We took Spirit Air to Florida, which I will avoid in the future. Extra charges for everything. Trash in the seat compartment. I pointed this out to the Flight Attendant, because there was a Kleenex down there, and I didn’t want to touch it, and I didn’t want him to think I’d left it.
“I guess we’re not very clean today!” he simpered.
I asked him if this plane was continuing on to Minneapolis after it stopped in Chicago. On the way out the plane stopped in Chicago, changed flight numbers, but went right on to our final destination; thought it might be possible that was the case here as well.
He didn’t know. “We all get off,” he said.
Apparently I planted a seed of doubt, though; when he got on the horn before landing, he said that this plane might be going on to Minneapolis, but we had to get off anyway.
They behaved as if they were playing at being Flight Attendants.
Entertainment: as usual on the way out, as with every morning flight, I watched Mid-Morning Matters. And you can too!
Then I watched a Perry Mason on my phone. I stopped taking my iPod on trips. Just another thing. Advantage: it has all my music. Disadvantage: it has all my music, so I’m always thinking “I could be listening to something else.” I like having all my classical stuff in one place, but the library is such a wretched mess, thanks to the people who tagged the MP3s for the internet database.
Here’s what it should look like:
TRACK TITLE
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 - 2
ARTIST:
Sibelius
ALBUM:
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1
That’s all you need. With very rare exceptions, I don’t care who’s performing it. The album titles are often things like “Symphonies 1 & 3” which means you get garbage on searches. Since the iPod screen displays limited information I really don’t need “Langsam; Adagio con mojo” for the track title. I don’t need the album art for classical stuff, since it’s usually a 19th century landscape, or a picture of Leonard Bernstein emoting. So I’ve replaced the album art with a picture of the composer with his name. Such as:
That’s from this magnificent portrait, here.
Unfortunately, I haven’t done this with the entire library, but I’m close. Anyway: the iPhone has new stuff, some radio shows, and a gig of Ambient for sleeping. Dozing off to Harold Budd is as much of the flying experience as Perry Mason.
Speaking of which: where is this?
That’s the Security Building, but I can’t find the intersection anywhere. Which might mean it doesn’t exist. Which would mean they have a generic LA streetsign they put up when shooting? Really? Damned odd. But not as odd as this:
WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH PAUL DRAKE’S EYE.
As you may know, William Hopper was originally named DeWolf, and was the son of Hedda Hopper. He was very cool. He’s probably the only guy on TV who could call women down at the phone company “dolls” and get away with it. Little known fact: he was never in color. He was the only man in human history who was really black and white.
Kidding. But: he was Dennis Hopper’s cousin.
If I ever started a Lounge band, I’d call it Paul Drake and the Operatives.
The music cues for the ep were pretty good, and I’m convinced they were written by Gerald Fried. But that’s tomorrow’s Bleat.
So: how’s the week going, after the vacation? Right back into the stew. Mondays demolish on contact anything you assemble on a vacation. I had assignments and duties and obligations and worries and chores and tasks and -
And I stood outside Monday morning, looking at the sun splashed on the lawn, and thought: it’s all just fine. I stood outside on a Tuesday morning, looking at the wet leaves and the bare trees, and thought: it’s all just fine. This doesn’t feel like any October I’ve known, and I don’t know why. I just know that it’s fine. I mean, it’s almost midnight, and I’m sitting out in the gazebo.
One cricket. One patient cricket, singing the song of the seconds. Counting down the day.
Now it’s Product Tuesday, held back a day because of the travelogues. Why do I do this? Because I learn something new every week, and perhaps you will as well. Because there’s a story behind everything. This week we look at 1948.
The weekly Borden’s!
Chateau Cheese. Or rather “Delicious Pasteurized Cheese Food.” You’re never quite sure what to think when they modify “cheese” like that. It’s not normal. No one ever says “man, I could use some cheese food. Do we have any cheese food?” It suggests a government rule about Modified Cheese.
The Chateau suggests it’s Swiss-like, since “Swiss Chateau” was a thing back then.
More Brach’s:
Twin-wrapped for twin-eating twin goodness. Translation: by splitting the bar in two and individually wrapping each portions, they can charge the same for something that’s about 82% of the size of a contiguous bar.
I have no idea what the Swing bar was, but it had fine chocolate coating. None of that coarse, grainy coating for this bar. This page says the Swing was the 3rd most popular bar in the country for a while, and has a picture of a promotional toy. The name, by the way, referred to the style of music that was popular with kids. Imagine a modern candy bar named DUBSTEP.
Wax:
At some point you expect the housewives to hoot and screech and jump up and down, and then one throws a mop handle in the air, and when it’s coming down it turns into a spaceship.
If that’s not too obscure.
Soap:
That’s what Lifebuoy looked like. Wikipedia says it was the original deodorant soap, marketed in 1894 in England as a cholera-beater. A commercial shown in movie theaters from the same era:
I love the 40s. You’ll note the BeeeeeOhhhhhh sound: that Body-Odor sound effect was ubiquitous enough it popped up in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Corn:
That tells you all you need to know. Compare with modern labels, which just can’t shut up.
Cereal:
Contains 12 loaves. A reminder of what we endured before the invention of Mini Shredded Wheat; a fellow could get winded chopping that thing up. It was invented by Henry Perky, who seems to have been one of those inventor-gadfly types:
Sometime in the early 1890s, at a Nebraska hotel, Perky — who suffered from diarrhea — encountered a man similarly afflicted, who was eating boiled wheat with cream. The idea cooked for a while in Perky’s mind, and in 1892, he took his idea of a product made of boiled wheat to his friend, William H. Ford, in Watertown, New York — a machinist by trade. Here they developed the machine for making what Perky called "little whole wheat mattresses", known worldwide as shredded wheat. They presented the machine at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, probably while Perky was trying to drum up buyers for his cylindrical steel rail passenger car.
At the end of his life he was setting up an institute for Scientific Farming, but he died before he could see it open.
The Sioux Bee again. So cheerful:
That style. Is it possible - just possible that Mort Drucker drew that?
The packages: Let me tell you, that wax tub got damned sticky after just a few uses.
The website today: so peaceful. For something that has BEEEES!
More prance in your dance and more wham in your slam:
Hold on a minute. Swift’s made meat, right? What were they doing with peanut butter? By the way, they’re still around - and wholly owned by a Brazillian concern, JBS.
A collection of Swift Peanut Butter jars - which doubled as drinking glasses, you know; collect them all - can be found here. Swift’s Peanut Butter, according to wikipedia, was renamed in 1928 - to Peter Pan, a brand that’s still around. Which means they brought back their own version at some point. None of this makes any sense.
Gum:
Ah, Teaberry, that most exotic of all gums. It’s named after the Eastern Teaberry, which is wintergreeny, I guess.
It doesn’t get any more 60s than this, friends.
See you around the usual places - Strib blog at noon, and Lint thereafter. It's "50s faces divorced from their advertising context week" at Lint, if you're curious. Have a grand Wednesday!
PS: Updates on hold until next week. Gives me a chance to catch up.
