Well, it had to happen.

Some sites just take a break, but not here! No, everything's upended, but there's daily content while I take my pause. It's good to upend the iron laws of the Bleat. Right?

Right? Okay well you're stuck with it, so steel yourself for unexpected inessential material, instead of the regular parade of inessential material. We might learn something. I did.

Also, contests! Let's begin.

The streetcar company in Minneapolis ran lots of ads. Why? Because they needed the business. The narrative today holds that streetcars were beloved by all and destroyed by mean car companies that imposed car culture on an unwilling public. No, people liked their cars, and preferred them to taking the streetcar, if they could.

Some of the ads were . . . rather tangential to the needs of the customer.

Despite this, most of what we buy is local! But here’s the Malay portion of our outlays.

Men instinctively convene in the vestibule:

Some of the ads featured “Bill,” your cheerful old conductor.

There was a campaign that put the streetcars into old fairy tales and stores of yore. I don’t think they moved the needle.

Open Sesame. Which means what? We all think “Says a-me,” but we all know it’s not that.

You can sit in comfort and read your paper: perhaps the best argument made yet.

Take the streetcar to the absolute end of the system, and dance for free!

“Ha ha you put your car into a phone pole because you were pixillated on bad gin”

Apparently the noise of the wheels is so loud people have to shout:

Officer Creepy smiles at this peculiar means of ensuring the company can never ask for a tax reduction:

“Sorry, but I’m not going to read all that.”

It’s a story of a man who died in the poorhouse and left behind a will. The equivalent of those websites that have AI-generated enticement gifs and link to a long story that gets passed around by grandma as if it’s true.

The whole story, here.

I wouldn't do this if the payoff wasn't very, very Bleatnik-specific.

In 1947, a new comic strip debuted in the paper. Smorgy, a fellow who was a soldier in WW2, was demobilized, moved back home to Minneapolis, and had misadventures. What follows is the build-up to the strip's debut, and it's remarkable in one respect: it was full of actual local people.

I don't doubt she was a real person. Likewise the boss, Mr. Kelley.

Mayor who? Tune in tomorrow.

We'll serialize this case this week, with another next week. I mean . . . it'll do, okay?

As promised: a new contest! Being a very old contest, really. We'll start with #37, which means they got the easy ones out of the way.

That will do. See you tomorrow!