Oh come on you gotta be kidding a second week of this where's your sense of duty to us, the audience
Sorry, but that's how it has to be. As for the banner art above, we'll explain it on Friday, complete with deets & linkage. Although you may of course run off and find the info for yourself and spoil it all.
Today we have Futurism + dairy-related Westernism. A 1923 Science magazine, mixing fact and fancy. What they knew, and thought might be, a hundred years ago.
I’m not sure what is going on here, or why the box has German-language signage, but since it’s by Felix Göckeritz, we can assume this is a piece of German pulp repurposed for an American mag. I've used the built-in MacOS OCR to get the text.
Let’s go to the text.
THE acting officer of the Berlin Statspolizei (Burglary Division), sat in his office and followed wearily the minute hand of the electric clock, which gradually approached the midnight hour.The collar of his uniform was open, and he was turning over the leaves of a detective story.
It was manifestly superfluous for him to take the functions of his office too seriously, for in the last fifty years the prevention and guardian divisions of the police had been perfected to such a fine degree, that only an idiot or a genius in the burglary line would think of breaking into a house. In his office the threads of a widely branched very phenomenal detection system came together, which had cost many thousands of marks, but also had absolutely stopped the burglars and robbers who had come into the held after the World War, now a matter of ancient history.
The criminal statistics were reduced to isolated instances, and a practically ideal degree of safety ruled over the whole land.
Goes without saying we can’t have that, since we have a story to tell. As it happens, there is a burglary - in 2000 AD, imagine that - and the policeman uses an Electric Gate to stop the car from fleeing. But it deploys springs and bounces over the gate.
They’re caught, of course.
Hello:
What’s this magnificent machine?
Let’s crank it out, Hugo - who, we must note, is a member of the American Physical Society. But aren’t we all?
The modern automobile, as far as the years old. It is true that a few cars were made as much as 30 years ago, but these were not for universal use, and only millionaires could afford them. The first cars were very crude, and were not at all reliable, and when we look back upon these high-wheeled two-seaters we smile at the contraptions that they were.
The other day an automobile of that early vintage rolled down Broadway. It was run-ming under its own power, but the sight was so ludicrous that it stopped all traffic, and every one had a good laugh at this piece of ancient mechanism.
25 short years were enough to produce this result. What, then, may we expect to see 50 years hence? What sort of automobile will we ride in? What will be commonplace 50 ycars hence?
The automobile, as it is built now. tends to become larger and larger. The car of today is fully three times as large as the car of 25 years ago. In our large cities overcrowding, due to the tremendous number of automobiles, has now reached the saturation point.
Oh. you have no idea.
The solution, as ever, was the flying car.
What the devil is this thing? That's an advanced design for 1923.
It’s a monstrous machine pumping out gas over a stockyard, of course.
More fiction:
CARL HOLT and I sat alone in our private office at the rear end of the corridor of the seventy-eighth story of the Zolberg Building in Kokomo.
It was in the latter part of July of the year 1950, and the weather being extremely warm, we had discarded our coats, and were busily engaged in the difficult task. of managing the affairs of the Watermotor Company.
The Watermotor Company was organized in the year 1927 by that famous inventor and scientist, John L. Gorman, after he had perfected and patented his epoch-making engine, which had revolutionized the manufacturing and transportation industry of the world by utilizing a source of power that was procurable without cost, namely, water.
He invented the water wheel!
Carl and I were not directly connected with the Watermotor Company, but inasmuch as we had been employed as members of the United States Secret Service we considered that the company's business was our business.
But of course. Always the same with these Futurians.
Reports had been circulated to the effect that there had been seen hovering over the World Food Corporation's immense structure in Frankfort. a huge, bird-like machine. the like of which had never been heard of before. It was said further that there seemed to emanate, from a large opening, a yellowish gas.
What’s this?
Why, a moon-shot launcher, of course. Passengers were strapped into the Moon Car, and then the great engine swung them around and around until they had sufficient momentum to escape earth’s gravity.
Everyone was just jam by that point, of course, and steering was impossible and they overshot the moon by tens of thousands of miles, but they were all dead so it didn’t matter.
"DOCTOR." said Silas Rockett, "Did I understand you to say that you intended to send a car to the moon?
"You certainly did, Silas," replied Doctor Hackensaw. "The moon was in
a condition to support life hundreds of thousands of years before the Earth. Hence there may be intelligent creatures on the moon with inventions far in advance of our wildest speculations. Think what it would mean to open communication with them and learning what it would otherwise take us a hundred thousand years or more to learn!
It would be a triumph such as no man has ever achieved before me!”
Sure, doc. Also: imagine the good Doc saying “There certainly isn’t any other good idea for getting into space, is there, Mr. Rockett?”
Ah, thisis what we’re here for.
Always the streets up in the air. It would take decades for them to give up that notion. I admit that the rooftop amenities would be nice, but A) it requires a uniform height, and B) would lead to an Eloi-Moorlock divide, if there wasn’t one already.
This being Monday on a Hiatus Bleat, that means Borden.
This week we'll look at a series of Borden ads that tied into a show they sponsored.
The show:
It's from the days when kids watched Westerns. Why did kids watch Westerns? What did this genre provide? Freedom, manliness, belonging, learning roles, adventure, gunplay, comedy. And justice. The good guy with the best horse brought the bad men to heel and handed them off to the other good guys whose metal stars suggested a system of laws and ideas that made a prosperous, free society possible. Plus, no girls so there’s no mushy stuff!
First up: have a FURY PARTY
:14 Look what you get! Posters that put a bounty on the heads of all your friends!
:17 Eight sheriff’s badges, suggesting a distribution of authority not often seen in the Old West
:27 The Fury Party Handbook. To my surprise, there aren’t ten copies on eBay.
BORDEN 2
Nothing says ice cream like a Grizzled Cowboy building a pyramid of playing cards.
:13 Good thing he’s got a container of ice cream behind his back, ready to spring into sight the moment someone mentions a particular type of card.
:19 Holy Coyotes
:22 The kid has a bowl of ice cream behind his back, of course - and so does the big kid. He was carrying a bowl and the container around, behind his back, for no particular reason, but man did it come in handy when they ran into the ol’ cowhand!
:34 CHEWWIES
:42 The smaller kid conjures another bowl out of nowhere
BORDEN 3
Now who is this guy?
It’s William Fawcett.
"Doc T". as he was known, was a Ph.D., and Professor of Theatre at Michigan State University in the early 1940s, just before World War II. He often spoke about leaving academia and actually trying his hand at the craft he taught. After the war, he got his chance and never looked back.
That’s it; that’s the imdb bio. Let’s check wikipedia . . . Ah! A Minnesota man.
. . . . after Fawcett attended Hamline University he became licensed to preach in 1916. During World War I, he joined the United States Army, serving as an ambulance driver. The French government honored him with the Legion of Honour for his care of the wounded.
TV was decades away. His path to fame hadn't been invented.
After his military service, Fawcett became a teacher of English and literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and, after earning a Ph.D. degree in Elizabethan drama from the University of Nebraska, he became a professor of theatre arts at Michigan State University.
In 1955, Fawcett was cast in the role of Pete Wilkey, the raspy-voiced combination housekeeper and ranch hand on the western television series Fury. During the series' opening sequence, the narrator states that Fawcett's character, Pete, cut his teeth on a branding iron. In the first episode, "Joey Finds a Friend", Pete says the captured wild stallion was filled with fire and fury, thus giving the horse his name.
Well, let’s see how he has an ice-cream-related moment today.
Ah: another cherry-studded item. But it’s not the Cherry Tart. Don’t you go thinking that, now. Cherry Tart time, it’s come and gone.
BORDEN 4
Manly men, including Peter Graves, are standing around swinging their arms in a way of generating body heat. This seems to have gone out of fashion.
You’re thinking: if Petey and Graves were in the show, surely the kids were actors from Fury as well. You’d be right.
Robert LeRoy Diamond (August 23, 1943 – May 15, 2019) was an American actor active in the 1950s and 1960s before retiring from the profession and becoming a lawyer. He is best known as the child lead in the television series Fury.
He was considered for the role of Robin in the Batman TV series, but at 21 was thought to be too old, and lost the role to Burt Ward.
BORDEN 5
Finally, a reminder that grizzled old farm hands don't worry abouy broken hipbones, because they drink plenty of All-American Milk.
We'll end by returning to Elsie and her family, and remind you of the large role once played in American society by clotted goop:
That'll do. What commercial gems await tomorrow? What big Hiatal topics?
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