Velvetex - Welcome, Mr. Bond.

Ah, Mister Bond! I see you have recovered from the sleepy-time drug that my henchmen shot you with. Your Q-branch didn't prepare you for everything, did they? It's a curare of my own formulation, containing Yoo-Hoo and color-safe Fab. Please, sit down on my luxurious Velvetex chair, with your feet on my luxurious, thick carpet. Yes, of course, it's wall-to-wall. My life of "crime", as you put it, does have its rewards. Mum, hmm hmm hmm hmm ha ha hah! Sit. And don't try the carpet shuffle trick on me. My Nehru suit is grounded.

I said SIT! Very good. You might as well enjoy your last few moments on Earth, Mr. Bond. Please enjoy my Velvetex drawing room and salutational chamber. Are you surprised that I know your real name? Don't forget you introduced yourself when you snuck into my vestibule by knocking on the door, which could barely be heard for its soft and luxurious Velvetex covering. But I digress. yes, when you told me your name, I wrote it down in my Evil Notebook, which is Velvetex, by the way. And so is my evil pen. I see you are impressed by my brand of espionage. Can I offer you a drink? I assure you, the mini bar is quite safe. I will kill you, Mr. Bond, but not with a drink. Extra ice, perhaps?

You can clink your ice cubes as loudly as you want, Mr. Bond. Your colleagues in MI6 cannot hear you, for you see, the walls are Velvetex, too. It dampens sound reflections, but not the actual volume of noises because only mass can suppress the transmission of sound waves through structural members and have you looked into what actual soundproofing costs? And they call me evil.

No, soft surfaces can only reduce sound reflexion, and do nothing to actually silence a room, but your ice clinks of distress cannot be reflected to your potential saviors in London, I assure you. Do your worst. The wallpaper is quite acoustical.

Ah, I see you have noticed my other walls. They are variously decorated with Velvetex also, for continued luxuriousness around the room. With such Velvetex wall coverings, I find it necessary to shout "silence!" much less often.

I see you're admiring my wall thing. Yes, it is brown, and some kind of leaf-shaped art or whatever. I bought it at the church rummage sale. Tower Records was throwing it away when they tore down their paraphernalia room. I find that it puts me in mind of early Yes albums in that I can't tell what it actually is, but leaves me with a defocused sense of spaciness and nonspecific narrative allegory that - Mr Bond!

Guards! Bond has slipped away! Curse my soft and luxurious Velvetex carpeting! His footsteps could hardly be detected as he made good his improvised escape plan while I waxed rhapsodic about my wall thing and it's comparison to early yes music!

You win this time Mister Bond, but you'll be back! I have lemon squares! LEMON SQUAAAARES!

Supplementary Sidebar - Farmer's Almanac's prediction for the winter of 2013-2014.

Yesterday I was just wondering how the hateful traumatic winter we just enjoyed would effect the coming summer. So, I did a little searching to find some long range forecasts. During this search, I was careful to avoid clicking on any Farmer's Almanac links, because I'd always heard that their accuracy was much the same as if you had predicted the weather by reading the burn marks in your toast.

Well, I accidentally found my way to the Old Farmer's Almanac's weather summary for November 2013 through October 2014 in the Chicago area. Of specific interest is their prediction of the winter. "How'd they do?" you ask? They're shit! Check it out.

http://www.almanac.com/weather/longrange/IL/Chicago

I'd recommend not giving their stupid site any extra hits, so here's the pasted text, for your convenience and hilarity.

Annual Weather Summary: November 2013 to October 2014

Winter will be slightly milder than normal, with near-normal precipitation and below-normal snowfall in most of the region. The coldest periods will be in mid- to late December, early and mid-January, and in early to mid-February. The snowiest periods will be in mid- and late December and in late January.

April and May will be warmer and a bit rainier than normal.

So there you go. Here we are in April and it's pretty damn cold and cloudy most of the time. Don't even get me started on January and February. Most of the time, the OFA's predictions are so vague as to be useless "In spring, turning warmer!". But to miss something as huge as the winter we just had strains credulity a teensy bit.

There's a term skeptics use: "confirmation bias". Basically, the way it applies here is that positive results are reported very loudly and misses are sort of swept under the rug. This is one of the things that accounts for pretty much every psychic in the world. There's a great podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and every January or so, they do a special episode where they review the past year's psychic predictions. They call out the things the psychics predicted that never happened, as well as the huge events they completely failed to see coming. This is kind of how the Farmer's Almanac works, I think. People are excited when they get something right, but it doesn't seem to make the news when they completely blow it on something as huge and obvious as the Polar Vortex winter of '13-'14.

Pallophotophone - Engineering the talkies.

Back in 1927, sound recorded on film was a big new thing. It eliminated sync problems during movie playback, since both sound and picture were run on the same machine. Here's an article from the May 1927 issue of Popular Science Monthly, after the first public demonstration of the new technology. Of the two sound-on-film recording techniques (Fox/Western Electric and RCA Photophone), the invention of C.A. Hoxie, reported here, was to become the dominant technology in the industry. To hear the machine described, it's kind of a freaky achievement for 1927. Apparently, people were smarter than we generally give them credit for.

If this isn't interesting to you, then you may want to come back tomorrow, when there'll maybe be some jokes or something.

The P.A.G! Images and Scanning Them Team apologizes for the visible binding in the left side of the image. Instead of cutting out the pages out of the magazine for a super clean scan, it was scanned intact, in accordance with our catch-and-release policy of sustainable magazine imaging.

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1972 Pontiac Luxury LeMans - A bargeload of Seventies restraint.

How's you car feel? A little bigger than you need? If you're in America, it probably is. But here's an ad from 1972, to make you feel better about your vehicular extravagance. It's an ad from Pontiac, trying to show you that you can still be pampered in your "mid-size" car. See? Prudent reserve from the GM of 1972.

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"All the luxury you want without buying more car than you need." This is assuming you have a surprising number of corpses to transport in the capacious trunk, or perhaps hundreds of pounds of weed to smuggle in the body panels. In your '72 Luxury LeMans, you can do it without going overboard, Captain Ron.

The copy really is worth the read. The feature list is like a what's what of Huggy Bear's credentials. Fender skirts, baby. Liberal (but not heavy-handed) bright metal trim. Yards of plush carpet, clear up to the lower door panels. And, if you're feeling a little bummed out by the austerity of your modern bourgemobile, you can fantasize about what your life would be like with a set of deluxe wheel covers. You can say goodbye to your days of persuading the proprietor of you local hub cap shop* to bring out his good stuff. "No no, Pepito. I'm feeling saucy today. I want you show show me some DELUXE wheel covers. Maybe something in a concentric beveled circle, with a red doohickey in the middle. This thing you've shown me barely has a doohickey at all. I don't think you grasp how saucy I am today." Well, forget that noise. Your new Pontiac Luxury LeMans comes with deluxe pie tin- err, wheel covers.

The instrument penal has the look of rare Ceylonese teak, which is a very rare look indeed. There are just a few places in the world where that look still grows, and some of it can be yours! It's safe too, with a steering column that's more than willing to absorb all your energy. All you have to do is have a sternum that's ready to absorb the steering column. Hey, you give a little, you get a little. And, it's easy to park and economical to operate, because gas was going for pennies per gallon. This means you can get the Luxury LeMans to the end of the block on just five bucks' worth of go-juice. All this, thanks to the sensible restraint of 1972. Now, don't you feel bad for all the crazy stuff you've reasonably believed about The Seventies? Me neither.

*Reputable hub cap shops:

- Rin Tin Tin's Tins
- The Bashful Wheel
- Andy's Capps
- Circle Jerks
- The Dish Ditch
- Starsky's Hubcap Hutch

Bacardi Rum - Blame it on Bacardi.

Hey! Who misses Nineteen Sixty-Seven? Ladies? Anyone? No ladies? Want a little slice of why? Just ask Bacardi.

Well, this classy gent is just mixing some drinks for his daughters, who look on with fascination. Why would women know how to mix drinks? Only men know that, baby! It's what makes this old guy such compelling company.

Let's see. One, two, three... nine drinks for four poeple. three of whom probably weigh a hundred ten soaking wet. And, there's more where that came from. Dad is just getting started on that second bottle.

Wow! They're going to need those drinks, at the rate the rum isn't coming out. It'll be a while. That must be the new Bacardi Maple Shyrup (when you have Bacardi on your pancakes, there are no esses). He's got that bottle parallel with the horizon, but it's moving pretty slow. If only there was a way for one man and his three grown daughters to pass the time in class and style...

Here's another little tune spewed out by my old fake band, Blue Wank, sometimes misspelled as "Wamk" depending on who was putting the letters on the marquee that night. We recorded this one at Freeda's End of the Beginning of Summer Cabana Hootenanny. We'd like you to remember that everything we recorded was completely made up as we go'ed. That's why it sounds made up as we went. Just think of the tracks we DIDN'T keep! You're welcome, and I'm so sorry! If you hate it, Blame it on Bacardi.

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The Shirtless Men Grim Chamber Test

Joke #1 - "Bachelor number one, if I vere to ask bachelor number three what bachelor number two's face tastes like and I were to ask bachelor number four vhat your nipples smell like, vhat vould he say?" -Segment from East Berlin Cellar Dating Game, canceled after half an episode.

Joke #2 - "Okay, these readings are all wrong. Someone's got Gary's tube in his mouth. Trust me, you don't want to do that."

Joke #3 - Scene from Mystery Hose, Stuttgart's most popular cooking show.

Joke #4 - "All of your joy levels are completely flat. Well done. There will be no celebration."

Joke #5 - "Bertrand, stop chewing on your tube. This is a science dungeon, not a happiness dungeon."

Joke #6 - Scene from Professor Konkrete's Chamber of Various Person-Konnected Hoses, Dresden's most popular children's show.

Joke #7 - "Bertrand, please shtop making der farty noises into Humholt's nipple-bracket-hose. You are making a mockery of zis experiment."

Joke #8 - "And we're back. Let's pick up where we left off before the break by taking a few more calls. Can I ask that we get at least one question that's NOT about Bieber?"

Mr.Fancy"Is It Wrong?"Balls_2 sent us Joke #9. Thank you as usual, Mr.Fancy"Is It Wrong?"Balls_2! - Geoffrey Baer's WTTW pledge drive suddenly took a turn for the worst, when they cut to the wrong phone banks during his "Deep Inside Chicago" tour broadcast.

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

Street Dragsters, 1966 - A Way-Out Look at the Future!

Well, not really. It would have been nice, though. This article from a 1966 issue of Popular Customs featured two designs for streetable dragsters, with room for two people, and enough cooling to possibly survive a life spent partially in traffic. The designs have shortcomings, of course. Since they're based on dragsters, they'd be good at going in straight lines only. The little bicycle wheels in front  would make them super prone to understeer (when you turn the wheels, but the car keeps going straight), due to their tiny contact patch. So, you'd need to take the corners reeeeally slow. We won't even discuss crumple zones or crash safety.

Anyway, that's not what these designs are about. They're plausible design ideas for street dragsters, and they look really cool. I love the old slingshot style of dragsters from The Sixties (where the driver sits behind the engine). They had the mass of the car all the way in back, so it looks like a dart. This was the style of Sixties hot rods. I miss them. Of course, having your engine in front of the driver without a firewall separating the two was horribly dangerous if the engine exploded, which they sure did, but that's not my problem. I'm just here to look. Even the front-engined design in this article has all the visual mass of the car piled at the back, where my eyes want it to be. Bad for handling, good for the eyeballs.

There is, in my opinion, a laziness with the current tastes in custom cars. Generally, if you want to have your own car show in the Two-Thousands, you can get one by taking old sedans, putting on hideous chrome wheels as tall as you are with a little rubber band of tire stretched around it, and then painting the car a bright color. There. You're now a visionary car designer. Customs by guys like George Barris (who had nothing to do with the designs in this article, just to be clear) were usually drastic modifications of the cars they were based on, if they weren't completely built from scratch. Custom cars these days are fairly conservative, if you ask me. The sixties were bonkers.

Here's the full article.