Thursday, August 23, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Fatter 'n a hamster's ass!
I swear, this isn't as incoherent as it seems. It all ties in with the grand show of vintage cars I took in on Sunday, my favorites being those immense, bulbous tanks from the 1940s. There was something imposing - almost disturbing - about these things, a great upthrusting nose like the prow of a ship, giant (bosomy?) swellings at the front and a falling-off at the back so extreme that in some cases the rear tires were completely invisible. How these things navigated road-bumps without severe damage is beyond me.
I remembered this Popeye cartoon, one of the good old vintage ones from the '40s (which means, of course, that it has a mililtary flavor to it). The car in it is a splendid example of the 1940s tank. Most of all I remembered that exploding tire scene, was almost traumatized by it as a child, and now I see why. It seems to build and build, expand and expand until you know what's coming, a sort of screen-filling red-drenched orgasm that blows all the main characters into next Thursday. They blast through several billboards before colliding with a clothesline, leaving them all clad in someone else's underwear (Bluto in a frilly corset), adding to the bizarre erotic effect.
Sex in cartoons? Are you kidding? Not that Popeye squeezing his spinach-can until it spurted into his mouth had any sort of Freudian significance at all.
It was nice to find this dear old thing - strictly through a Google search, I never would have tracked it down any other way - because I've been obsessed with those bulbous, surreal '40s vehicles lately, particularly the custom-made ones that pushed all those features to a fetish-y extreme.
The kids could slide down this one, except their short pants might get caught on that pointy rear bumper. It's hard to see the rear tires, though they do just peep through seductively. A little trap-door thingie over the rear tire is also just visible. Else how'd you ever change the thing?
A lot of these extreme cars were custom-made by a guy named Westergard. I think I caught a glimpse of one of those cars once, and it was breathtaking, but didn't quite look real.
This is some sort of convertible, I guess, but I'd be too scared to get in it. It just looks intimidating.
Now we get to it. This car has a FAT ASS. It has haunches on it that are as cobby and waddly as a hamster's. It looks overweight. It looks like it has big overstuffed seed-pouches both fore and aft: a hamster squared!
Hamster!. . . Car!. . . Hamster!. . . Car!
Does this thing even HAVE rear tires? Does it just sort of drag itself around, creating horrendous sparks behind it and making an awful screeching noise? It seems to sit level on the ground, belly down, kind of like a. . .
Yes.
Would you call this a station wagon that's been left out in the sun too long? A pregnant trailer? What the fxx IS it? Like Popeye's tire, it looks as if it's about to explode from internal pressure.
Then again, maybe it's just a hamster on wheels.
Cars were more animal-like then, but this one seems so hunkered-down, so crouched. It would have to scuttle around on its belly like a badger. And the squinty little eyes on it: disturbing. It must have run, or no one would have gone to the trouble to have this Westergard guy build it for them. But it just looks so wide. How did you navigate turns in it? How could you see out of these tiny little window-slits? How much gas would it guzzle in a day?
I don't particularly trust hamsters at the wheel, but some of their antics are kind of amusing.
But just look at this majestic thing, jeez, it almost has a face on it, with a fierce toothy frown and great upjutting phallic nose. It's a straight-ahead sort of thing, a get-out-of-my-way car. Come to think of it, it seems like something from another planet. But breathtaking nonetheless.
Any resemblance to a hamster's ass is purely coincidental.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Thistledown Press
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Monday, August 20, 2012
Cars! Cars! Cars!
This was my first shock. It's a "whatisit" from 1949 (or something), bulbous like a fungus, or puffy lilke a marshmallow. The hood has these strange vents in it. The creepy protruding headlights look a bit like Jeff Goldblum's eyes in The Fly. Not a pleasant car, at all.
Maybe it's all my recent musings on the Edsel with its shit-bucket grill, but I became fascinated by all the chrome doo-daddies on the front of these things. This looks like a giant strainer that seems to go the wrong way. Bulby, bulging shapes were the norm back then. When was this? Either the late '30s or early '40s, I think. What car? Who knows. Did I keep track? No. I don't even like cars, but I liked looking at these.
Plain beautiful. Saner-looking grill, though the headlights still have that odd ocular look. It's funny how designs evolve and shade into each other: here the extreme bulbousness is played down, the line is sleeker. Must be late 40s or even 1950.
Home, James! I would describe this one as "stately". Might be a Rolls. This one displays the tiny slitty windows that became the norm for a few years. How did you see out?
This is never a car! Maybe part of a car. Maybe it can fly.
At first glance this looks just like the first photo, but it isn't. Note the difference in the hood, opening in the other direction and without those odd-looking vents. The headlights are dramatically different, more like spectacles than googly eyes, and there's that tall centre grill like something off a baleen whale. The more you look at them, the less similar they seem. But they're both odd as hell. In fact, to me this looks more like a back end than a front end. Can it be driven either way, I wonder?
This one is called the Westerburg Flying Roadster with double-axle streamlined Viking shield and removable Matchbox wheels.
Harold Lloyd might have had one of these.
Just to prove I was there. A second later I heard a surly voice behind me: "Don't put your head in the car!" Does this mean the door of the trunk might come down and decapitate me?
(I should explain that this was the Port Coquitlam Car Show. It's nice to go every couple of years and wander around, contemplating HOW ON EARTH some of these cars ever got built. And they thought the Edsel was odd-looking. )
Saturday, August 18, 2012
I love a little pussy: the Edsel connection
Now I've got Edsels on the brain.
You know, those cars from the '50s that kinda-sorta-didn't catch on.
The ones that languished in showrooms, then used car dealerships (most of them not even used), then. . . automobile graveyards like this one.
Like the elephants in the Tarzan movies, maybe these poor abandoned Edsels somehow knew when it was their time, and just chuffed along to the junkyard all by themselves.
But one thing we'll never forget is that useless, metallic hunk of junk stuck on at the front, variously called a horsecollar, toilet seat and (women's genitalia: I'll let you fill in the slang term).
This inspired me to find images that evoke the Edsel Twat:
Bedpan. You hardly have to use your imagination at all on this one.
Latvian opera singer's mouth.
Jim Nabors' mouth.
Wee-jee board thingama-jigger.
Amoeba.
Human heart.
Silly putty container.
Reptile egg.
Upside-down plastic bag of goldfish.
Two hands making that heart thingammy-symbol.
The Head of Our Lord Satan. I think I'm finished.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Thistledown Press
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Friday, August 17, 2012
Pink genitals on parade
moose knuckle (usually uncountable; plural moose knuckles)
- The ball joint of the humerus in a moose's skeleton.
- (slang) The noticeable shape of a man's penis when he is wearing tight clothes.
- (slang) The shape that is noticeable when tight-fitting clothing wedges between a woman's labia.
Synonyms
- (labia visible through tight clothing): cameltoe, frontal wedgie
The things you learn. I had to share this with you, even though I'm so tired I'm falling out of my chair and should have gone to bed an hour ago. This Edsel thing got me going on the design of the grill which looked like "a vulva" to some people. I shouldn't have clicked on that word in Wiki cuzzit led me here, to this bizarre term which I kind of like because it's equal-opportunity offensive.
Still, there's something almost romantic about the camel toe/moose knuckle pairing. And it's anatomically a lot more accurate. Don't wear those bulk pantyhose fromTarget.
OH, and I just found this - it's on the level, I think -
SmoothGroove is the safe and effective way to alleviate the crudely termed Camel toe.
The SmoothGroove camel toe solution –
- Is made from a medical grade polymer which moulds itself to the contours of the body, so it is extremely comfortable
- Contains an antibacterial agent, so it is safe
- Is washable
- Comes with a satin pouch to store it discreetly in your wardrobe
- Is available in White, Black and Clear
If you can't decide which colour you like or want to treat someone to their own SmoothGroove, why not buy more than one and get a discount!
It's VULVA, not "Volvo"!
In finding an illustration for today's strange topic, I had to pick from a bunch of different Edsel ads. One was much more esthetically pleasing than this one and showed the car sweeping through a pair of opening gates, with harp glissandos and announcers saying if you had an Edsel, you were showing the world "you've arrived!" The only reason I didn't use it is that it was transferred from film stock that had gone bad, all pink and bleary like a particularly nasty eye infection.
Lots of these things have arrived in auto graveyards, but some people are refurbishing them and putting them in car shows. The fact that it is quite possibly the most hideous automobile ever made does not deter them. In fact it seems to lend them a certain exotic charm.
Having a 1958 Edsel in perfect condition is kind of like having a set of Nazi medals that look "like new". Like, who'd want to?
People have posed various theories about the Edsel, why the intensive and supposedly foolproof ad campaign fell so flat. Was the timing wrong for a new luxury car? Was it too pricey for the typical-average-American-family-of-the-'50s-who-wanted-a-new-car-every-2-years-but-couldn't-always-afford-it-because-Mom-spent-too-much-on-her-effing-manicures? Did it, like the infamous Jaguar, refuse to start?
No, it was just butt-ugly and that's all there is to say about it. Looking at it now sets my teeth on edge: it has a face on it like a robot from Hell.
It looks hostile. It looks aggressive. It looks like some good ol' boy fired up on corn squeezin's and toting a slingshot and a bag o'rocks.
YICK.
The more I watched this video, which I picked for the elegant chrome-laden, turquoise-and-white decor that sums up the '50s, the more I realized it wasn't an Edsel ad at all, but some guy driving his vintage Edsel with some other guy filming it. The other guy's rear-view mirror just kept showing and the cars in the other lanes were too recent. But I don't want to change it cuz the other ads all run about 8 1/2 minutes and feature Bing Crosby, and I couldn't stand that, I'd have a seizure on the spot. It's bad enough even thinking about these automotive nightmares.
This is the kind-of-a-thing that caused Stephen King to write that, you know, that BOOK, and inspired nightmarish TV shows like My Mother the Car.
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The name Edsel has come to be synonymous with failure on a great and embarrassing level. But there's so much ugly on it, let's call it Synonymous with Shit-awful, old, chromy, boxy, monster-faced Car-Ideas that whoever thought of it should have shoved so far down their throat it would come out the other side. Or something like that.
Coda. I hate research more than I hate worms, but I had to include this tasty snippet from Wiki:
The Edsel is best remembered for its trademark "horsecollar" or toilet seat grille, which was quite distinct from other cars of the period. According to a popular joke at the time, the Edsel "resembled an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon".[11] Some have speculated that the car failed to sell because its grille resembled a vulva.[12]
The Edsel's front-end ensemble as it eventually appeared bore little resemblance, if any, to the original concept. Roy Brown, the original chief designer on the Edsel project, had envisioned a slender, almost delicate opening in the center. Engineers, fearing engine cooling problems, vetoed the intended design, which led to the now-infamous "horsecollar."
(Hey! That's vulva to you, mister!)
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