Cointreau - Candy is dandy but liqueur is quickueur.

In the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Mister Salt asks Wonka if he has "something going on the side", in reference to the butterscotch and "buttergin" vats in the inventing room. Wonka conspiratorially whispers in Salt's ear "Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker." As with all the cleverness in the movie (buried among the lame puns included for the children in the audience), it was lost on me as a kid. But as a giant grownup, I can now appreciate the way Wonka shakes people off by giving them an answer that is not an answer at all, and confuses them long enough for him to change the subject. For more on this, see also everything that has happened in American politics since World War 2. It's funny in a movie. Less funny in world events.

Cointreau did more than simply deliver nutty clip art to readers of Redbook (which I insist is not me. I only look at the pictures). Cointreau (kwahn-TROW) is a "liqeur" (lih-KOOR), which is distinct from liquor (LIK-ker). I knew how to say these things before I could legally buy them because, as mentioned before, I used to be a busboy, and routinely lugged cases of booze from the basement to the bar, which required chanting the name of the stuff to myself on the way down so I wouldn't forget which kooky word I was looking for.

As I have just found out from the Phil Are GO! Spirits and Get Outta My Face I Can Stop Any Time I Wanna No YOU Shaddap Team, Liqueur (say it all French Like) is basically distilled alcohol with loads of other flavorants in it. Spices, sugar, fruit, sugar, and most importantly, sugar. It's thick, sweet,  and syrupy.

Liquor, on the other hand, is the American word for "spirits". It's pretty much an umbrella term for hard alcohol, which is usually thinner than water, and is good for degreasing bearings. Vodka and Gin are liquor. Triple Sec and Cointreau are types of liqueur, also called "cordials" or "schnapps", just to keep things clear as mud. I think the problem is, people make up new names for things while they're enjoying the thing they're naming. So, we wind up with a bunch of names for something, and half of them sound like you're drunk already when you say them properly "schnappps..pps", "liqeueuruur".

The high sugar content of cordials / liqueur makes them A) a favortie of high school girls who don't like the taste of alcohol but want to get sloppy drunk when their parents are away for the weekend and leave the cabinet unlocked so their new boyfriend can feel them up on the pool table without accountability, and B) a plausible basting agent for meat. People like their savory things covered in sweet stuff. Look deep in your heart. You know it to be true.

So, clip art. There's some nice stuff in this ad. So nice, in fact, that it'd be great if someone would present it to the world, all cleaned up and ready to go into your next party invitation. If only such a hero would step forward and provide this service and no extra charge. Rude Finger Graphic Gift coming right up.

"Oooh, I am soooooo drunk! I hope
nobody's hands find their way under
my cardigan. By the way, my single
enormous button is hanging on
by a thread!"

This is not useful cip art. It's just weird. What purpose does she serve?

Mister Mooney forgetting about what Lucy did
with the receipts, 1000px wide.

400px wide.

1000px wide

400px wide.

Gizmo Vest

Joke #1 - Advanced design "portable respiration vest" helps wearer to breathe in event of lung failure. User simply winds up timing device for personal respiratory tempo, and then inflates bladder with convenient mouth nozzle... Oh. Wups.

Joke #2 - Radical new "portable lung" aids respiratory patients. Inventor hopes to further develop smaller version to be implanted in chest cavity, or develop much, much larger patients.

Joke #3 - New "EveryTool Utility Vest" literally prepares wearer for "any possible situation". Vest includes travel size Kleenex, miniature butane torch, vial of owner's blood, kitchen size trash bag, one 50-count packet of pachinko balls, and hand grenade.

Click for big, if that's
what you're into.

Good housekeeping ladle lady - Vote for soup!

There's nothing especially funny about this mail-in offer for assorted Good Housekeeping cookbooks  All it has to offer is this very dated clip art ladle lady. So the Phil Are GO! Image Manipulation and Blandishment Brigade will make it offer her to you.

Loving ripped from the page and de-halftone patterned, she'll make a fine addition to whatever folder on your hard drive you keep all this junk in. We now present her in glorious black and white at a majestic 1000px width, and at a less majestic 400px width. She's a PNG on a transparent background, and if you know what that means, you know that she'll drop cleanly into wyour Photoshop document, while still showing your background pattern between her legs. She'd be great for adding some visual "pop" on a note to your family, like "Make your own goddam dinner. You're not crippled!" or "I still remember what you said on our vacation last summer. Do you trust me enough to eat this stew?"

We just know you'll pass this ladle lady down from generation to baffled generation, so hurry up and treasure her. Get your rude finger ready to right click her into your heart in three two one...

Click for 1000px size.

Click for 400px size.

She can also be had in a fancy vectorized format for pixel-free enlargements. Just email us and we'll send you the file, since Blogger doesn't tolerate EPS files. Just think how hungry everyone will be, staring up at the ladle lady floating over your neighborhood, printed on the side of your dirigible. This fantasy can be yours with the vector version of her!

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Today is national Go Vote For A Thing Day, so go vote for something! No one will know what you like unless you vote for it, as loudly as possible. If you're not sure what to vote for, we'd like to suggest voting for write-in candidate Dr. Johnny Fever. It might be good to live under a Fever administration. Non-stop rockin' and everybody being cool. If you choose not to vote, don't come crying to me when you find yourself living under a Fever administration, with non-stop rockin' and everybody being cool.

"Booger."

Pel-Freez Thimk Rabbit - A fad for all seasons.

"Thimk Rabbit". What's an ironic typo in a 1961 ad have to do with the underdog rabbit meat lobby? Not much, but it was a fad in the sixties to misspell "think", even though it had nothing to do with your product. Is it an actual typo? Nope. It was a fad.

Double-you tee eff? They didn't weave it into their ad copy in any clever way. They just tacked it on at the top. Why jump on a fad if it has nothing to do with your product? Maybe because advertising always wants to seem hip and "with it". I fail to see how this helps with the sales of rabbit meat. I guess the trend was just that huge. Everyone was doing it.

Punch card machines with "think" sign on the wall in background..
Punch cards. Those weren't the days.

In the 1930's, IBM began using the slogan "Think.". Makes sense, right? It's a computer company that uses diligence and intelligence as their corporate identity. Back then, IBM was called the National Cash register Company, but the slogan was such a hit that they brought it on over when they became International Business Machines. It was a huge hit and of course was trademarked by IBM. "Think" was used by IBM through The Seventies Apple made their own response slogan "Think different.", which actually was a little ironic, too. To be grammatically accurate, the sentence should read "Think differently." (Lolly lolly lolly). I think Apple was being cheeky.



Now we come to the origin of today's weird ad. In The Fifties, there appeared a parody of the "think" sign: "thimk". Google Answers' timeline is uncertain how it started, but it was at least popularized be MAD magazine, which apparently existed in the fifties. News to me.

This is just conjecture, but I bet "thimk" started as an office joke kind of thing. You know -  the way that people used to have office jokes that had clearly been photocopied  a hundred times and faxed around the world from person to person? This is how memes used to get around before the internet. Anyway,  I bet MAD was just the first to publish "thimk", even though it had been cropping up among office wiseacres before then. I have no proof. It's just a guess.

So "Thimk" was s huge hit with people, the same way that "pobody's nerfect" was a hilarious thing for a while. How huge a thing was it? Well, apparently it was huge enough that a rabbit meat company couldn't afford to seem like they weren't hip to the jive. That's pretty big. It's strange that Pel-Freez went with the "thimk" line instead of just spelling it "scwewy wabbit", implying a link to Elmer Fudd, who had been doing the cartoon hunting gig for some twenty years by then. I wonder if "wabbit" was trademarked by Warner Bros.? Actually, now that I think of it, Pel-Freez probably wouldn't want their potential customers imagining Bugs Bunny being slaughtered and eaten by their family. Definitely bad for business. See? These are the landmines you can avoid when you think a little before you pull the trigger. IBM was wight.

Reminder - Seasonal Obligation Cards. Yes, have some!.

This year's Season Obligation Cards have just arrived, here at GO! Tower, and they're to beat the band. Also, they're free for the taking, if you send us some kind of physical address to mail it to. Then, you can take one... for free. So, write your address on an email and send it to philarego@gmail.com and remain perfectly motionless for a few weeks while we get ready to send them all out.

Bear Safety Service - What a mess-cot.

In 1949, cars needed a lot more attention. If I recall, You had to change your spark plugs every ten miles, and, when driving, you had to continually adjust the carburetor via an arm-hole in the dashboard. So, there was a real need for Bear service stations dotting the nation as Starbuck's does today. By the time your car's tail lights left the station, the front of the car needed service again. So, at one time, all bear stations were almost exactly one car length apart.

I see the problem with that car right now, and I don't need a giant alignment rack to tell me, either. The car has no fenders. Without wheel arches, the front wheels can't steer at all without rubbing. It's a miracle it was driven to the shop. The owner must live in a perfectly straight line in front of the service station. Lucky for him/her! That  Bear "garageman" had better install some fender holes, stat!

"Take your garageman's advice." A "garageman"? There's a term that obviously totally failed to catch on. Back in time, it was acceptable to take your vocation and tack "-man" on the end of it, and use that word to describe yourself. "I'm a signman." I'm a lumberman." "I'm a teachman". "I'm a gazelle washerman." For some reason, this has only persisted with "fireman", "garbageman" and a few others. Despite the popularity of  Mad Men, I doubt there are many in advertising who call themselves "admen". There's also the fact that it's kind of completely sexist to imply that gender helps define your career.

Anyoldhoo, check out that horrible bear mascot! What happened to him? Well, for starters, he looks like he has a hangover. Second, he has an arm growing out of his chin. Third, his posture makes him look about ninety. That's, uuh, 405 in bear years. It's no wonder his back hurts. He has a safety flag jammed into his spine! That's some cruel irony. Good thing that cross with the picture of Action Crewcut Jesus is hiding his left arm. He's probably holding in his abdominal hernia. This mascot is in bad shape.

This bear drawing has "traced drawing syndrome". You see it a lot in small-time business logos and school mascots. Once upon a time, a decent artist was hired to draw up a character. Since then, it's been traced and re-traced, crumpled up, enlarged, shrunk, and traced again by a string of quasi-artists that don't understand what the lines are supposed to look like. This is how you get a bear with no line separating his chin and his arm. Call it a prehensile goatee. Even though it's just a cartoon, it still needs to have structure. Each line has a job to do, and when the lines are reproduced by someone who doesn't understand what they're looking at, it introduces noise and craziness born of visual illiteracy. In the case of this bear, it looks like the tracer was concentrating on making him look fluffy and/or shaggy, to the exclusion of all other concerns. As a result, he looks like he's partially melted. Let's give this tortured creature some rest and replace him with a better-drawn version.

I took ten minutes and scratched out a new bear. I'm slightly creeped out by how much it looks like a Care Bear. I probably should have drawn it larger than in the ad (4" tall bear), or worn my glasses. Ah well.

On the left is my tracing the bear mascot from the ad. I hesitate to call him the "original" bear, because when this ad was printed, the original drawing either no longer existed, or was at the bottom of a filing cabinet with coffee rings on it. I drew through the cross thingy, trying to show where the lines probably "originally" were.

On the right is my slightly disturbing care bear. He has a younger posture and looks more awake than the pink bear from the ad. A posture hunched over forwards looks negative and tired. A posture bent slightly backwards opens up the character's attitude and makes it look happy. You can exaggerate the posture in either direction for effect, because it's a cartoon. The whole thing is an exaggeration.

He could be iterated and improved with a few more drawings, but you get the idea. He looks like he's built out of squishy sausages and has volume. He has structure. I added a little thumb to his hand to help him with his "Vannah White" pose. Bears don't have thumbs, but then they don't smile and promote automotive maintenance either.

To make a character look furry, you don't make the entire outline wiggly. You choose where to add tufts. The sides of the muzzle, elbows / knees and the top of the head are good places to add a few "soft jaggy" lines to indicate fur.

The lines at the corner of the mouth and under the eye should cooperate to describe the rounded muscles in the cheek. That's how you make the whole face look like it's smiling, and not look "painted on". For more on this, I suggest buying "Cartoon Animation", by Preston Blair. He's one of the old timers from Disney who worked on Fantasia, and that book has just about everything you need to know about drawing characters of any kind.

You could maybe buy this book for some son/daughter/niece/nephew for Pointy Tree Day, assuming first that the kid has any interest at all in drawing. You could also buy him/her a Action Crewcut Jesus doll. Your choice. But, if the child learns to draw, he/she could draw all the Action crewcut Jesuses they want, couldn't they?

Kentile Mosaic Solid Vinyl Tile - Dinner before death.

Ah! Mister Bond! I see you are awake, after your little nap. So sorry if you have a headache. The gas we used on you is a particularly noxious blend of Inexpensive Avon cologne that comes in a bottle shaped like a cowboy boot and Windex. It's very effective against MI6 agents, but you'll also find that middle aged women in hip huggers will be very drawn to you until the scent fades away. Won't you please come into my kitchen? I have fooled you. It is not a mosaic floor. It is Kentile Mosaic Solid Vinyl Tile!

I see you're impressed by the internationalness of my little fortress. No, you're not on a veranda in Spain. You're indoors! That's right! Those railings are mostly cosmetic, but they keep my servants from falling off the breakfast daiz. Shall we sit? Fatua, bring Mister Bond a Kayo. It will be his last.

You are very troublesome, Double Oh Seven. While you were killing my guards and upsetting my giraffes, you knocked over several cans of paint that I had set aside for touching up my brickwork. What shall I do now, when the tea trolley chips the corner of my wall? Perhaps in England they make due with exposed brick, but here in Glencoe we demand color!

Speaking of color, you may notice the stripe of orange on the floor, indicating the minimum safe distance you may stand from my walls. Also notice that near the hearth oven, that distance is slightly greater. It would be such a shame if you were to fall into the oven, or the dishwasher, or hear the easy sounds of Sergio Mendez on my newly miniaturized hi-fi set. Sergio is not for you!

Would you care for some terrier? No? That is well, because it is not terrier all. You see how easily I deceive you. It is a baby kangaroo. It tastes exactly like veal, but at merely thrice times two the cost. I can do this because my international smuggling ring is so successful, Mister Bond. And, so it shall remain, once I dispose of your corpse in the In-Sink-Erator. It is over there, in the sink on the island countertop, which is filled with my collection of seasoning shakers and plastic fruit, near my wall of precious copper pots and pans which must never be used -

Blast! Where has he gone!?

Guards! Retrieve Mister Bond and bring him to me! The man who does gets an extra big bowl of Quisp, but not too much! I need my guards to be lean! He must not reveal the secrets of my decor to MI6!

Click for big.