Plywood Dinette Ensemble - Welcome to the dollhouse.

A magazine like Popular Mechanics is likely to draw a reader base of men who are of the "Why buy one when you can build one?" philosophy. Good for them! Every woman is basically a little girl on stilts with all the same dreams and desires as her former five-year-old self. Right? Of course I'm right! That's why every man returning from dubya-dubya-eye-eye with a can-do attitude needed to build his wife a plywood dinette set to get that "We live in a giant dollhouse" look.

See how fun? Sure, there were other, more elegant and sleek plywood furniture designs out there, but all those were way harder to build, and all required the especially tricky technique of bending plywood with steam. These things were best left to a factory, what with the pressure and the heat and the clamping and the giant tanks of water. (Although, truth be told, I aim to have a go at some plywood bending myself some day. The results can be beautiful.)

Nope, this enchanting plywood dinette ensemble is much simpler. It could be whacked together by the scruffiest knuckle-walking oaf whose toolbox contains a wide array of carefully selected hammers. There'd be a special hammer for driving screws, and a special painting hammer, and a really nice one for fixing windows. All the parts for this dinette set are completely flat, and can be cut out of a few sheets of plywood. You'd never guess, huh? If anything, it looks like it was made out of cardboard by a giant child. But plywood? Hard to believe.

For the finishing touch, the fellows at "Pop Mech" painted the furniture a nice yellow, do go with the pink walls, gray carpet and "everything" curtains. Even the table cloth looks like a huge hankey. I can almost imagine the happy husband and wife sitting down to dinner in their three-walled dining room, ready to enjoy their slightly out-of-scale turkey leg and banana. And look at the size of those buttons! The illusion of miniature-ness is very thorough.

This article was very thorough, with diagrams and cutting patterns and everything. Let's just turn the page and see what ... AAAAH! Jesus Christ!

She IS a doll! Or maybe some kind of domestic  homunculus? Those creepy, staring, painted-on eyes! The wicked smile! I'm going to have nightmares about this.

 By what witchcraft has this unholy abomination been allowed to walk the Earth? Forget building her some furniture. Any carpenter with a shred of decency would just drive a stake through her heart and end her tortured existence. Hopefully our guy has a special hammer for putting down animated golem ladies. He'll need to make a stake though... probably out of plywood.



*Editor's note: The reader is asked to forgive the mixed mythological references to zombies, Hebrew legend, homunculi, and vampires. The exact nature of the horror in question at the time of writing was very much... uuh...in question.

Covered Wagon Room, Harold's Club, Reno - The Oregon Fail.

When you're doing up a themed restaurant/bar/casino/laundromat, your priority stops being "Does this look good?" and becomes "Does this fit our theme?" That's the mantra of any cornball cheese-fest emporium. In that regard, the Silver Dollar Bar in the Covered Wagon Room, in Harold's Club, in Reno gets ten out of ten.

Once you own a casino in Nevada, you can't go far wrong with a western theme, especially in the cowboy-crazed 1950's. Silver Dollar Bar: bullseye. Now, since I didn't grow up in the fifties, and since I have an allergic reaction to the sound of a rustic twang or the smell of an old-fashioned book burnin', the cowboy thing doesn't work on me. But when I found this postcard, I happily threw down my hard earned dollar, not in spite of the bar's awfulness, but because of it.

The back of the card says the bar has a "waterfall of real whiskey". This makes it a whiskeyfall, not a waterfall, but I understand the inaccurate phrasing. When you're making up a thing that doesn't exist, you sometimes have to describe it as it's exact opposite, just to get people to understand. "A waterfall of real whiskey". "A normal responsible driver, but talking on the phone". "An intelligent, clever sitcom starring Tim Allen."

Sure, your guests know they're sitting at the Silver Dollar Bar in the Covered Wagon Room in Harold's Casino, but when was the last time you reminded them of your theme? If Harold was playing the theme game the right way, his answer had better be "NOT RECENTLY ENOUGH!". "Wagon stools? yes, please! The name of the bar is on the napkins, coasters and stir sticks, but what if the patrons look down? Sure, the carpet has cowboy pictures and stuff on it behind the stools, but not right up next to the foot rail! We need some frikkin' wagon stools, stat! Make them just like the cowboys used to have, with a little pretend wagon tenty thing and some little wagon wheels and a bigger wagon wheel holding the legs together, so that the guests can imagine the axle going right up their butt. Only then will our cowboy theme be complete. Why are you still standing here? Make with the wagon stools!"(Celebrity voice impersonated).



So what's there now? Well, the Harold's Club used to exist between 1st and 2nd streets, where they meet highway 430, in Reno. Reno Community Relations is there now, which sounds very nice . There's also Club Cal Neva, and a nearby Superpawn. Sounds like Reno's doing okay for itself.



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Here's a picture of Harold's going plooey in 1999. Harrah's bought  the property (story here) to put up "an outdoor plaza". Sounds like Harrah's just wanted it gone. You'd think casinos would be more sentimental when they buy each other out. That sentence was hard to type with a straight face.

Kooking Kornir 4

Your fruits and vegetables are always at their best when suspended in a gelatinous bourbon casting. Planning an outdoor function? Be sure to weatherproof your mold with three coats of marine varnish. Spray on for best finish, and wet sand between coats with 300 grit wet-or-dry sandpaper. A little wax never hurts! Watch the rain roll right off your dee-lush-ous dessert and watch your guests roll right off their chairs!

Asparagus has seen a new popularity in the health-conscious seventies. Make those spears more palatable with our patented veggie sauce. Mix four cups zesty Italian dressing, two cups mayonnaise, and eight tablespoons of marshmallow fluff. Drizzle over asparagus for a healthy side dish that''s sure to please!

Look out, general! That ground beef has our catsup surrounded! Boerf mon deiu! Make a light summertime lunch of hamburger with catsup for dipping. It's steak served continental-style! Wow them with shrimp in tangy french dressing puddles as an appetizer.

Bees stay away! Our bar-b-que brought it's own bug! Our hamburger-banana dragonfly will add a fanciful twist to your next backyard get together. Just roll burger meat into fist-sized balls for the thorax and abdominal segments and accent with sun-roasted banana wings. Garnish with spinach and watch your dragonfly fly off the platter! It's Mmm-mmm-magical!

Little Ads - Many jobs! Several opportunities!

Joke #1 - "Thirteen down. A three letter word for 'enjoyment' or 'pleasure'....... Oh, Bazooka Joe, your crossword puzzle has stumped me again."

Joke #2 - "Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twen... Gasp! I've been burgled! Someone has STOLEN my favorite molecule! HELP! POLICE! Err, I mean...REALLY SMALL POLICE!"

It's not fair to stereotype, but the man in the picture looks really excited to find that there are Audel career guides for choreography and fashion design.

Joke #1 - "So, if we check the sending wire to the altimeter, we can then be sure that ... Is that your hand?

Joke #2 - "Aah ha ha ha ha ha! If you look closely at the back of the hydraulic pressure gauge, you'll see that somebody has changed out the line for a higher-rated 4 p.s.i.hose! HA hah hah hah! Must have been one of those jokers over in supply! They know darn well our hydraulic pressure gauge feed lines never exceed 112 bar! I bet is was Corky. Man, I'm gonna give that clown such a ribbing at lunch! Jeez, those guys really crack me up!"

"Many opportunities in freelance ghost-busting! Train at home in your spare time! Fun, interesting job anyone can do! Build your own proton pack! Easy payments! Choose from one of three sample ghosts: free roaming vapor, malevolent spirit, or level twelve demi-lich (see next ad). Soon you'll see why that busting makes you feel good!"

 "Learn to write like an expert penman! Train at home with free book by Cryptkeeper T.M. Tevis. Begin now! Learn to write funeral greetings, epitaphs, remembrances, and obituaries for BIG PAY! Hurry! He won't last long!"

"Photography for pleasure or profit! Learn to take beautiful photographs, like the engraving below. Wait, what?"

Bird's Blancmange - From Skyron to your table.

Some of my favorite Monty Python sketches are the very long ones from season four. The Python team were beginning to test their ability to write long-form comedy, preparing to write their first movie script: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. These 28-minute sketches like Mr. Neutron and The Golden Age of Ballooning can be an acquired taste, but they reward the longer attention span with a slightly deeper look into the bizarre minds of the writers.

The most (in my opinion) accessible of the full-episode python sketches is the Science Fiction Sketch, more popularly known as The One About The Blancmanges (TOATB). It's a pretty broad sendup of American sci-fi movies with jokes that you don't need a degree in history to understand. John Cleese's American accent as the narrator starts as weird, if you've never heard a Brit trying to sound American, but once you get what he's doing, it's hilarious... "THAT'S how we sound to them?"

Anyway, the villains are, of course, blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the galaxy of Andromeda planning to win Wimbledon by turning all Englishmen into Scotsmen - well known (apparently) as the worst tennis-playing nation on Earth. An American would never know what a blancmange is if not for this sketch, I think. Cliffs notes version: a blancmange is a kind of weird fancy European pudding mold. Thanks to Python, I was one of maybe five guys in my high school (all dorks) who knew this at the age of fifteen. That's the benefit of being obsessed with something as literate and educated as Monty Python. You learn obscure stuff while simultaneously not scoring with girls. Whee.

This ad for Bird's Blancmange (pronounced "blaw-mawnzhe" - it helps if you have a canker sore on your tongue.) appeared in Picture Post magazine on September 22nd, 1951. When I first saw it (many many years later) I went like this: "Ooooooooooh!" because I had never seen a real blancmange before. I had only seen the wacky Python alien version. Finding this ad gave me a little bit of closure on the whole "WTF is a blancmange?" mystery in a way that looking up the word in a dictionary couldn't quite provide. Turns out the Pythons did a decent job with the shape. Are we to guess that there is a traditional shape for a blancmange? It seems so.

The magazine ad predates the Python sketch by about twenty years. That's pretty freaky. Monty Python was already history when I discovered it around 1983, and this magazine was already history when the TV episode was written. I don't know why, but that kind of blows my mind.

Gorgeous Photo in the ad, though. At first it looks like a painting, because of the hand-colored black and white photo, but it's still a photo. Know what makes desserty things look delicious? The highlights, or "specular" shading. That's what conveys the creaminess of the chocolate cream and the strawberry filling. If you get a job painting a dessert, take some extra time getting the shiny bits right.

I kind of want to try a blancmange sometime, just so I can say I did it. I'd probably have to go to England to find a proper one, or at least find a proper English person in America to make one for me. I hope they're good, because I'd hate to be rude by making a face. Knowing the English, he/she' probably be gracious and terribly polite about it if I couldn't choke the thing down. Gotta love the English.

Formica Bathroom - Get ready to regret it.

Guess who's back today? It's our favorite whipping boy The Seventies, here to teach us about all you can do with Formica. True enough. You can do a lot with Formica, but you shouldn't do it in your bathroom. Don't listen to The Seventies, people. Remember Disco?

 Formica, in case you didn't know, and in case you slightly care, is made from resin (liquid plastic) impregnated paper, with a second decorative printed paper layer and a hard plastic layer on top of that. Yes, the plastic layer is made from Melamine, which you may remember from the much-publicized whoopsie of melamine-contaminated pet food and, later, powdered baby food, all brought to you by lazy and irresposible Chinese manufacturers in 2009. No, your Formica countertop is not going to make you sick unless you smoke it, or grind it up and snort it. Then again, this ad is from the seventies, so, you never know.

Formica's name is an interesting story, and one that I hold up as an example of a good product name, unlike made up nonsense like "Abilify" (a prescription drug)  or "Altria" (Philip-Morris' fake name). The mineral "mica" was used as an electrical insulator in resistors in the early 20th century. Formica got it's name because it was originally developed as a "substitute for mica" in this application. Ding! Formica! It's a natural name that grew out of the product's function. All product names should be this way, not dreamed up by naming corporations, based on consumer focus testing and word association.

Is it fair to judge Formica bathroom panels by my memory of leaky, worn out shower stalls? Nope, but I'm going to do it anyway. When I think of Formica showers, I think of swollen, warped panels with black mildew coming from underneath. I'm sure there must be examples of Formica showers with properly sealed edges, but you know how memory can be: the gross ones really stay with you.

The idea behind putting Formica in your shower is that you can decorate your bathroom with godawful patterns, the same way you ruined your kitchen, only more water resistant... assuming you don't skimp on the silicone caulk. Hooray! More ugly everywhere! "Restraint" was a closed book in the seventies. "Too Much", by contrast, was a beloved, dogeared book with favorite passages underlined and highlighted in the seventies. Passages like "migraine" and "retinal burns" were even circled several times.

Aww, why so mean? Well, here's a sample of the wallpaper I recently spent a day pulling down from my bathroom walls. It wasn't Formica, so it came off in curly sheets, rather than biohazardous planks with water bugs swarming out from behind them.

Spending two years with this cornucopia wallpaper in my bathroom was like brushing my teeth while staring at a Magic Eye print, except that the sailboat never appeared. The pattern just kept vibrating on all four walls until I felt like vomiting. Fortunately the toilet was always handy... not that anyone would notice if I just spewed on the walls.

The Seventies even shows us the miracle of a carpeted bathroom. Tired of that easy-to-clean, quick-to-dry hygienic tile floor in your bathroom? Solve that problem with carpeting, baby, and don't be such a potsy! Leave town for a week or two and a bathroom like this would be reclaimed by foot-high fungal growths when you return. You'd have to throw your body weight against the door to get it open, feeling the mushroom stalks snapping as the door sheared them off the floor. But that'd be worth it, as long as you have that warm, soft carpet beneath your bare toes, right? Screw you, The Seventies. You're an idiot.

1957 Vision Training - Hold still. Don't blink. Try not to scream.

Joke #1 -  My God! 3D TV is SO much better than my plasma screen! You can really momentarily perceive the illusion of depth, offset by long stretches of brain-hurting blurriness! And it only costs 30% more than my crappy old 56 inch plasma screen? I'd be stupid NOT to buy one! Oh, hey, what if I want to have friends over for as movie? ... I said "How do I watch a movie with friends?" ...Hello?

Joke #2 - Building on the success of the Wii, and convinced that it can do no wrong, Nintendo re-introduced the Virtual Boy at the 2010 E3 expo. Crowd response was baffled but enthusiastic, and Nintendo accepted over 23,000 irritated pre-orders in five hours. One ambivalent fanboy was quoted as saying "I don't understand why this is fun, and the demo gave me a headache, but I guess I have to want one." Consoles will ship in time for the holiday season and will come with two pack-in games: "Mario Staring Derby" and "Super Don't Blink".

Joke #3 - Deep inside the Fox News bunker, network employees enjoy the finest in day-care services. Here, two lucky children receive critical brain updates direct from the hive mind.

Joke #4 - Extended wear contacts, 1957. Contact lenses at that time required constant flushing with saline, which in turn required filtration and aeration. To solve the "portability problem" of the new contact lenses, the table was fitted with wheels.

Joke #5 - An early East German Viewmaster prototype, circa 1949. Popular Viewmaster reels of the time were "Depth of Emptiness", "Broken Tree", "Hound Who Cried", "Tiny Stones Vol. 2", and "Look at Chair".

Joke #6 - Cern, Switzerland. Plagued with technical setbacks and functional delays, the Collision Analysis Team at the Large Hadron Collider has introduced additional personnel. Despite the LHC being offline at the time of the report, the new team announced the detection of a bunny and two ponies after only fifteen minutes on the job.