! One more DUI and Human Services is going to take Dolly away!"

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

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Spot the Joke - Fitting room, cannibals.

Today we bring to your eyeballs two more challenges to your sense of lack of humor. Please spot the joke in the alleged "comics" from a 1965 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, the weekly journal of the 20th century's most conservative and absolutely straight-laced Americans. If there's one thing we've learned from Fox News, it's the conservatives' legendary sense of humor. Please join The Phil Are GO! Joke-getting Assault Squad, our blue ribbon panel of the most charitable and sympathetic laughers, in trying to figure out what exactly is the joke in these seemingly unfunny cartoons.

 Theory #1 - The young woman is an employee at the store where she is trying on dresses, and her shift ends at 5:45. She should be out on the floor moving product and assisting customers, not trying on the inventory. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The younger woman is a paid assassin, hired to kill someone at precisely 5:48. Through careful practice and training, the assassin knows that it will take her exactly three minutes to reach her position, assemble her sniper rifle, and liquidate her target. So, she needs to finish picking out a dress before then. Ironically, her target-to-be is the very woman that is helping her with her dress purchase. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The woman trying on dresses is a stripper, working at a nearby gentleman's' club, and her shift begins at 5pm. Despite the fact that her profession involves taking off her clothes, she seems preoccupied with buying the right dress. This is apparently funny.

Theory #1 - The explorer's mother had a long and illustrious career - more so than her son. The natives know of his famous mother's fame. This is funny.

Theory #2 - The natives are worshipers of Cheeksa, the Polynesian goddess of buttocks, and they are performing her salute to the explorer who seems to have The Divine Ass-print on his chest, indicating that he is favored by Cheeksa. This is funny.

Theory #3 - I didn't know that the expression "saved our bacon" existed in 1965. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The natives believe that the explorer must be their mother, and since they live in a matriarchal society, they prostrate themselves before him. Unexpectedly, the natives living in a remote jungle village can read English, This is funny.

Theory #5 comes to us from Jim D. Thanks, J. Dee! - The natives are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, therefore ANYONE'S bacon would be safe in their presence! FUNNY!!!!!!

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

Glidden White Lead Paint - Them were the dayshhhh.

Hey, nice painting, Nineteen Thirty-Six! I'll bet you have some lead in the paint, as well as the house it was painted in. hey, you don't look so good. How's your brain feel? Maybe you should sit down.

Glidden wants you to know about the wonders of white lead. It's why their paint sticks to everything... wood, concrete, your central nervous system... It could be argued that in '36, we didn't really know how poisonous lead was. It could also be pointed out that the Greek botanist Nicander observed "colic" and "paralysis" in people poisoned by lead as early as the second century B.C. But don't blame Glidden. If there's money in it, any company will make you just as sick as the law allows.

While lead paint can't be legally made in America any more, there is still loads of the stuff in production around the world, in countries that we may politely describe as "provincial". America's test scores are bound to get (comparatively) better somehow, right?

Don't think that modern paints are somehow worse than good old heavy paint. They're probably as good as, if not better than, lead paints of yore, what with our knowing and doing of chemistry and stuff... until someone finds out that knowing and understanding things is somehow poisonous. Then we can all happily eat lead sandwiches and become happy.

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Chicago Automotive Disappointment Parade lack of coverage, Day Number Final - Some more!

More recently unearthed pictures from Chicago Disappointment Parades of years gone yore, courtesy of alert reader and fellow eye-candy hoarder Steve Miller (apparently). Behold the wild designs of car designers cut off the leash... and then rapidly re-leashed before anything interesting was actually put into production. See the booth babes of ages past! Wonder how old they must be by now! Take a Silkwood shower because you feel dirty inside!

The 1950 Nash NXI, surprised by an unannounced visit from the company brass.

Despite the rather more conservative air of 1951, you can tell she's a booth babe because no human would ever voluntarily hitch up their knee so awkwardly on a car high as her belly. A double-jointed hip was an asset on the resume of a 1951 Crosley booth professional.

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Design genius Harley Earl's visual opus of restraint and minimalism, the 1953 LeSabre concept car. A design so ahead of it's time, we wouldn't see anything like it again for another forty years (see below).

A scandalously-clad booth babe in the Muntz booth, 1951. You can see her ankles!

1956 Packard Predictor, still can be seen at the Studebaker National Museum in Indiana. I'll just remind you that Studebaker also brought us the oddly displaced-in-time Avanti. Why do the good ones die, while the survivors are nearly indistinguishable?

Hey! a '59 Toyota! It may have been a little early for Japan to push their Japanese-ness so hard with the kimono and all. According to Steve Miller, "In 1960, the kimono was gone, replaced by a typical American girl-next-door in a typical American girl-next-door gown."

The '65 Plymouths - Frolic in the bucolic.

Our exclusive lack of coverage of the 2013 Chicago Automotive Disappointment Parade continues with this extra-big two-page ad for the 1965 Plymouths. Go drive them in the park and be weird with your girlfriend/wife/secretary, won't you?

There was a time when I would have thought these old domestics looked boxy. But, now that we have the new Cadillacs to show us what real boxiness is about, these old Plymouths look positively sleek. I won't show you a picture of a Cadillac. They're everywhere. Go look out a window. there's probably one in your front yard right now, but it could easily be mistaken for a building. God, I hate them (Cadillacs, not buildings).

Anyway, today is Valentine's day; a nice day for you to take your sweetie out to the park in your Belvedere and make her do this... unless you like her... and unless you like the parks department, which probably doesn't like you driving your Belvedere all over their nature and stuff.

"This is what I'll look like on my way out the door the day I divorce you!"

It's good to be health conscious. You want your significant other to feel secure that you have a long life ahead  of you. Here, Pat Boone checks his girlfriend's nose for nasal displasia, while the flora checks him for polips. Good to know!

After using the park in this way, please be courteous and
burn the whole place to the ground.

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Chicago Disappointment Parade - From the mists of time.

Some previously unlooked photos have washed up on the shores of The Present... flotsam of the swirling eddys of the universe of spacetime of auto shows, and from a time when it was so long ago we didn't even know what year it was. They're from 1953, '54, '56, and '60, and they were sent to The Present Day by alert reader and temporal adventurer Steve Miller. Thanks, Steve, whenever you are! Watch out for those rascals Hitler and Rasputin.

The Chicago Automotive Disappointment Parade of 1953. Chairman of the Show, Prolapsed Pete, showcases Ford Motor
Company's answer to the desirable compact imports of that year, the Ford Thundersqueak. In this photo, he is about to
remove his pelvis and three vertebrae, prior to entering the vehicle. Fortunately, the Thundersqueak had a convenient
pelvis hanger for temporary storage while riding in the car.

At the 1954 Chicago Automotive Disappointment Parade, future middle class trickle-downer Ronald Reagan proudly endorsed the 1954 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight. The design for this model would remain unchanged until 2001, when a steering wheel was added.
The famously traditional Oldsmobile customer base responded poorly to this "pointless gadgetry".

The Pontiac Chieftain was a standout concept car at the 1956 Chicago Automotive Disappointment Parade. The vehicle was pedal
powered, had no suspension, no heater, no radio, and no brakes. After the favorable response from show attendees, Pontiac's
product managers were stumped as to how to make the car horribly disappointing for production, so they just made the body panels out of paper and charged $6200 for it. Also, they punched each customer in the ear.

The 1960 Chicago Automotive Disappointment parade saw the introduction of "booth professionals", charismatic, friendly representatives who handed out brochures and recited marketing talking points through blank smiles. Baffled at the crowd's tepid reaction, auto makers would later introduce sexier outfits. Auto sales among the clergy skyrocketed.

Home Made Sports Car - Garage find, after 18 months.

To commemorate the somethingth annual Chicago Auto Show and Concept Car Disappointment Parade, we're doing a week of car features. So far, so good. Today we bring you a 1956 article from Popular Mechanics about a father and son who built a sports car in their garage. You're probably thinking that a project like that is a huge amount of work, but actually it's a huge amount of work. We present for you all three pages of this interesting article describing how they did it. Please find it interesting.

"I though you were gonna do the styling." "No, I thought YOU were!"
Well, somebody must have done it."

It's a rare thing to find someone who's a brilliant engineer AND a brilliant artist. I'm way more artist than engineer. I've built a few pieces of furniture to fill a need, but they usually turn out to have one or two obvious flaws that tell you it was designed and built by an artist, not a proper carpenter, such as being partially on fire, or being 31% useful for it's intended purpose.

This sports car has a curb weight of 2500 pounds with a 250 horsepower V8, and a perfect 50/50 weight distribution. Impressive, especially for '56. It also has the look of a balloon with a zip tie around it. You can't have everything.

This does not diminish the achievement of building your own car from scratch. I sure as hell couldn't do it, even if I could design one that looked better. My design would live forever as a drawing on paper. You can't drive a drawing... until the next iPad changes that or something. And, as the article says, "These are individual opinions which you may not agree with but, after all, the real reason for building a car yourself is to create something that you like. You are not trying to appeal to everybody, just to yourself." Absolutely. Just getting any shape at all to come intact from your wood frame / plaster / fiberglass layup process is an a victory. Who cares what some jerk fifty years in the future thinks. "Eff you futurejerk!" Hey, that's me!

I'd have to say that the relative positions of the battery and gas tank spells
trouble in the case of a rear-end collision. Pinto, anyone?

This concept car will arrive in the marketplace in the shape of a perfect cube after design changes driven by committee review, accounting adjustments and market testing. It will have a one-cylinder engine, nine-seats, forty cup holders, rear seat diaper changing station, and convenient vomit troughs throughout.