Great Day Hair Color - Screw your secretary.

If your hair changes color from grey to black over a period of two weeks, nobody will notice except that they will all want to bang you. Who says? Clairol in 1971! Yep. This poor guy starts out looking as sad and floppy as Principal Skinner, but in a few undetectable weeks, he becomes as vibrant and desirable as Springfield's lesser-known co-anchor Scott Christian. And them his secretary will want to do him.

Things are getting hot in Mndotf Filing Inc., and Clairol's Great Day hair color is the reason. At first, the boss looked like he could be his secretary's father, but after a couple of sneaky weeks adding Great Day to his hair, why, he could pass for her brother, and that means it's open season on Boss Brotherdad! Someone's gonna get it on!

Boooo! The boss hardly gets a look from his much younger secretary. They're both completely distracted by doing their jobs. This is inappropriate.

After a couple of days, the secretary can't put her finger on it... or can she?

See? Before too long, his hair is looking like a big black dome full of masculinity and grooviness. She doesn't know why, but her desk is going to need straightening up, after they finish collating on it.

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1949 Hudson - See the Hudson Centipede.

In your new '49 Hudson, you can park anywhere you like. Drive straight through the midway. It's fine, because everyone wants to see your giant Hudson, with physically impossible "step down" design. By the way, what is that supposed to mean? When you get in a car, you're almost always standing on the ground. How can the floor of the car be lower than the pavement? No matter. It's just advertising, and if you start thinking, then you're a terrible person.

Yep. Your Hudson is a real showstopper, but you know what? It's not showstopper enough. If you want to send them screaming from the tent, you need the Hudson Centipede. Four axles and four fender skirts, just to keep things modest. Here's the 1949 Hudson Centipede on a transparent alpha card, ready to horrify the other graphics on your hard drive. Don't say I didn't warn you. Get your rude finger ready to right-click-save this little crime against humanity into your HDD's freakshow in three, two, one, RIGHT CLICK SAVE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY NOW! You're welcome!

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Veto Deodorant - Your neck is so tasteful.

Hey! You know how The Fifties were all repressed and stuff? Well, shut up! here's an ad for Veto deodorant showing a woman having her neck sucked. Tastefully restrained, 1957!

Some of you will probably choose to view this as proof of the zombie infestation having started far earlier than you previously thought. Others will theorize along the vampiric route. However, I just happen to know that, in The Fifties, it was considered perfectly acceptable for a man to greet his special lady with a nice juicy neck suck, like an affectionate lamprey. You know she's really yours when her neck tastes like your own saliva. Romantic, no?

Sportsmanlike Driving, Pt. 10 - Driving! Doing it. How to?

Today, we cover another chapter of Sportsmanlike Driving. Today's topic is on "the rules of the road" or "how to drive and stuff".

Fig. 171 shows you the importance of signaling when you plan to pass on the shoulder.

But always lookout for the always dangerous "Atak Trucks". You should only pass these vehicles with another "sacrificial car" between you and this potentially deadly monster, as shown in Fig. 171.

In busy cities during times of heavy traffic., lanes may run in different directions, depending on the time of day. This is why it's so important to to be sure your watch is synchronized with the State Traffic Clock, to avoid a moist, chunky-style death.

In wintery conditions, special precautions must be taken:
1. test road conditions by stopping your car and examining the road surface. Consider tasting the road for saltiness. A safe winter road should taste like a potato chip.

2. Drive at lower speeds. If anything really gnarly happens, you'll want to be able to describe it to your children in great detail.

3. Follow at longer distances, to gather more speed as you rear end the driver in front of you.

4. Use tire chains, to safely tear the shit out of the pavement. This will lead to a more "texturized" road surface, for better traction, and thus, more safety.

5. Keep windshield clean. Snow makes an excellent cleaner. Also remember that urine freezes at a lower temperature than water. Hey, just saying.

6. Avoid foolish driving acts, such as steering, braking, or moving in any direction.

Fiberglas - Good for your battery, for some reason!

Well, Chicago is once again being made the bitch of a huge wad of arctic air, after getting pounded in the ass by a bunch of snow for three days. Good times. This Owens-Corning ad seems to think it's really important to have fiberglass in your battery in this kind of weather. Oh Sorry, I mean "Fiberglas".

Cold weather hurts batteries. We know this. But why? Well, About.com pretty much just tells us that chemical reactions slow down as the temperature drops, so a chemical battery will produce less current when it's cold. For more understanding than that, please see your local continuing education facility's chemistry adviser.

This is one thing that gives me pause about electric cars. I wonder how well they'll perform in regions of the country that experience what I will understate as "Proper Winter". Your car is hard to start in the winter because the battery doesn't like the cold. After it starts (if you're lucky), you're fine, because the gas motor inherently produces heat as a by-product. your car will warm up to proper temperature in a couple of minutes and be perfectly happy... so long as you can get it started with your battery. So what happens when your whole car runs on batteries? For one thing, I'd imagine the range of travel would suffer horribly.

The other thing you'd miss is the free heat. Gas engines produce heat. They can't help it. In the summer, this is a pain, since you're hot enough already, and keeping your engine from overheating becomes a priority. But in the winter, your car's cabin heater works by borrowing a little heat from the engine and using that to heat up the passenger compartment, which is fine, because your engine produces more heat than it knows what to do with. If you weren't using it for your comfort, your car would just be throwing it out the window. So, yeah, free heat. That's why you can't warm up until the engine starts to warm up. Well, with an electric car, there's no free heat. If you want to be warm, you'll be draining the batteries faster. Also, remember that generating heat with electricity is really inefficient. Ever lived in an apartment with electric baseboard heaters? I have. The energy bills were insane. Warming up the passenger compartment in your electric car will seriously kill the batteries.

So, yeah, in my opinion, the jury is still out on electric cars because of the power source, if you live in a sometimes-cold place. Batteries need to get smaller, stronger, cheaper, lighter, and quicker. Right now, most decent batteries on the market are lithium-ion, but there's a better kind on the horizon: lithium polymer. Lithium ion batteries are still made with mostly heavy metals. This makes them heavy (duh). It's possible to replace some of the heavy metals in a battery with polymers. That means plastic, which is lighter than metal (also duh), and I believe they have greater energy density than LI kind.. Right now, there is a lithium polymer presence in the consumer market. Radio control hobbyists will be familiar with LP batteries. Those wee little R/C helicopters? Those generally run on lithium polymer batteries because they're light enough and powerful enough to make a model fly. However, it will be a while before LP batteries take over the broader market, probably because there aren't enough of them produced to feed broad-based consumer products like cell phones and cars. Even so, LP batteries will still suffer from the cold. I suspect that hydrogen fuel cells will endure the cold better than conventional batteries, but I'm not sure about that.

As for this Owens-Corning ad, they seem to think it's important to have your battery insulated with "Fiberglas". Don't be fooled. A battery at rest doesn't have any "body heat" to be retained by thermal insulation. So, the wintry imagery in this ad is misleading. I suspect the kind of insulation they're talking about here is electrical insulation, keeping the various bits inside the battery from making contact and shorting out. The ad copy just mentions holding "the power-producing material on the plates longer", for longer battery life. That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with hot or cold. I could be wrong, however, since my field isn't chemistry. Maybe some super-smart reader can straighten me out, if I'm completely off base.

In the meantime, thank you, Advertising, for not only assuming everyone is ignorant, but actively working to keep us that way. I knew I could count on you.

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The Danze Studio - Berlin, 1946

Joke #1 -Summer tryouts at the Berlin Skuatzendanze Academie, 1946.

Joke #2 - "Deeeeep, deeeeep breathing. Be open to the dots. Try to feeeeel your dots. AH! Very good, bertrand!"

Joke #3 - Last minute rehearsals for the holiday production of "Der Magic Shphincter", Berlin, 1946.

Joke #4 - Finally, after three semesters of practice and long nights of meditation, Bertrand finally managed to perform a Multiple Colon Drop. His graduation was all but assured. And, he still had a few weeks to help Grobert do the same.

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

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Italian Line Cruise Ships - No brawling.

The offices of GO! Tower have been mighty quiet lately, with all the staffers off for the holidays. It warms my heart to know that in less than a day our carpet will be another year out of style. I am pleased. Today is Arbitrary Slightly Bigger Year Number Day Eve, or as you probably call it, New Year's Eve. You probably have some kind of plan to hoist a glass or bucket with one or more friends. I wonder what percentage of the world population starts each year with a blood alcohol level of zero? Anyway, I won't. That's for sure. I'm not going into the city to stand in a packed crowd of drunk people that can only move vertically, then to drive home in a 20-mile four wheel power slide and wake up behind the wheel in my own living room, assuming I didn't get into a drunken fight with a stranger and ride home in a cab, ankle deep in several inches of shared vomit. That's for extra sure.

What I will be doing is having a couple of local friends over to drink in my basement bar, The Vista Del Mar lounge. After, I'll wobble upstairs and fall into bed. My guests will have less than a mile to drive home. In all likelihood, I'll face six inches of snow to clear tomorrow morning with a bit of a headache. Ah well.

You know what would interest me, as far as public parties go? A civilized new year's eve event on an Italian Line cruise ship in 1936. See? Civilized!

Apparently, there was a time when going to a party meant wearing a tux and having room to stretch your legs, and being all grand and stuff. Of course, this is an ad, and as such, is a view into a pretend world of fiction and lies.

Still, if you went to a New Year's Eve party on an Italian Line cruise ship way back then, you probably stand almost no chance of being punched, or being called "bro" by a guy with droopy eyelids and spittle at the corner of his mouth... unless you'd broken into the Dowager Empresses state room and stolen her crown jewels. Then there's all those icebergs to dodge, or else face becoming a romantic historical disaster.That's just not cricket.

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