• Old Ads: Automotive

    I’ve been clipping copying these ads from the old Life magazines for a long time and, chances are, you might have seen some of them on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. The ads are just as neat and interesting as the actual content of the old magazines; nowadays some of them would be considered racist, sexist or both, but it doesn’t make them any less of a historic record of their epoch; they were perfectly acceptable at the time and they make the progress much more obvious. Makes, models, shapes, prices long forgotten; “amazing auto-pilots” and cars “for women drivers” – you won’t see ads like these in the magazines of today. I thought I’d share a few ads on this blog in a somewhat organized manner. The first installment will be about cars, but I am planning to follow up with food and other things. These ads are in no particular order since I was too lazy to make a not of the year and issue.

    I’ll start with this awesomely sexist ad:

    ©Time/Life
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  • We Buy Old

  • Homey Don’t Eat That Crap!

    in_living_color_homey_the_clown_dont_play_dat-t-linkRecently State of Missouri made an announcement about repealing some old ban on “yellow-tinted imitation butter and the other restrictions imposed on the sale, possession or shipment of substitute sandwich spread that is a different hue”. The question is why would anyone want to eat this crap in the first place. I understand that the law was written for different reasons but I wouldn’t mind them actually enforcing it to get fake products out of our grocery stores. And while they are at it, they might as well get rid of

    • disgusting turkey bacon
    • any food that has the word “flavored” in it’s name
    • products that have ingredients that can’t be explained
    • things that have artificial coloring (I wonder what their real color is)
    • fruits and vegetables possessing some unnatural characteristics such as crunchy tomatoes and strawberries
    • breads that can be compressed to 1/10 of original volume
    • anything in green packaging, green doesn’t mean healthy, it’s just a color
    • no-fat sour cream
    • rename rice- and soy-milk into rice- and soy-juice or whatever; it’s not milk even if it’s white
    • non-dairy dairy products
    • artificial powdered coffee creamer, WTF is that made of anyway
    • cheese in a can and powdered cheese
    • stop McRib comebacks

    I am not a believer in things that are “good for you”, or “locavores”, or “slow foods”, or whatever else is in fashion right now. I do believe that if you want butter, you should eat butter, not some yellow crap in a tub. If you are unable to eat some foods due to health reasons, just enjoy something else, don’t eat fake chemical concoction designed in the lab to fool your senses.

    In these times when most of our activities had been replaced by imaginary and virtual things, maybe we should draw the line at fake foods. Homey don’t eat that crap!

    UPDATE: How could I forget the scam that  is organic food. Thanks, L.L.!

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  • Behind The Iron Curtain:Revolution

    Today is the 91st anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution – an event that truly changed the course of the world history and still influences all things political, military and diplomatic. Millions of people died, millions were displaced, families were shattered, hopes destroyed, lives broken.

    Many blame Lenin and the Bolsheviks for the failed 70-year experiment but the truth is that they were at the right place at the right time when with the little agitation and slight prodding the Russian people were ready to fight for what they thought was a better future.

    For almost 20 years after the break-up of the USSR people cannot agree if it was a good or a bad time in the Russian history. It was a time of great achievements, industrial development, first man in space, victory in the World War II, but at the same time it was paid for with civil war, oppression, labor camps, millions of lives, starvation, forced relocation of the whole nationalities, state-sponsored antisemitism and constant fear. Would one trade free education for free speech, free health care for freedom to see the world, man in space for plentiful food. To many the answer is clear, others can live with the trade-off.

    Today many will gather in public places to celebrate or curse the legacy of the revolution. It lives in people like me who witnessed the last years of the USSR but it also lives in people like you who for the past 90 years tried to prevent this from happening here. Were you successful? Time will tell…

    November 7,1977. Red Square, Moscow, the USSR

    httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH42Gme4oIg

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  • How old am I in American years?

    In calendar years I am 38 but just like the dog years go by much faster then the human years, I think I am much older then an average American born in 1969. To prove that, I will list a few items that I and my parents used in our everyday life that were not antique, just normal things you could find in an average household, and then we will see what age group will admit to knowing what these are:
    1. Calculating aids.

    The Slide Rule. In the movie Apollo 13 when the spacecraft was in trouble bunch of geeky-looking engineers whipped out these little secret weapons. Some people can still beat a computer with this thing, if not in speed then in physical strength. I actually learned slide rule use in school and used it for a period of time. We didn’t have calculators, I think I got my first one in the 8th grade.

    My Mom was an accountant and she used abacus at work. Some people could do miracles with this things. Try to multiply two numbers using the abacus and you will know what I mean.
    Lastly, to finish this high-tech roundup I’d like to mention trigonometric tables. In the absence of calculators to find values of trigonometric functions, squares, square roots, logarithms and other math calculations we had to page through these tables. It wasn’t hard to do but sure makes you appreciate your little scientific calculator.
    2.Reel-to-reel tape player. This is the exact model that we owned. My Dad purchased it when I
    started talking to record my first words. This player worked fine for the next 22 years and probably long after we left it to somebody. It was very heavy but I remember dragging it around town to record music from friends’ tapes and records. This is how music was downloaded in my time. Get some tape, bring your recorder to a friend’s house, wait for a couple of hours while it’s recording, lug your player back home.

    3. Color TV. In 1976 or 77 my Dad bought our first color TV. It was still a rarity. This TV was extremely heavy and had vacuum tubes inside. There was no cable, just 3 over-the-air channels and no one even knew what the remote control looked like. You could always tell that TV was on by glowing tubes inside.

    4.Drafting Board. Before the AutoCad drafters stood in front of these and actually drafted. I had a drafting class in the technical school and my uncle let me use his board for some time. For those who don’t know, drafting is hard and tedious and I always sucked at it. That was the main reason why I chose to study electrical engineering – electrical drawings can be done with template. Until you drew a gear in 3-d with a quarter cut out you don’t know what pain is.

    5. Kerosene Burner. My Grandma actually used this to cook. She lived in the rural area and when propane wasn’t delivered she fired up one of those. It was smelly but it did what it was supposed to.

    6. Transistor radio. This is the exact model we had. The writing on it said “50 years if the Great October Revolution” so it was made in 1967. I mentioned before how we (and the rest of the country) listened to Western Short Wave Stations to get real news and happenings in the world. There were even shows with banned rock-music. The strange ting was that they kept making these radios and then had to scramble radio transmissions.

    7. Our first washer.This was just a plastic tub with an electric agitator. The process was simple:heat the water in the bucket on the stove, dump it into the washer, put the clothes in, turn on. When the timer went off you had to manually empty it with the attached hose, repeat the process to rinse, then wring out the laundry and hang it outside to dry. Still, it was a miracle machine.

    So how old am I?

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