Category:
Love & Romance

My Honey Chile



"She's got a wooden leg, all stiff at the knee...just a limb from the old apple tree."

Posted By: Paul - Sun Jun 06, 2021 - Comments (0)
Category: Humor, Music, 1940s, Differently Abled, Handicapped, Challenged, and Otherwise Atypical, Love & Romance

ISO Man who eats with knife

This sounds like a setup for a romcom. City girl advertises for a cowboy who eats his food with a knife. She gets 175 proposals in response.

In a movie she would move out west and have all kinds of adventures with her knife-eating man. But I haven't been able to track down what became of Frances Beauvais.

Casper Star-Tribune - Mar 23, 1922



Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer - Apr 6, 1922

Posted By: Alex - Mon Mar 01, 2021 - Comments (5)
Category: 1920s, Love & Romance

The Cure

Posted By: Paul - Tue Feb 23, 2021 - Comments (5)
Category: Music, Television, 1960s, Diseases, Love & Romance

The Human Relationship Simulator

This post seemed appropriate for Valentine's Day, since it's about an engineer's attempt to use machine logic to improve the "ambiguities of the woman/man relationship".

James F. Hollander was a patent attorney with a degree in electrical engineering. In the late 1970s he invented and patented what he called the "Human Relationship Simulator". It consisted of a box with various dials.

Even after reading his patent, and an article about his invention, I'm not exactly sure how the thing operated. From what I can gather, if a couple were having an argument, or needed to make a decision (such as where to go for dinner), they could both adjust dials on the Simulator, and it would give them an answer. And measure the intensity of their feelings.

The Relationship Simulator



Here's more info from a 1977 article in the Asbury Park Press:

Taking a hypothetical issue, such as a man and woman deciding whether or not to go out to dinner, information is fed into the panels. One represents the man; the other, the woman.

Each subject uses dials that represent four areas — compliance with society, attention to own desire, social pressure and personal inclination. The personal inclination and social pressure gauges are intricately detailed to show adamant 'yes' or 'no' responses, or degrees such as strong preference, or very much or some.

Attention to desire is measured in readings of low, medium and high, as is compliance with society.

As the subjects feed this information into the panels, other gauges measure tension, feelings, guilt or pride, emotional independence, like and dislike, and influence, based on each decision.

The machine does the thinking, lights a decision of 'yes' or 'no' and tells the subjects their emotional responses....

In a marriage situation, Hollander said the device could show the individuals why something is going wrong in the relationship if arguments are portrayed and feelings defined.

"I wanted to pick out the ambiguities of the woman/man relationship," he pointed out.

Asbury Park Press - Aug 29, 1977



If that doesn't seem entirely clear, then here's a sample from Hollander's patent:

The decision voltage output of the man-simulator is connected to the threshold detector of the woman-simulator via a sense port. Similarly, the woman-simulator has a decision voltage output port connected to a sense port and input to the level threshold detector of the man-simulator. A switch interrupts each output so that the effect of relationship can be shown. By adjustment and interpretation of the dial settings and decision indications, paradoxes and problems in man-woman relationships are demonstrated.

Posted By: Alex - Sun Feb 14, 2021 - Comments (0)
Category: Technology, Patents, Psychology, Marriage, 1970s, Love & Romance

My Girlfriend in Walk

For those who would like to hold someone's hand as they walk around, but can't find anyone human who will oblige, engineers at Gifu University in Japan have invented the "My Girlfriend in Walk". It's a robotic hand covered in soft, skin-like gel that will grip your hand. Plus, it emits the scent of a woman's shampoo, and (through a smartphone app) can simulate the sounds of breathing and rustling clothes.

The inventors hope that it might help people who have been isolated due to the pandemic.

More info: SoraNews24



Posted By: Alex - Sun Nov 08, 2020 - Comments (5)
Category: Technology, AI, Robots and Other Automatons, Love & Romance

Follies of the Madmen #492

Is Miss Fixit a nurse or a child--or both? I'm confused....



Source.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Nov 01, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Corporate Mascots, Icons and Spokesbeings, Hygiene, 1950s, Love & Romance

VARIACIONES 1/113

In the Parque del Retiro (Retiro’s Park) in Madrid, Ines Sastre runs to meet Javier Bardem who is waiting for her with his arms wide open and they embrace one another in a passionate kiss. This only one shot which lasts one minute twenty seconds is subjected to a hundred and thirteen changes for one hour and seventeen minutes. “I wanted to exhaust the possibilities of changing a shot by changing the music, the colours, by burning it, by making some holes…” remembers Aguirre; “sometimes, the heads are not visible, or we can only see her legs, or the image seems to be scrapped off”… /… the variations of this shot are preceded by the ones of another couple taken in the beach of La Concha in San Sebastian that maybe acts as a suggestion of a merely real support for this ideal meeting. The images are accompanied by not only Borges’ voice-over but also Fernando Fernan-Gomez and Francisco Rabal’s voices-over among some not so well-known other voices …/ … disparate prints, sometimes unpredictable, that Borges’ literature proposed to moviemakers of this period and from distant cultures. It is the disparity of Javier Aguirre’s experimentation along with the contradiction that seems us so provocative.


Alas, I cannot find this film online, or even any clips. But I felt WU-vies should know about it, in case any art-house showing appears in your neighborhood, or you find it on disc, or on streaming!




Posted By: Paul - Fri Dec 06, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Annoying Things, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Movies, Avant Garde, Twenty-first Century, Love & Romance

Dog-Collar Engagement Rings

An unusual fad, as reported by the San Francisco Examiner, June 19, 1927:

Only the other day there came from Denver the startling news that the young women of this western city were wearing dog collars for engagement rings in lieu of the conventional band of gold, silver or diamond-set platinum. To further emphasize the departure from tradition, the girls wore this romantic token around their legs, as shown in the photograph of Miss Fay Rowe, of Denver, on this page. Thus the engagement ring-dog-collar became a garter as well as a symbol of betrothal, combining utility with romance...

The custom was started by a young woman in one of the college sororities and it spread rapidly. It was generally believed to be something entirely new in the way of betrothal tokens, but had the young woman been a careful student in her history class she would have known that the fad she started was an old one long before the Christian era was born. Jeweled anklets have been discovered in the cinerary urns of the ancient Greeks, with inscriptions which indicate they were tokens of engagement. Bracelets were also common in all ages as tokens of betrothal...

The principal objection to the dog-collar engagement token around the leg seems to be, "What's the use of wearing an engagement ring without anybody seeing it?" To which the answer is, "Nowadays a ring worn about the leg can easily be seen with the skirts of women growing shorter and shorter."

I can think of a few more objections a bride-to-be might have, other than that the dog collar wouldn't be visible.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Nov 26, 2019 - Comments (6)
Category: 1920s, Weddings, Love & Romance

Raising a Perfect Wife From Scratch



Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts.

In 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water.


The full story here.

Posted By: Paul - Tue May 07, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Education, Husbands, Wives, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Love & Romance

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

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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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