1964 World's Fair - Festival of Gas!

More from the 1964 New York World's Fair! Apparently the American gas Association had a pavilion and decided that The Festival of Gas. Exit polls revealed that, among thirteen year old boys, the name was "the most disappointing at the fair".

And here is a postcard of a model of the Festival of Gas! Super cool and spacey? Check and check! It featured such exhibits as "House of Energy", Theater of Food", and "Restaurant".

There was this "ferris wheel of appliances", which, uuh, showed you what appliances looked like riding a ferris wheel. Want a ride on the ferris wheel? Sorry, kid. Appliances only.

Despite the displays of questionable interestingness, I could hang out in the Festival of Gas all day, just because it would feel like I'm in the future. People back in '64 probably felt they had a right to expect that everything would look like this in the post-two-thousand world. The ordinaryness of our 2013 buildings is even less whelming than a ferris wheel of appliances.

So what's there now? The Festival of Gas was at B15 on the official '64 World's Fair map, which is now "field 3" - a soccer field, see?


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Restaurant, with Giant Floating Gas-Powered Hair of the Future.

Please enjoy this footage of the Festival of Gas, featuring a disorienting jazz soundtrack of uncredited authorship. Someone is apparently so proud of their jazz that they won't let us embed the video. Lawyers are fun.

Excuse me now while I go back to imagining I live in the future of 1964.

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Carrier Air Conditioning - Mi gusta el frio!

It's probably warm where you are lately. If you're somewhere near the left-hand side of the U.S., you're probably on fire right now. Let's learn a vaguely racist lesson about air conditioning, thanks to our mid-century friends at Carrier.

"Why have most great inventions and advances in science and industry come from temperate zones? Because for centuries tropical heat has robbed men of energy and ambition. There was no air conditioning. So they took siestas, seeking relief from heat and stifling humidity."

Until Carrier came and rescued humanity from the horribly unproductive problem of Dead Mexican Syndrome (DMS), Mexico's space program was almost nonexistent. That's all changed, now that every Mexican enjoys reliable home air conditioning. Thanks to Carrier air conditioning, mexicans never die any more (see picture).

The Carrier centrifugal refrigeration unit, now with added man.

In super hot India, technical industry is now changing the fortunes of millions of people, and India is a major source of educated workers. Why? Every single person in India has air conditioning, and they no longer need to take afternoon naps, or as they say in Hindi, "siestas". See?

Wherever you find air conditioning, you'll find the most productive workers on the planet. That's why every well-cooled American shopping mall is filled with energetic teenage workers, known the world over for their diligence and scientific enthusiasm. See? AC = productivity. Thank you, Carrier!

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Halo Shampoo - Additions to your head collection.

Don't "soap" your hair, people. You know how you're in the shower, and you just grab a bar of Dial and rub it on your head? Stop doing that! Please enjoy these heads, lovingly torn from the pages of history for your sanitation. Graphic Gift coming up in three, two, one... Right click, you!

"Darling, I have something I've been yearning to whisper
into your nose for a long time now..."

Enoch Johnson's Eight-Wheeled Car - Photoshop's day off.

As any reasonable person will tell you, more wheels are better. Usually, we have to rely on the Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade to make this happen for us. Today's eight-wheeled homebrew car means the PAGGBPB can have the morning off to polish their clone tool skills.

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Super cool. Machinist Enoch Johnson went and built himself a car with eight wheels. The body panels look like they were all made from flat sheets of metal, relying on stiffening ribs to give them some rigidity. The little fenders are ribbed for his pleasure, too. This definitely keeps the car looking "retro", even for 1961, the year the article ran in Popular Science.



Eight wheels? If you need to ask why, you need to not ask why. It bears more than a passing resemblance to Homer Simpson's The Homer, though. If Enoch could think of something to stick on it, Enoch stuck it on. Wheels? You bet. Lights? Ooooh, yeah. An aoogah horn? Ding. Is it better than that car I never designed or built? Absolutely. Does it have more wheels than that car I never designed or built? Maybe. I haven't decided yet.

Back tomorrow.

All of us here at GO! Tower hope you had a boisterous and questionable National Explosives Day break. Phil Are GO! will be returning for our national holiday of detonation tomorrow with all the keen insight, nearly detectable jokes, and obscure references that have nonplussed you literally tens of times in the past. P.A.G. staffers have nearly recovered from their Frisbee bruises and salmonella chafing, and will be ready to greet the new fiscal year filled with more old pictures, which are, in turn, filled with accidental irony.

See you tomorrow, citizens!

[-Mgmt.]

Spot the Joke - Wax, legs and rice.

The Saturday Evening Post was America's non-threatening comfort food of the brain. It strived for mass appeal by angering no one and being as agreeable to mainstream culture as humanly possible. So, of course there can be no better recipe for great cartoons and a cutting wit, right?Please join the Phil Are GO! Joke-getting Assault Squad in a bit of joke archaeology. Help us figure out what exactly is the joke in these comics from America's blandest news source, the Saturday Evening Post. Help us Spot the Joke!

Theory #1 - The woman has just waxed the kitchen floor, and just as it rains whenever you wash the car, a thundercloud has taken up residence over her house, casting an obvious shadow on the roof. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Waxed things are slippery. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The wax on her kitchen floor is so slippery that, after she spilled a pot of soup on the floor, the liquid was repelled onto the ceiling. Hence, the damp spot on the roof. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The gentleman is a paraplegic. He has misplaced his special buoyant prosthetics made from a rigid, closed-cell foam with a watertight rubber skin, or his "sea legs". He is forced to make due with his ordinary plastic prosthetic legs. The two women have thrown his floating legs overboard. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Women enjoy seeing any man suffer. This is funny.

Theory #3 - The nauseated gentleman is apparently searching the deck of the ship for his "sea legs", despite the rather obvious fact that they are clearly still attached to his body. This is funny.

Theory #4 - The "man" crawling around the deck of the ship is actually Katharine Cook Briggs, half of the team who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire. Her partner and daughter, Isabel Briggs-Meyers would be surprised that her mother had chosen to drink while aboard a ship: something an "ISFJ" would never do. This is funny.

Theory #1 - The man's digestive system is intolerant of the spices used in Spanish rice. The adult diapers he keeps on hand are "Tango" brand adult incontinence undergarments. His wife's advice to "put on some tangos" indicates her understanding that he will have a bout of inflammatory bowel syndrome tonight. This is funny.

Theory #2 - Tango is a dance mistakenly attributed to Spain, although it actually originated in Argentina and Uruguay. Spanish rice is a totally unknown dish in either Spain or Mexico. This is funny.

Theory #3 - A Tango is a type of dance, not a type of music. Theoretically, one could tango to any music with a beat. So, the woman's request to "put on some tangos" must indicate that the disc in the man's hand is a laser video disc, since a Tango can only be observed and not heard. This cartoon ran in the September 28, 1957 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, nearly thirty years before LaserDisc technology was made available to the American public. It is impossible that the couple owned a LaserDisc player in 1957, or that Bob Barnes, the cartoonist, had even heard of such a thing. This is funny.

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

Little ads - Blow yourself up, pepperface.

You know how you wake up every morning and scream "What were they advertising in the back of Teen Magazine in 1971?!? Aaaaaaaaaa!" Me neither. Maybe tomorrow morning. Anyway, here's what they were advertising in the back of Teen Magazine in 1971.

The new blown-up face of Al Qaeda? She could sleeper in my cell any day, huh huh huh.

The new face of The Blow Yourself Up Company (Not affiliated with Al Qaueda),
which apparently occupies the Department a few blocks away from Photo Poster, Inc.
Small world! Well, the blowing-yourself-up world is small.

Embarrassed by unsightly pepper-shaker-face?

Hmm. Increasing intelligence. Gosh, where to start? Well, if you ordered this book,
there's good news: you're nowhere near the human maximum intelligence, so you have
loads of room to grow. The hex to decrease intelligence goes like this: "I would like a book
on witchcraft, please. Here's my money." Well done.

n