Pedestrian Crossing - Frank's dilemma.

Joke #1 - Frank knew he had to get the door fixed, but the holidays were coming and money was tight. It was just getting so damn annoying holding it on with his armpit, though. Right hand turns were a real treat.

Joke #2 - Frank turned his lights on at the last second, startling them all. "A-HA!" he shouted. "Caught you, Barbara! How dare you have an affair with that man, that girl, that other man, that boy, and that baby... AND at our special intersection, too!"

Joke #3 - "Well hey, Frank! Nice to see you! I didn't expect to be run over by you this evening!"

Joke #4 - The joke had gone over like gangbusters, but Frank had neglected to wash his hand afterwards, and he had to get home for dinner in a hurry. He liked being known for something, but he would have to think of a new joke to use around the office. The "stinkpalm" was getting to be a real pain.

Joke #5 - Frank was tired of being a spectacle at stop lights. The window came up to his armpit, the steering wheel was buried in his stomach, and the roof pushed his hat down over his ears. Maybe in future decades cars would be bigger? Or maybe one of the manufacturers would produce a special model for sufferers of gigantism?

Joke # 5 - Frank turned his lights on, startling them all. He was getting good at this. It was pretty clever of them, meeting to plan his surprise party in the middle of the street, but he was cleverer still.

Joke #6 - His arm didn't feel right in his lap - it might get pinched between his leg and the steering wheel. It didn't feel right up on the wheel - he may hit a big bump, causing the wheel to jerk, breaking his thumb. Nope. He'd best keep it safe by hanging it out the window, where nothing at all could crush it suddenly.

Joke #7 - Audrey Meadows, Ron Howard, Grace Kelly, Mel Blanc and Bing Crosby, all in one intersection? Okay, Frank would save his murdering spree for the next crosswalk.

Joke #8 - Frank turned his lights on at the last second, startling them all. "A-HA!" he shouted. "Caught you, Gerald! How dare you... etc etc."

Joke #9 - Jeez, the goofy hayseeds that lived in these podunk towns.... They'd stand there, transfixed, hypnotized by his headlights until he turned them off. His commute was getting to be tedious.

Joke #10 - Scene from the Skokie Theater Company's 1954 interpretation of The Hobbit, Chapter eight, in which Bilbo and the dwarves, lost and starving, screech to a halt in an intersection to find a group of elves feasting, singing, and shopping, only to have the lights go out, and the revelers vanish.

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

1975 Plymouth Fury - Huge. The new small.

Looking for a small car? Consider the 1975 Plymouth Fury. You may also want to consider purchasing a small town to park it in.

Well, why be so hard on 1975? What did it know about small cars? Considering what had come before it, the Fury was kind of smallish, I guess. It's probably longer than an Escalade, but I can't be sure. The research team had trouble finding the exact length of the Fury. Maybe Alert Reader Craigf has it memorized? According to the Wikipedia page on the Fury, the '75 model had a wheelbase 4 inches shorter than the previous version (115 inches for the coupe in the ad). For comparison, a 2011 Cadillac Escalade's wheelbase is 116 inches.

It's nice looking. I really like the white vinyl interior. Will someone in power please make the car manufacturers bring back white interiors? I'll be waiting in my office.

The real attraction in this ad is the smiling couple who, according to the plaid-trousered husband, are "waiting for a car that looks good...". Well, you oughta know.

I'll be passing around a basket of Plymouth Fury PNGs. Please  take one and pass it around. Big and small, left and right. get your rude finger ready to right click them into the garage on your hard drive.

Allen-Bradley Motor Control - Who-who what what?

The Change In Public Media supervisor dropped this in my inbox late last night. Must have been a late one for them yesterday. I need to tell them to stop monitoring so many changes in public media and go home to their families. Maybe I'll have the Work/Life Balance and Overtime Avoidance Manager tell them. Forza Motorsport 4 came out yesterday and it feels like a busy morning for me.
Dateline - The Saturday Evening Post. October 13th, 1962. An ad for Allen-Bradley Motor Controls appears in a mainstream publication, and part of the audience is interested!

Quite a product shot, huh? A manly hand holding a jumble of corners and screws. "What the hell is a motor control" anyway?", you say? Well, it's a thing found in factories, restaurants, laundromats, stores and probably your house. Anywhere there's an electric motor, you need a motor controller. The bigger the motor, the more important it is to have a motor controller.

"Why the hell didn't I know what a motor control is?" you say? Well, it's because pretty much all media was different in 1962. Magazines like The Saturday Evening post and Life were big stuff in the days when any activity participated in by more than three people DIDN'T have a magazine or website dedicated to it. In '62, everyone in the family read Life and The Saturday Evening Post. So, right next to ads for tampons and baby food, you find ads for obscure industrial geekdom like this Allen-Bradley one. "General Interest" meant just that back then. Now, there's practically no such thing. Markets are very specialized now.

Here in The Future, information squirts out of every screen, and screens are found on every object that costs more than a dollar to make. My Department for the Prediction of Technology Manager tells me that within three months we'll have flexible ads on our underwear. When you change your clothes, you'll be presented with an ad for Ass Don't Smell.

So, outlets for advertising and news of all sorts are as numerous and common as cell phones. It's like every person over the age of six having a continually updated copy of every magazine in existence in their pocket at all times. So there's little need to cram industrial machinery ads into the same publication as Hires root beer.

To the same extent, this also explains why television shows that were arguably a pile of shit, like Donny and Marie, Hart to Hart, and most of television from the Seventies could meet with any degree of success. There were five channels, so there was hardly any competition. That's all there was to watch, unless you wanted to go outside and look at nature or ride a bike or something insane like that.

Dad had a box or two of motor controls in the basement when I was a kid. I promise you the thing in the picture was made of shiny black phenolic resin, and the screws and metal parts were heavy gauge brass. Basically, you need motor controls because electric motors use more juice when they're working harder. A big motor has a big armature (spinning axle thing) and that's a lot of mass to turn. Also, the motor is probably hooked up to a conveyor belt or something, and that's heavy too. So, while you can simply throw a switch and instantly supply maximum current to a small motor, a big motor needs to be gradually brought up to speed to avoid drawing too much power and throwing a breaker, or worse. That's what motor controls do.

It looks like Allen-Bradley still exists, sort of. They seem to be part of Rockwell Automation, since a Google search takes me right to Rockwell's site.

I don't know why dad needed a box full of motor controls. Maybe he imagined someday singlehandedly re-fitting a laundromat with new motor controls when all their dryers simultaneously suffered Sudden Catastrophic Motor Control Failure (SCMCF)? He'd have been a hero of the laundromat, and he'd get free dryer time for a year. Too bad we had our own washer and dryer.

Perry Como - Perry cuts a disc... of stone.

Mom loves Perry Como. In case you're thirty or younger and assume everything that happened before you were born just didn't happen, Perry Como was one of the crooners of the fifties. He was always overshadowed by Sinatra and Bing Crosby, but he was in there with them, making ladies feel things that they dare not mention to their husbands.

This is a two-page article/pictorial of Perry recording an unnamed song , but since the article ran in the Nov 8, 1952 issue of Collier's, these could be photos of Perry recording "Don't Let the Stars Get in you Eyes", which was released in late 1952. The article mentions the song "If "as being "the most recent" hit. If  was released in early 1951, so somewhere between "If" and "Don't let the Stars..." is the song being recorded in the article. I don't think it's either of those songs, because I found recordings of them on YouTube and I don't hear any strings. There's a string section in the pictures.

Anyway, look at the state of recording technology in '52. Holy jeez! Nice banquet table you dragged to the session behind your limo, Perry. Look at the mixing console: A few knobs and one VU meter. The large, vented cabinet on the recording engineer's right is probably the tape machine.

This studio is, in all likelihood, recording in mono. The single volume meter on the console indicates that much. Also, stereo recording (you know - one channel for each ear) was starting to be adopted in the early fifties, but from looking at this picture, I don't think this studio had adopted the new technology just yet. Give them a break. Magnetic tape had only been around commercially for maybe for years when this photo was taken! Previous to that, music was recorded on dead raccoons.
So, of course the recording console was simple: the engineer only had one channel to worry about. I can't think what the rest of the knobs could be. He only needs volume and maybe a few bass and treble adjustments. The Audio Archaeology Team was unable to find any information on 1952 recording consoles. Internet, I am, not for the first time, disappointed with your inability to hand to me all information from anywhere in the universe and from any epoch at a moment's notice. You're on notice, internet.

Multitrack recording didn't appear until a little later in the fifties. Multitrack recording lets you record on part, say, the orchestra, then roll the tape back and add the vocals (if you have a two-track machine). If you want a stereo recording of the orchestra, you need a three-track setup (orchestra left, orchestra right, and one for vocals). If you look at the other pictures, you can see Perry recording vocals independent of the orchestra. How did they do that if they only have a mono studio? Maybe they had two mono machines? That would let them record the orchestra on one machine, then play that tape while Perry sang over it. The recording and Perry's live microphone feed would be mixed together with a "mixer" (probably the thing with knobs on the beat up table in the picture) and recorded together on a second machine. This is called "bouncing" and it's what I was doing in high school with a pair of cassette decks and a couple of cables. It sounded like hell but I had no money.

In the late sixties, pretty much every studio got at least a four track tape machine. For me, this happened in college, when I bought a Tascam Portastudio 424. For the Beatles, this was when they stopped sounding like Herman's Hermits and started sounding like The Beatles.

There is something to be said for older technology. I've been a home recording dork for a few decades and since I migrated my hobby to the PC, I've recorded exactly two songs in the last four years. In the past, with my Tascam DA-38 (a stand-alone device that starts up every time), I'd knock out about two per month. Lately, my copy of Pro Tools (software that runs on a computer) just won't launch at all. Imagine opening your garage in the morning and instead of seeing your car waiting there, you saw an hourglass icon floating in midair. After ten seconds, it disappears, leaving you with your empty garage and no way to get to work. Somehow, we've been convinced this is acceptable behavior from a computer. Now, I have to take a day off work and call Digidesign and pay them twenty bucks to help me figure out why their software is a flaky pile of stupid.

I'm thinking of de-evolving back to something with cables and knobs that works every time.

Floor-O-Scope

Joke #1 - Loaf observation, day 114. No change observed. Man, this experiment was really getting intense.

Joke # 2 - The Over In The Corner bacterial colony had repelled another wave of skirmishers in the night from the Under The Window colony. They had a plan to decimate the Under The Window group once and for all, but they needed help. They had just found the large ally they were looking for. Tonight, there would be much victorious flagella-waving.

Joke #3 - The hairs were oval in cross section, with mineral residue consistent with the untreated water of the older buildings over by the materials lab. Roybert had been right: those jerks from Materials had been using his soap, and there would be hell to pay.

Joke #4 - Harry S. Truman's home-made reading glasses, 1948. Smaller and lighter than his 1947 model.

Joke #5 - "Honey, the apple juice is almost totally absorbed, now. It really is the quicker picker upper! ...Honey, you hear what I said?"

Joke #6 - Well, it looked like an ordinary piece of floor cake. Still, Roybert suspected a trap. This would take some more observation. He sure was hungry, though.

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

Charles Atlas - Smooth operator.

We've used an ad featuring this same photo of Charles Atlas before, so no, your memory isn't an idiot. Different ad. Same picture.But the first time around. I didn't notice that old chuck has no nipples. Also, it LOOKS like he has no belly button, but it could be disguised in a fold of his "ten pack". It really doesn't look like his nips are hidden in shadow. It looks like they've been airbrushed out.

What gives? All I can think of is something like the code of Standards and Practices set up in 1950, but A) that was television and B) this magazine is from 1948. So why are Charlie's raisins MIA? He's definietly got them in THIS picture of him and Joe Louis.

The world may never know why Charles Atlas' torso is nearly featureless. The only reasonable assumption we can make is that he accidentally shaved them off while preparing for his photo shoot.

Interestigly, a bunch of pages toward the back of this same issue of Popular Mechanics, we find this ad for home plastic casting kits. It looks like drawings of naked ladies are perfectly okay with the Mop Mech editors, cartoon nipple and all.

P.S. Check it out! The Plastic Arts Studio is in Muncie Indiana, home of all the Tom Slick cartoons. Can it be a coincidence that the plastic casting ad from a company in Muncie IN features a cartoon nipple when no nipples were EVER seen in any Tom Slick cartoon? Hmmm? Of course it is. Don't be an idiot.

Champion Spark Plugs - Reliable as bears.

Another giant spark plug from space has come to show us the superiority of Champion Spark plugs. By rectally fitting us with spark plugs? No, silly! By letting your child play with bears. Sheesh!

See? First, there's the father and son, who were heading out on vacation to a questionable sweat lodge in the middle of the Mojave, but their car broke down. Possibly because they were using sub-standard non-Champion spark plugs.

So, they stopped at a service station to get new plugs put in. Good thing they're choosing Champions, because they wouldn't want to get stranded in the desert, where there are... delightful bear cubs... to play... with. So, it's good they were stranded... by their crappy off-brand spark plugs.

Wait. Start again. Father and son are safe in the desert because their car is powered by Champion spark plugs, so it won't break down... which it apparently has... which is good... because... otherwise they would have...  missed the chance to play with bears?

No. It must be this: At a routine stop at a service station in the middle of the desert, the father and son are having their oil checked. Fortunately, they don't need new spark plugs, because they've got Champions in their engine, so instead of exercising any caution at all, they're free to play with the bears... which are hardly restrained by the chain in the ground... allowing the bear to have a go at the boy's face if he wants to...? Champions are great.

Jeez, no. Okay. Champion spark plugs are so good that you can let your son play with bears, which are the sole attraction at a zoo in the desert. And the bears are almost certainly doomed, because their not indigenous to arid regions of the American Southwest. Also a giant spark plug space ship. And shooting their car with a ray or whatever. Jeez, advertising is complicated. I'm buying a brand that doesn't give me a headache.