Weird Universe Archive

March 2020

March 31, 2020

Let’s try to stop smoking!!!!!!

Capitol Records released this album in 1964, on the heels of the Surgeon General's report detailing the harmful effects of smoking. Apparently that report inspired a fad for anti-smoking records. (See our earlier post about the 1964 album Music To Help You Stop Smoking).

The Capitol Records release claimed to help listeners kick the smoking habit by hypnotizing them. The hypnotist was said to be a doctor, but for reasons of professional ethics he didn't reveal his identity, instead using the pseudonym Scott Gordon.

Discogs.com notes, "The title has one exclamation point on the back of the jacket and spine, no exclamation point on the label, and 6 on the front of the jacket."



Although I couldn't find any audio clips from the record online, I did come across this video posted by a British dance company in which they perform to a brief excerpt of Scott Gordon hypnotizing listeners.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Mar 31, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Smoking and Tobacco, 1960s

Odor-based Alarms

Alex's recent run of Weird Patents reminded me of the attempts to base an alarm device on smells.

Here's one that seems to have gone nowhere.



And another.



Posted By: Paul - Tue Mar 31, 2020 - Comments (4)
Category: Annoying Things, Inventions, Twenty-first Century, Smells and Odors

March 30, 2020

Regained sight after fall

Another case of an improbable cure.

Eugene W. Phillips, 60, had been blind for 16 years. Then, in August 1972, he fell off his back porch, puncturing his back with a stick and hitting his head on the ground. But he also partially regained sight in one eye. His doctor concluded that the fall had jarred loose a membrane that had been covering the optic nerve.

Bonham Daily Favorite - Aug 8, 1972



Provo Daily Herald - Aug 9, 1972



Related:

Posted By: Alex - Mon Mar 30, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Health, 1970s, Eyes and Vision

Blaze, the Dog That Flew First Class



In the year 1945, a dog named Blaze, while being shipped on Army Transport planes, bumped off several traveling soldiers, causing a national controversy.

Read about it here.

A funnier account was composed by James Thurber, viewable after the jump.



More in extended >>

Posted By: Paul - Mon Mar 30, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Government, Scandals and Controversies, War, Air Travel and Airlines, Dogs, 1940s

March 29, 2020

Sardine-Flavored Ice Cream

In 1994, the Japanese Patent Office granted Sato Shigeaki a patent for sardine-flavored ice cream. In his patent application, Shigeaki explained that his intention was to to promote the fishing industry by encouraging children who don't like fish to eat them. He also provided the basic recipe for his sardine ice cream. It involved cooking the sardines with onions, soybeans, rice wine, and walnut paste. Then adding this concoction to a base of chocolate ice cream.

This patent enjoys a somewhat unusual distinction. In 1997, European patent examiner Bernard Delporte revealed that it was the most common search request received by his office. He added, "No one believes that it actually exists until they've called it up and seen it themselves."



However, further research reveals that sardine ice cream was just the tip of the iceberg of Sato Shigeaki's grand vision. Apparently he imagined using oddball ice cream flavors to boost a broad range of different industries. As seen by the other patents he was granted:

Patent JPH08275731A: White Cedar Ice Cream
PURPOSE: To enable sales of an ice cream in different types of industries such as the lumber industry and the paper-manufacturing industry, to promote activation of enterprises and to sell the ice cream as a prescribed commodity as a local product by combining white ceder as a tree with ice cream to develop an epoch-making food.
CONSTITUTION: This ice cream is obtained by mixing a naturally extracted edible white ceder spice with an ice cream, mixing a pie dough with an edible white ceder spice, baking the mixture to give a pie, grinding the pie and mixing the flour with an ice cream or combining these ice creams with a designed cake forming a leaf or a twig of white ceder.

JPH06233656A: Sunflower Ice Cream
PURPOSE: To obtain an ice cream of sunflower as a local product.
CONSTITUTION: An ice cream base comprising honey of sunflower is mixed with a sunflower paste prepared by making seeds of sunflower into a paste to give an ice cream. The ice cream is topped with a material obtained by mixing seeds of sunflower roasted by an oven with caramel to give the objective ice cream of sunflower.

JPH11137180A: Salmon Ice Cream
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To obtain salmon-contg. ice cream by mixing salmon in ice cream, and to provide a method for producing the above dessert, intended to offer a new commodity using salmon in the districts noted therefor and accomplished by proposing a technology to lower the freezing temperature of salmon and a second technology to remove the fishy smell inherent in salmon.
SOLUTION: This salmon-contg. ice cream is obtained by mixing salmon flesh boiled with alcohol during ice cream production process followed by chilling (freezing) the resultant mixture.

JPH06217700A: Chinese noodle seasoned with miso ice cream
PURPOSE: To provide a tasty ice cream-based Chinese noodle seasoned with miso intended to activate the relevant market as well as furnish consumers with joyfulness.
CONSTITUTION: Raw noodles are boiled with cow milk and then put into chilled cow milk and cooled. The resultant cooled noodles are boiled with a liquor comprising 80wt.% alcohol, 10wt.% miso and 10wt.% pig bone soup and infiltrated with the alcohol followed by cooling again. The resultant noodles are mixed with an ice cream base which has been separately prepared by incorporating an ice cream base with miso, followed by chilling, thus obtaining the objective ice cream-based Chinese noodles seasoned with miso.

JPH06217699A: Chinese noodle seasoned with soy ice cream
PURPOSE: To provide a tasty ice cream based Chinese noodle seasoned with soy intended to activate the relevant market as well as furnish consumers with joyfulness.
CONSTITUTION: Raw noodles are boiled with cow milk and then put into chilled cow milk and cooled. The resultant cooled noodles are boiled with a liquor comprising 80wt.% alcohol, 5wt.% of soy and 15wt.% seasoned shark fin soup and infiltrated with the alcohol followed by cooling again. The resultant noodles are mixed with an ice cream base which has been separately prepared by incorporating an ice cream base with a seasoned shark fin soup, followed by chilling, thus obtaining the objective ice cream-based Chinese noodles seasoned with soy.

JPH0998722A: Silk ice cream
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To produce silk-contained ice cream perceivable by tongue and eyes that the ice cream contains silk by mixing silk, which is good for health, into ice cream and the unbaked dough of pie, and further spraying silk powder over the baked pie to lay it on the ice cream.
SOLUTION: Silk powder is added and mixed into ice cream base commercial or originally blended which has been sterilized by heating and cooled. Pie dough is also compounded with silk powder, and it is formed into a shape of a silk worm or a cocoon and baked. The pie is placed on ice cream. Silk powder is sprayed over the pie. This enables one to clearly perceive that the pie has silk and to directly taste the silk powder.

JPH08277399A: Cypress flavor for food
PURPOSE: To obtain a cypress flavor for food, having excellent deliciousness, taste and palatability and useful for the preparation of a cake, etc., by adding water to cypress wood chips, heating the chips to distill out a liquid component and removing the water from the liquid by evaporation.
CONSTITUTION: This cypress flavor is produced by adding water to cypress wood chips preferably mixed with false arborvitae wood chips, heating the chips to distill out a liquid component and removing water from the liquid by evaporation.

JPH06233655A: Beer ice cream
PURPOSE: To obtain an ice cream of beer taste having a mellowness and pleasantness to the palate.
CONSTITUTION: The alcohol degree of beer is weakened and mixed with a fresh cream, whole powder milk and a stabilizer so as to prevent the beer from becoming a sherbet state and blended with an ice cream base to give a beer ice.

JPH06343397A: Japanese rice wine ice cream
PURPOSE: To obtain a tasty ice cream having the taste of Japanese rice wine.
CONSTITUTION: The ice cream is obtained by adding SAKE (Japanese rice wine) lees to an ice cream base composed of sugar, cow's milk, an egg, fresh cream, skim milk powder, glucose and a stabilizer and cooling the resultant mixture.

Posted By: Alex - Sun Mar 29, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Food, Inventions, Patents

March 28, 2020

Intestinal Chimney Sweeps

Back in the early twentieth century, the French laxative Jubol ran an ad campaign that featured tiny chimney sweeps climbing up into intestines and scrubbing them out.

It reminds me of that old urban legend about Richard Gere and the gerbils.

Image source: vintage-ads — historical source: Rire - Dec 14, 1918



"Voila le petit ramoneur de l'intestin..." (Here's the little chimney sweep of the intestines)
L'Illustration - June 10, 1916

Posted By: Alex - Sat Mar 28, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Health, Advertising, 1910s

Follies of the Madmen #470

Imagine your lungs as a barn...




Posted By: Paul - Sat Mar 28, 2020 - Comments (1)
Category: Addictions, Business, Advertising, Tobacco and Smoking, Surrealism, Twentieth Century

March 27, 2020

Can fear cure cancer?

In 1962, East German researchers conducted a bizarre medical experiment in an attempt to find out if fear could cure cancer. They inoculated some "mice, rabbits, rats, and cocks" with cancer cells. Then they put these animals into a cage which they lowered "into a zoo-like enclosure where 30 ravenous African polecats paced for food. The polecats would leap upon the little cage, shrieking and clawing at their hoped-for prey." This terror experience was repeated every two hours for several days.

The result: the cancer cells grew more slowly in the terrorized animals.

Of course, this begs the question, what it is about fear that would fight cancer? Was it the elevated adrenalin levels? Or was there some other biochemical change that caused the effect?

Unfortunately, I can’t find any other details about this unusual experiment except for the brief news report below. I'm assuming there was never a human version of the experiment. Though one never knows, given some of the other stuff that researchers got up to behind the Iron Curtain.

The Paterson News - Nov 7, 1962

Posted By: Alex - Fri Mar 27, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Medicine, Science, Experiments, 1960s

Family Feud

Source.

More on the Dyotts, here and here.


Posted By: Paul - Fri Mar 27, 2020 - Comments (0)
Category: Crime, Family, Patent Medicines, Nostrums and Snake Oil, Nineteenth Century

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Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid.

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Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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