Category:
Business
[This image is from
The Saturday Evening Post for May 5, 1945. As you can tell from the slightly mismatched borders, it's two separate scans, upper and lower, with the division just above the punchline caption. Excuse my impoverished Photoshop skills.]
Once upon a time, hillbillies were a powerful iconic staple of American life. But alas, no longer. Perhaps
The Beverly Hillbillies was their dying gasp. Since then, PC guidelines no longer allow for such stereotypes, as the Abercrombie & Fitch folks found out a few years back, when they tried to market
this T-shirt. And so our national mythology is a little drabber and duller.
This image comes from the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post for March 15, 1965, and is attributed to the artist N. M. Bodecker. It touts the article "Madison Avenue: The Big Invisible Sell."
How many of these famous icons can you identify? My answer-key after the jump!
More in extended >>
They admit it's "decidedly unusual," but I think it would sure beat stuffing envelopes. "Simply drop into hot grease and they're ready to eat -- big, tasty, crispy, delicious!" Question: What makes them magic?
From the July, 1934 issue of
Modern Mechanix. (via
J-Walk)
Old self-improvement schemes never die. Recently, I spotted this antique advertisement from 1954 that alerted me to the existence of Pelmanism, the brainchild of
William Joseph Ennever.
The Pelman Institutes of England and America apparently once claimed over half a million followers. But now they're long gone. Yet that has not stopped at least two folks from trying to resurrect the copyright-abandoned mind-strengthening course and claim and market it as their own. You can see their pages
here and
here.
Oddly enough, the last vestige of Pelmanism most people know, without realizing its true origin, is the
card game we call Concentration or Memory or Pairs.
Yes, the
San Diego Comic Con--or "Nerd Prom" as it is sometimes called--might be over for another year. But it's never too late to fill your life with tchotchkes that uphold your geek credentials. And it's especially easy when you have a resource like
The Budk Catalog. Imagine the envy of your nerdly pals--and the instant appearance of a SWAT team--when you parade through your hometown while wearing these Wolverine claws. Hospital coverage due to police sniper fire not included.
Minister Chuck points me toward the
Divorce Deli. It remains a question as to whether pickles are extra.
[From
Fortune for December 1936. Two image files, click separately.]
Sniffles = Death.
Not the most subtle or believable of Madison Avenue appeals. Sure, in that pre-antibiotic age, pneumonia was deadly. But I can't imagine that the proportion of cold-sufferers who contracted pneumonia--at least among the affluent audience for
Fortune--was any higher then than it is today. In other words, miniscule.
We all love gadgets. Except for the truly useless and frustrating devices. Those we hate and ridicule. The Japanese actually have a term and category for such items:
Chindōgu.
Recently, while browsing through the catalog for
WHATEVER WORKS, I found two examples of Chindōgu.
This
anti-cootie sack for the paranoid traveler seems utterly useless. Wouldn't the bedbugs crawl inside within seconds of contact?'
This
spinning fork is guaranteed to suck all the pleasure out of an eternal childhood pastime: making S'mores. When the batteries die and the plastic handle melts, all the fun comes to a tearful end.
[From
The Saturday Evening Post for January 29, 1966.]
Of course, the very first thing you'll load aboard your interstellar ship is a new Frigidaire. What's that you say? These women are not astronauts, but rather futuristic housewives, and the Fridge remains earthbound? Then why are they wearing those bubble helmets? Future pollution? But what about the helmet that features a cutout? And the slit glasses? If only the geniuses who created this ad were still around, we could ask them to explain....
As anyone who has endured five minutes of conversation with me knows, I'll often relate real-life events to
The Simpsons. That show, like the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, has now reached a canonical mass such that you may find a textual reference applicable to any real-world situation.
Today's printed version of
THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL offers me another such occasion. There's an article headlined "Police Raid After-Hours 'Sip Joint' in Silver Lake." Inexplicably, though, this piece is not online, so far as I can google. But the barebones of the tale is told in a subheading. "A 17-year-old male who was allegedly caught dispensing beer has been referred to the Youth Services Bureau for prosecution in Family Court."
An
older article which is still available gives us this definition of a "sip joint."
"A sip joint, according to the police, is a place where a bar is set up — usually a house — for the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages at times when bars are closed."
Now, I've often been strapped for cash, but I've never once thought of setting up a tavern in my residence. Yet to geniuses like Homer Simpson, such a plan is their first instinct, as we saw at the end of
this episode.
The term "sip joint" itself seems exceedingly rare, and perhaps limited to Rhode Island.
Can readers supply instances of this practice, and what it's called, from their own regions?