If this is real, SIGN ME UP!

 

This card was stuck in our windshield when we came back from shopping today. Up to now, such things have been ads for gutter cleaning, roofing, landscaping, or something mundane like that. But this was different.

Haven't seen anything quite like it - it seems to cover any known human issue (including Mother Katery and Removing of Obiya), a few that aren't even known yet, problems that you don't have and may never have, or CANNOT have ("Help! I'm stuck on the moon!"). I don't wish to be too critical here, as something like this may help someone, or maybe a lot of someones.

If this person has some real ability to help with SOME of these issues, or can at least provide a listening ear. . . but that's NOT what it's usually about. 

Like Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, this person may well be preying on the weak and vulnerable. OR NOT. The fact that this advertisement likely represents a different culture (South Asian, I think) makes me want to tread carefully - for  how do I know what it's like to live within that culture? 

Still, when a solution to EVERY SINGLE problem is laid out for you like a banquet of exaggeration, you've got to wonder. And I'd have to go all the way out to Delta to partake of this, unless it can be done by text message or Zoom (the way most "therapy" is done these days. You have to have the app.)

I can't begin to go into the times I've been taken in by people who seemed to have a genuine gift. But at some point, the "gift" became more important than they were - and the whole thing got corrupted, if it ever had any value to begin with. 

My former friend Paul Biscop, whom I met when he was teaching a university course in anthropology,  claimed to be a spiritualist medium, and even founded his own church on Vancouver Island (though that ended rather badly). But the relationship was rocky and uneven, and  eventually he dismissed all of my spiritual experiences as "fantasies" or even mental illness - which really hurt, though I can't imagine why. He said he was trying to help me with this insight, and of course I should have been grateful. But he often pulled rank, citing his two Masters degrees and his PhD as proof that all of HIS experiences were obviously valid, and mine were bogus.

Many years later, long after I had broken off the dubious friendship, he suddenly died, and what he left in his wake appalled me. His partner/spouse of 24 years (also named Paul) was left with more than $10,000.00 in debt that he had no idea existed. Far from  being left with no insurance money, he was left with a gaping hole that couldn't be filled. Last I heard he was literally homeless, and the spiritualist church Paul Biscop stomped away from was trying to help him by setting up a GoFundMe page. 

As nice as the folks at this church were, I could tell there had been bad blood there. It had become Paul's little pocket cult, and the rest of the congregation ultimately protested. When he died, his memorial was held at a local Masonic Hall, and very few from the church attended.  A table was set up at the back of the hall to sell off some of his books on anthropology and spiritualisms in order to help his surviving partner. . . survive. 

To this day, there's a page-long tribute online all about  how wonderful the man was, with none of the problematic things he did even mentioned. It almost seems like, as with Elvis, dying was a good career move for Paul. In any case, it's a cautionary tale, for it's just possible Paul set off on this spiritual journey with good intentions. Like Marshall Applewhite, like David Koresh, like Jim Jones? ALL of these men started off as relatively mainstream Christian preachers who may have thought their intentions were good. And they brought a lot of people along with them, one way or another. 

Let's just say it didn't end well.

OK then. . . what does this have to do with this card? Everything and nothing. It may be a whole 'nother circumstance, and I hope it is, but I also hope it isn't another form of Benny Hinn-ism, where people pour all their hopes and most of their savings into something that will only leave them spiritually bankrupt. 

FURTHER READING. I  went into more detail in this blog post, which deals with some of the same issues. Read it if you like.

https://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-way-we-live-way-we-die.html

I lied. . . THIS is the first sound recording!

PROOF! Chopin recording is a BLOODY FAKE

I just received this gem by email, helping solve at least part of the mystery of the Great Chopin Minute Waltz Hoax. Link to the original blog post is here: 

https://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2019/09/hoax.html

From: Chase White
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2020 3:42 PM
To: magunning@telus.net

Subject: blog Chopin Minute Waltz

I just read your blog from September 2019 entitled HOAX! The musical fossil that fooled the world. Well done. I am a classical musician in Tampa, FL, and I obsess over anything related to Chopin. Today, I was browsing the New York Philharmonic’s on-line digital archives, and I happened upon some scanned pages from a Chopin file kept by musicologist, Edward Downes. One of the pages in the file is a scanned article from the April 1991 edition of Classic CD magazine entitled “The first recording ever.” By the note that Downes scribbled around the article, it appears to have been given him by radio host George Jellinek. Downes uses the word “hoax” in his note from 1991. I thought you might find this article interesting, since in your blog you state you couldn’t find much information in your Google search. Your blog was one of the few references I could find on the topic in my search today. Article is attached. 

Stay safe!

Chase White

Tampa, FL

(BLOGGER'S RESPONSE): Just when I get totally disenchanted with the internet, something like this happens! Well, something like this has NEVER happened. I even thought I was a little nuts for remembering it, because it’s barely on the internet at all. I remembered hearing the supposed Chopin recording on a CBC classical music show called Off the Record. The host was skeptical, even before anyone else debunked it. To me, it sounded like a lot of bumpy noise, barely pianistic, played insanely fast, with a distorted-sounding yell at the end. The host listened to it, compared it to Piltdown Man, and played it again. It did sound less genuine on second hearing. We do hear what we want to hear, I think. 

I forgot all about it for a long time, then when the Leon Scott recordings came to light, I thought of it again because it was the same kind of recording technology. In fact, my first reaction to THAT finding was, “Hoax!”, maybe an extreme form of autotune. But the Chopin thing now seems so howlingly fake: some fellow named Sot (can’t find HIM anywhere), and the marvelling over Chopin’s  technique (you couldn’t hear anything!) and his dexterity in playing it in one minute. Liberace had a big clock up on the stage when he pulled THAT stunt. It would be interesting if one of the CDs actually came to light so you could hear it. Who knows how many of them went out with that magazine, and on April 1, no less. I’ve also heard recordings by Brahms that sounded pretty fake. Forgive me if all this is on my original blog post, I haven’t looked at it in a long time!

Be well, also. This is an insane time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbIJc05QTA&t=209s

These are hilarious recordings, I think!

Margaret G.

P. S. I just remembered a little detail in the unmasking of this hoax. Bob Kerr, host of Off the Record, detected a false note in the CD catalogue number, which begins with XOHA. He interpreted the “XO” as “hugs and kisses”, and “HA” as – well, HA!  And on April Fool’s day, yet. Thanks for sending me this, it made the lockdown a little cheerier.

Thanks to Chase White for enlightening me and - at the same time - brightening my very grey day!

HA!

HOAX! The musical fossil that fooled the world

Blogger's note. For a couple of decades now, there has been a rumor, theory, whatever, that SOMEONE out there owns an actual recording of Frederic Chopin playing his famous Minute Waltz. This was supposedly recorded in 1845, decades before the first commercial music recordings in the 1880s, and well before the famous Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville phonoautogram transcriptions of Au Claire de la Lune.  I actually remember hearing the Chopin recording on the radio some 30 years ago, and the announcer was skeptical, comparing it to the world's most famous anthropological hoax, Piltdown Man. This consisted of a human skull made to look old with sandpaper, with an ape jaw wired on to it. It sat in a museum case unchallenged for 10 years, while anthropologists scrambled to make their theories fit the "evidence". 

The recording, as I remember (it was played twice) did have that garbled, distant, deeply distorted quality of very early, primitive sound recording. It was also very noisy, with irregular thuds like dead bodies hitting the floor. The piano playing was barely audible, and the piece was played at a clip even more absurd than the inane "minute" that pianists still strive for. (The title of Chopin's famous waltz, by the way, translates as Petite Waltz or Little Waltz, and has NOTHING to do with playing it in under a minute. The spirit of Piltdown Man lives.) At the end, it was as if you could hear someone shouting something. George Sand yelling "bravo!", maybe?

The truth about the Minute Waltz recording came out when someone exposed a classical music magazine for perpetrating the hoax to titillate their readers (the CD recording was included in every issue, which is strange because none of them seem to exist any more). The issue was released on April 1, which gives us a clue - but does that mean anything?  Was it really a case of time travel? And what about those Leon Scott de-Whatever (God, his name is so long I have to look it up EVERY time) recordings made out of smoke on paper? We're supposed to believe THAT? 

To be honest, for a long time I did not believe any of it and just assumed those thin, wavery, creepy sounds I heard were just another Chopin/Piltdown flimflam. The article below (circa late '80s) is taken from a Polish music newsletter, and it is the only reference I can find anywhere on the internet to the reported Chopin recording. Strangely enough, though the article seems to be confirming the veracity of Hippolyte Sot's pioneering work, I can find no reference to him either. None whatsoever. It's as if he never existed.

A CHOPIN RECORDING?

While doing construction work in France, the workers dug up an old metal box. Inside the box they found a near faded letter and a glass cylinder. Not knowing what they had found, they turned it over to a local historian who was able to make out the writing. What he discovered was

THE FIRST KNOWN AUDIO RECORDING !!

The letter was written by one Hippolyte Sot, resident of the area in the 1840s. The letter described the techniques he had devised to record audio sounds using a glass cylinder. It went on to say that despite his efforts he was unable to obtain any interest nor recognition for his work. He therefore buried the details of this invention in the metal box along with one sample recording. The recording was none other than

FREDERICK CHOPIN playing his own Waltz in D flat major!

The magazine says that the recording was made about 20 years earlier the those created by Leon Scott, the person normally attributed with the invention of audio recording. It also gives additional detail about the inventor and how the information was retrieved from the glass cylinder. And what's particularly interesting is that H. Sot had NOT invented a playback technique, and it took 20th century technology to recover the audio information recorded on the cylinder.

To get all the details, get a copy of the latest issue of CLASSIC CD magazine. And yes, the CD included with the magazine includes the recording. Its the only recording of Frederich Chopin, and he displays some pretty fantastic playing ability.

That the text above is a hoax you may find out from the following rebuttal:

"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was exquisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.

Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!

The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.

The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transferred by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.

Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?

The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)

The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"

NOTE: This news item was submitted to us by Dr. Barbara Milewski, a noted Chopin specialist, in response to a request from one of our readers who thought that an original chopin CD may actually exist.

POST-BLOG CONFESSIONS. I cannot find one thing about this story now, even though it's described here as a "world-famous" classical music hoax. But it explains why my first reaction to the Leon Scott recording of Au Claire de la Lune was a dead-certain disbelief. That distant, creepy nasal voice gargled a "tune" featuring only three notes, and could easily have been autotuned from ONE note (and who knows where that might have come from). Not only that,

it was sung at a dragged-out graveyard tempo, so that you wouldn't know it was a "tune", let alone a famous one, unless someone told you. So much was made of it, so many people presented papers and gave press conferences and received prestigious awards that it all smacked of scientific opportunism, not to mention jumping the gun on something very dicey indeed.

I guess I sort of believe it now, but they've mucked around so much with those three suspicious notes that they have been rendered unrecognizable as anything human. There wasn't much follow-up after the initial frenzy, and in fact the First Sounds.org website now looks as dated as anything set up in 2008. I did note that they seem to be backpedalling a bit on the veracity of the technology and how this "music" could possibly have been retrieved:

The Phonautograms of
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

The sound files of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms released during 2008 by the First Sounds collaborative were created using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology, which sought to track the wavy lines scratched on soot-covered paper as though they were standard record grooves. However, Scott did not intend his phonautograms to be played back, and from a modern perspective his tracings are often malformed: the recording stylus sometimes left the paper and sometimes moved backwards along the time axis, violating basic assumptions of the “virtual stylus” approach and—for that matter—of sound recording in general. For this reason, we supposed at first that many of Scott ’s phonautograms—particularly the earliest ones—might remain permanently mute.

In late 2008, First Sounds cofounder Patrick Feaster devised an alternate playback approach, graphically converting phonautographic wavy lines into bands of variable width and playing these back using software designed to handle optical film sound track formats. This approach can’t correct serious malformations in Scott’s phonautograms any more than the “virtual stylus” approach can, but it is sufficiently robust to let us hear something from phonautograms that are otherwise too compromised to process. Many phonautograms from 1857 also survive, but they lack the tuning-fork timecode, so in these cases we have no objective means of correcting for speed fluctuations, which are generally great enough to render sung melodies utterly unrecognizable (emphasis mine).

So is First Sounds offering all this explanation as a sort of embarrassed postscript to all the initial huff and puff? I STILL believe this thing will eventually be found out as a total fraud, so that Eduarde-de-Whatsisname will have to join Hippolyte the Sot in the remainder bin of posterity.

Along with. . . 

Joyce Hatto (2007)

Joyce Hatto was an English pianist who rose to prominence in the year preceding her death. Her talent had only been discovered very late in her life, when she was in her seventies. She was noted for being able to masterfully play a wide variety of works, including compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. However, she never played in public. Recordings of her performances were produced by her husband from a private studio. But in 2007, a few months after her death, a critic for Gramophone magazine discovered that none of the recordings attributed to Hatto were actually performed by her. Her husband had been taking recordings of other pianists and claiming they were recordings of his wife.

For a feast of incomprehensibility, I welcome you to sample sound expert Patrick Feaster's bizarre blog, Griffonage: 

Griffonage.com

Hoax, hoax, HOAX!! Why people are still falling for internet deception

Don't fall for the hoax: Facebook isn't restricting your News Feed to 25 friends

Rob Price Business Insider
Aug. 11, 2018, 9:45 AM

lThere's a viral Facebook post making the rounds that claims the News Feed is restricting what you see to just 25 friends.

Spoiler alert: It's just not true.

No, Facebook is not restricting the content you see on your News Feed to just 25 or 26 friends.

Over the last few months, a hoax has been making the rounds on the social network. It claims, in essence, that Facebook has implemented an algorithm change that means you will only see posts from a select few of your friends. Anyone else is flat out of luck.

The hoax encourages users to combat this by copying and pasting a faux-informative message about the "change" — and then asking users' friends to reply to the post.

Here's one example Business Insider has seen (the wording often varies slightly):

Hello Friends - I'm jumping on the bandwagon too....Fighting this Facebook algorithm change, because I'm noticing I am not seeing so many of my friends posts. Here is how to avoid hearing from the same 26 FB friends and nobody else. This post explains why we don't see all posts from our friends. Funny, I thought if I followed you on Facebook I would see what you post. Not anymore.....

Your newsfeed recently shows only posts from the same few people, about 25, repeatedly the same, because Facebook has a new algorithm....

Their system chooses the people who will read your posts. However I would like to choose for myself, therefore, I ask you all a favor- if you are reading this message leave me a quick comment, a "hey" or sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed please!

Otherwise Facebook chooses who to show me and I don't need Facebook to choose my friends. Please copy and paste on your wall so you can have more interaction with all your contacts and bypass the system. That's why we don't see all posts from our friends.

Hold your finger down anywhere on this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go to your page, start a new post on your page, then put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click on it to paste. Thank you all!

Variations of this hoax have been circulating since at least February 2018, and Facebook comprehensively debunked it at the time. But that clearly didn't halt its spread.

The problem is that by the time a fooled user realizes it's total hookum, it's too late — they've already copy-pasted it, sharing it with their friends, allowing it to keep going viral across the social network.

That said, there is an extremely convoluted and twisted kernel of truth in here — Facebook's algorithm does make judgement about which of your friends it thinks you want to see content from, and then prioritizes them in your News Feed. And engaging with these friends' posts (and them engaging with your posts) will make them appear more frequently.

If you feel you are seeing only a limited number of posts from a limited number of people, there is a tried-and-true trick that will give you a different view of your News Feed: have it show you the "Most Recent" posts rather than its default, "Top Stories."

To do this on the desktop click on "News Feed" in the left-hand column and then on "Most Recent."

This view of the News Feed is harder to find on the mobile app. First click on the "three lines" symbol (next to the notifications bell symbol). Then click on "See More" then on "Most Recent."

But the "facts" this hoax claims, and its purported fix? Dead wrong.

BLOGGER'S TWO CENTS. OK then! I would have completely ignored this bogus thing, except that in the last two days, two of my Facebook friends have copied and pasted the "hold your finger down" version, along with "This REALLY WORKS!!" AND "Four of my friends told me this works!!" These are not people who write in this style - in fact they are published writers - so it's obvious to me they DIDN'T WRITE IT!!

Any time anything is copied and pasted in this way, it means something funny is going on, or something not-so-funny. "Viral" things that turn out to be completely bogus make me angry. It dismays me when I see otherwise intelligent people falling for something so completely lame. It highlights the "I saw it on the internet, therefore it must be true" mentality that is still going around among people who seem to have powers of discernment. Perhaps they WANT it to be true (while we're using all caps), but that doesn't mean it is. 

When you get this sent to you or see it posted and it's from a friend, it's a knee-jerk reaction to believe it, because your Facebook friend who would NEVER delude you is sending it. That person conveniently ignores the clunky, exclamation-point-ridden style which screams "cut and paste", and the ludicrous repetition which means someone has glommed together a couple of the many versions of it without editing. This one randomly claims "four different people" have had good results with it, which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt. . . (And I am so glad these were four "different" people, not four of the same person.)

I will perhaps believe these things - perhaps - if I see them written in that person's OWN voice and in their OWN writing style. (I just can't get off this all-caps thing!). If they then tell me what their personal experience has been with this method to "bypass the system", well then - 

Yesterday a Facebook friend posted another version of this (and there are always overlapping versions going around just to muddy the waters), and was debunked by discerning friends. Today, another friend (a writer friend) posted this:

All right. Four different people have told me this genuinely works and I miss seeing a lot of my friends posts. So I’m gonna give it a try. I heard you do have to comment and some say you don’t ?? What gives ?
Yes Adding bypass It work It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.
Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed. I
Their new algorithm chooses the same few people - about 25 - who will read your posts. Therefore,
Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go your page, start a new post and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click paste.
This will bypass the system.
Thank you It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.

Can I pick this apart? Would a professional writer say "friends posts"? Then there is "some say you don't?? What gives?" This is NOT her writing. Definitely not. Nor is this: "Yes. Adding bypass It works It WORKS!! Come on, people, that is nuts."

I might believe it, perhaps, if someone posted, "I saw this thing about bypassing the Facebook algorithm and decided to give it a try," with personal results. Which would be exactly nothing.

People say, "Hey, it does no harm." Yes it does. It leads me around by the nose, it deludes me, and I hate that. As with fake news, I no longer know what to believe. What a waste of energy, and what a phony and disappointing vibe to get from a Facebook friend.

A long time ago I got a "questionnaire" I had to publicly fill out, all about the color of my panties, my bra size, how I behave when drunk, how many men I've had, etc. It was all in the name of "breast cancer awareness". This was nowhere near the date for that day and turned out to be a complete hoax designed to embarrass people, including me (and it was sent by a close friend!). But if you refused to take it, people were hurt, angry and edged away from you, or even unfriended you for "not caring about breast cancer". At very least, you were chided for being a poor sport for criticizing something that was all in good fun and completely harmless.

I care about breast cancer, but what I don't care about are bogus posts meant to humiliate me in public and blur the line between genuine information and absolute dreck. This truly is a life-and-death matter, and meaningless questionnaires are of no use, cause confusion and even do harm. But a number of people claimed it actually DID "raise awareness" of breast cancer, meaning women all ran to have a completely unnecessary mammogram, or just said, "OH! I had no idea there was such a thing as breast cancer. I'm so glad I'm aware."

Meantime, let's say it all together:

Yes Adding bypass It work It WORKS!! It's just that the university professor who cut and pasted the message was having an off day.

LOOK - a real live PONY!

This is one of those sinister comic book ads from the 1950s that promised naive, trusting children all sorts of extravagant "free gifts". They claimed to be just GIVING away dolls, wristwatches, jewelry, guitars, strange dark rectangular things (?), and - most seductively - "a real live PONY". (Note that they don't say "we're giving away a pony" - no, we're just supposed to look at it.)

Coyly displayed below the splendid image of a "free" rifle is the announcement "OUR 60th YEAR" - our? Who or what is this "our"? Look closely - no, don't, because you can't, the type is too small. But back then, when we all had better eyesight, we would eventually realize that to attain any of these "free" ponies and radios and cameras and other things, we had to do something.

To sell something.

To sell something door-to-door. Cloverine Salve, to be exact. As a kid, I had no idea what salve was, and even now I wonder what could have been in it. Goose grease, perhaps?  I guess it was something like Vick's Vap-o-rub, stuff that you smeared on yourself or others. At any rate, you had to sell a tremendous amount of this stuff to earn any of these premiums, and I really doubt if anyone ever had a live horse slipped through their mail slot.

Just the tone of this ad and its feverish captions (GIVEN - GIVEN - GIVEN, ACT NOW, ONCE IN A LIFETIME, BE FIRST, WE ARE RELIABLE, and, strangest of all, WE TRUST YOU) - all these exhortations have an evangelical quality to them, a sort of religious fervor which reminds me of Elmer Gantry at the pulpit. This is old-timey salesmanship at its cheesiest, and I can only imagine those poor children trudging up and down the neighborhood having doors slammed in their faces. Child exploitation at its most heartless. 

But soft! Cloverine had not yet  finished its cruel deception. In subsequent ads, likely in the early '60s, children were lured by exciting comic-book adventures, only to be seduced by the promise of "getting stuff". One wonders if some sort of legal boundary had been crossed with that early ad, with its dastardly "look - a real live PONY" scam. The premiums look similar, but they are actually squashed down at the bottom of the comic-book adventure. This time you actually see a can of Cloverine salve (which I couldn't even find in the older ad). Truth in advertising?

I found a lot of these, so I made a collage. You can't read the typeface anyway, but they're pretty much the same. Two of the four still mention the Live Pony, so I wonder if you actually DID get one if you sold a million dollars worth of salve (and owned a farm).

I don't want to think about all those unsold cans of Cloverine salve. As with those waxy chocolate-covered almonds my kids had to sell for Brownies and Cubs, parents no doubt took up the slack. But at least you could eat the almonds.

And I found this. I don't know what to make of it. An old-fashioned meat grinder, and a. . .