Gould-National Batteries - Snowed in.

This week, Chicago is enjoying some especially non-wintery weather, so how about a post with snow in it? Gould-Natinoal Batteries' Mr. Big promises not to let you down on the coldest days.

This morning there was condensation on all the windows of P.A.G. HQ, which I'd never seen before. Walking outside was like crawling into someone's mouth. Hot, sticky, and pressing in from all sides. This is the kind of weather where you may fantasize about being set on fire, because at least a nice fire is dry, instead of oppressive and smothering. So, diving into one of the snow drifts that blocked the promenade of Go! Plaza, seemingly only yesterday was just a fever dream of my pre-sunrise commute.

Anyway, who's Gould-National Batteries? Just a company that exists, but without any real web presence. One of the first links that shows up on a Google search is a rather generic-looking page on CorporationWiki.com.

There are a few funny things about the picture, though. The car with Mr. Big in it seems to be plowing through the snow as if the battery gives it infinite traction and mass, while mortal cars are stuck. What does the cranking power of your battery have to do with driving through snow? I know, I know. It's advertising. Please stop thinking.

 Also, there's the little clip art man next to the huge battery. I scanned him at 1200 DPI and he started to look a little familiar. I know that blob is intended to be his mouth, but if you think of it as a moustache he begins to look a lot like Hitler in a zoo suit. Coincidence? Of course, idiot.

Clip art guy could be reused for other things, but first he'll need to be separated from his background. And, since he's so small, his detail tends to fall apart when you blow him up, so I traced him as vector art in Adobe Illustrator. What's that mean? It means he's just a guy made of dots an lines, baby. Just a guy made of dooots aaaand liiiiines. Enlarge his brains out and there's no jaggies. I'll post him as a good ols PNG on transparency, but anybody who wants the vector version can email us for an EPS (Blogger won't post an EPS file) that you can open in Flash, Illustrator, or even Autocad, so you can use a Flow-Jet or CNC machine to cut him out of a sheet of titanium, to stand in the yard for your child's birthday party. Rude finger graphic gift, coming right up. Right click and save, save, save.

Farrow's Canned Produce - Buy our fruit and veg. Bibbity bobbity boo.

This ad for Farrow's canned produce comes to us by way of England's Picture Post magazine, circa 1949. The gorgeous painting does all the work of selling. The only copy in the ad is a poem. How absurdly gentle of them!

Of course, this is England so maybe they're just a little more civilized than us (soccer/football fans notwithstanding). It's just kind of jarring (no pun) to see an ad that's just a picture and a poem. This is what they call "the soft sell".

Canning keeps food "fresh" for a several years. I used the quotes because all the produce I ever saw come out of a can was decidedly more brown than I remember seeing in their natural state. The convenience of canned fruits and veg may have been partially to blame for my early-life categorical loathing of vegetables. After discovering frozen vegetables, the clouds opened wide. After seeing the comparative price of frozen veg, the same clouds closed up again, just a little bit. Still, if I'm making stir-fry, frozen pea pods, broccoli and water chestnuts are the only way to go.

Dad served in the army, so he could eat almost anything that didn't operate a machine gun nest. I recall him popping open a can of peaches while watching M.A.S.H. or something, and noting the odd color of the fruit as it made the 14-inch journey from can to dad. He would also eat a can of lima beans as a TV time snack, finishing off by drinking the juice. Yikes. War really is hell.You might as well can those lima beans. Peas too. Frozen or fresh, they're tiny bags of mush waiting to spew their little entrails all over the inside of your mouth when you bite down. Canning them won't make them any worse. Also, peas smell like underpants.

Anyway. Purdy picture!

I do feel obligated to point out that the English were training for fruit defense as recently as 1969. This may explain their compulsion to cram all produce into cans. For safety perhaps.

Ford Mustang II - Pudgy little brother.

Hey, look! A Mustang ad. What's wrong, you don't remember this car? Yeah, not surprising.

A lot of car guys don't like the Mustang II. First off, its inception was tainted with the energy crisis of the early seventies.Many versions of the Mustang II were not so fast, especially the 4-cylinder model. Also, it was based on the much remembered Ford Pinto. Fortunately, the Mustang II didn't inherit the Pinto's "explodiness".

In 1974, they hadn't quite figured out how to reduce an engine's emissions without killing the power as well. So of course, the engine Mustang II's engine was pretty well strangled by the clean-air-jumble of hoses and filters of the time. Even if you got the V8, it only produced 140 Hp.

When gearheads get dreamy about someday restoring an old Mustang, they're almost never thinking about this one. It's underdog status is no doubt part of it's appeal to me. Besides that, I prefer the silhouette of a hatchback to the standard "three box design". I like a nice white interior too. It's very Space 1999.

This car is so cool, I think I'll 'Shop it out of it's home background and rub out James Spader leaning on the roof. I tried to reverse the badges and decals in the flipped versions, but din't bother with the lettering on the tires. Too messy. Rude Finger Graphic Gift coming right up! Big and small. left and right. You're welcome.

Chair Froth / Fuzz

Joke #1 - In what is widely regarded as a devastatingly shrewd marketing maneuver, in 1947 the Broyhill furniture company introduced the unsettling but very affordable "Hairy Chairy - the chair that grows a beard!" for $14, alongside the heart-stoppingly expensive "chair shaver" for $1299.

Joke #2 - [Reuters] Addressing a problem with their service that has existed for years, Cinemax has announced that every monthly subscription will now include a coupon redeemable for one monthly rental of a wet-dry vac. Reaction from awkward males aged 14-22 has been unanimously positive.

Joke #3 - Carol did love her grandfather, and nothing would ever change that, but the hours of cleanup after each visit were really beginning to wear on her.

Joke #4 - Named for the distinctive sound it made when reclining, the "Whiz-a-Lounger" was purchased by many customers who misunderstood the meaning of the name, necessitating the release of the much more accurately named "Idiot Vac".

Joke #5 comes from Jeremy. Thanks Jeremy! - “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised… all of George’s Iron Bladder competitions seem to end this way.”

Joke #6, also from Jeremy - “Tupperware parties always get me sooooo excited,” cooed Francine."


Joke #7, Jeremy again! - "Announcer: But when it’s the rear end of the president of the PTA on her furniture, Thelma wants everything shipshape!"


Joke #8 is courtesy of Kurt. Thanks Kurt! - “And so, after moving the Liquid Plumber to a higher shelf, Mavis respectfully gathered what was left of Fluffy.”

Joke #9 is by John Grizmond. Thanks John! - "I’ll wipe that grin off your cushion, you coin eating bastard."


Joke #10, zinged by Jeremy once again. Quite a zing! - “As a nudist upholstery cleaner salesman, you violate a lot of taboos… but you sell a lot of upholstery cleaners.”

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

G.E. Musaphonic - Trying to out-Panduit the Zenith.

A few pages away from Monday's Zenith table radio ad, we find this G.E. radio ad of identical size and placement on the page. Coincidence??? Possibly! Is it also pretty??? Definitely!

Whereas the Zenith radio had the non-catchy name of "Model H511", the G.E. wins the silly name category with the hilarious moniker "Musaphonic"! Zenith's alphabet soup system of nomenclature implies thorough engineering, as if the model were named for the serial number in the corner of the blueprint. "Musaphonic" sounds like it was voted on by a committee of jackoffs gathered around a long mahogany table. It implies nothing but marketing based on the assumption that the consumer (you) is an ignorant troglodyte easily dazzled by long words that have no meaning but earn big bonuses for the jagoffs that come up with them. Such is the long, rich heritage of the advertising industry.

Does the G.E. sound good? Well you wouldn't ask if you had bothered to study the wigglyness of the plexiglass cutout, you idiot. See? It's wiggly fidelity that your eyes can hear.

The ignorant troglodytes of 1954 would have been horrified by the use of the term "frequency spectrum", so they made an attempt to translate the concept of "clarity" and "detail" into something visual. Why not make a graph? Because most people don't like looking at graphs. A hundred years ago (1990-something) I can recall comparing frequency spectrum  graphs on the wrappers of competing audio cassettes, trying to figure which one to buy. That was hopeless. Instead, I just chose the tape that was the darkest. Rust colored tape meant "good enough for recording songs off the radio" and the shiniest black hi-bias tape meant "record from a CD with the shortest RCA cord possble because I'm an audiophile."

This G.E. radio reminds me of the new-ish Panduit building on I-80 near Tinley Park, which it turns out, is the world headquarters for the manufacturer of industrial geekdom. Here it is in Google maps, which seems to have cruised past early in the morning on a day when the place was still a skeleton.

Here's the finished structure. I'm not sure why this picture was flipped horizontally. The vertical section in the middle should be towards the left side of the building. Pretty nice, huh? I don't know how a design so clean and modern got through a committee. First time I drove past it, I said "jeez, that's a nice looking building. I bet it sounds really good."

Medicine Selection

Joke #1 - "You’re going to be just fine Mr. Clinton. You only need to take these various prescription medications six times a day with a meal, as well as this prescription nurse two times a day, with gin. Some drowsiness may occur."

Joke #2 - "Now, as you see here, we’ve got a wide selection of medications displayed on our special Medication Examination Table. Just choose whichever one looks good, and then step over to our special Medication Ingestion Table and prepare to collapse on our special Patient Molesta- I, uuh, - our Patient Care Tile."

Joke #3 - "Ah, nurse Gimble has a tray of bottles ready for us. I think you’ll find that any one of them can hold all the cash in your wallet, as well as all major credit cards, if you bend them just a little."

Joke #4 - …and after recommending  a random bottle of pez, spree, or razzles, Dr. Lambert, whose great great great great great great uncle’s ex-roomate was a trained physician (thereby multiplying his own negligible qualifications by ten thousand fold) sent the happy patient home to recover from his little bout of leukemia. It may sound extraordinary, but it’s just another ordinary day at St. Placebo’s Institute of Advanced Homeopathy.

Joke #5 is recommended by 4 out of 5 Comatoast commenters. Thanks Comatoast! - Joke #5 - "Looks like that's all of them. Nurse, please load the merchandise into Mr. Brighton's bag. A pleasure doing business with you Mr. Brighton. With your distribution record I suspect you'll have half the elementary school hooked by the end of the week."

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

Zenith Table Radio - Look at the sounds.

"Oh boo hoo. Waah waah. Everything was better then. Everything is terrible now". Well, as with basically everything, it's a non-simple mix of "yes" and "no". This ad for a gorgeous Zenith table radio makes you want to go all "waah waah".

It sure is pretty. Look how deco and geometric it is. Much of the consumer products landscape here in the future has been designed to look all swoopy and blobby, as if one left one's consumer product out on the driveway on that one day in July when the sun chose to go triple nova. Your poor radio/vacuum/microwave, all bendy with the blown-off quanta.

This Zenith cost thirty bucks in 1954. That sounds a little steep. The old inflation calculator says that's... OOF! $240! For that, you got a radio that looks great, stores no presets, connects to probably nothing via an "aux in" jack, and has an analog tuner of the "nylon string wrapped around a pulley" type that dissolves into sibilant noise as soon as you take your hand off the knob. Two weeks after buying the radio, the volume pot would get that corrosion on the copper contacts that makes adjusting the volume sound like "KSSHT! kh-kh-kh KUUH! KKKSSHHHHT!" Aah, the golden age of wireless.

For my money, the digital tuner is the single greatest development that radio has enjoyed since it's invention. Second greatest: digital volume control.

Let's say you walked into your local Best Buy's Noyze Zone and plunked down your $240 and said "give me your best". First off, the best thing you can do after walking into Best Buy's audio department is to walk right back out before the Corporately Mandated Hipness Demonstration Subwoofers loosen your bowel.  But, maybe your car broke down and you're stuck there.

Well, it won't be easy to spend $240 on a table radio. The first thing that your Eminem-looking associate will show you is probbaly something like this Sony XPLOD plastic aorta  for $129. It's been overdesigned with the exact same degree of effort as the Zenith in the old ad, but with rather a different sensibility. The chosen name of the XPLOD brand tells you everything you need to know about their idea of audio fidelity, regardless of your chosen price point. For $240, you can get two XPLODs and make them into a pair of headphones with some of those really long zip ties.




If you simply must spend $240 on a table radio, you'd do better to get this Boston Acoustics iObject dock in Stormtrooper White from Amazon for $249. Radio with more presets than there are decent stations in any one language. Solid build quality. Various in and out connectors. No CD mechanism. Sound quality that will make you take a few days off just to finish being impressed with it. The menu system is cryptic and frustrating, though, until you get it figured out. It could use Bluetooth audio streaming. Also, pity it looks like you paid $100. The Boston radio isn't especially clever or pretty (apart from the auto-dimming backlight on the display), but the ghetto dynamic of XPLOD's mouth-breathing troglodytic product developers makes the Boston look positively inspired. Too bad all the really good industrial designers work for Swedish companies whose point of entry is, shall we say, "prohibitive".

So, like it or not, you do get a lot for your money, thanks to science. If only the ghost of Zenith past would have come and worked some magic on the Boston Acoustics design department.

[I know this looks like a review or a promotion for Boaston Acoustics, but it's not. It's just a decent radio that costs about the same as the old Zenith.  -Mgmt.]