Nearly-identical vintage toys: compare and contrast

It strikes me, after the fact, that I need to include a BIT of explanation with these ads rather than just throwing them at you. Unlike me, you may not remember them. These are vintage ads for kids' toys that are practically interchangeable. I don't know if Digger the Dog came ahead of Gaylord, but both toys had very catchy jingles. Digger had an adenoidal little boy who, while almost unintelligible, was mighty cute. The men who wrote these (for they were almost surely men) were geniuses in their own small way, for their little ditties plied drill-bits into our brains that screw with our memory to this day.

As a child, I wanted a horse so badly that I'd "ride" anything. I would hang upside down from the railing of a gospel church door and pretend it was a horse. I would pop the legs off one of those tin TV trays, stand inside the legs, and pretend to gallop around. Never did I get anything as impressive as Marvel the Mustang or Blaze, which would probably cost more than most families were willing to pony up.

The pooping dog was not something I experienced or wanted, not being a Barbie afficionado. In my day, it would have been considered horrific, since back than nobody pooped. I mean nobody, not even dogs.

These have only the fact that they're robots in common, but they're cool. Why am I bothered by the thumbnail in the bottom one? Does it remind me of a TNT blast, or something more ominous?

In any case, I remember most of these ads, particularly Digger the Dog and Gaylord, who seemed to be almost the same product. Likewise Marvel the Mustang (who came with the unforgettable slogan, "What horse do?") and Blaze, though unlike Marvel, he didn't really go anywhere. Though boy and horse seemed to be barreling along, it was obvious that only the background was moving, while Blaze just bounced up and down in one spot like those awful horsey-things mounted on springs. Marvel, on the other hand, kind of shuffled along, front and back legs stuck out awkwardly like diagonal table legs. No winding. No batteries. But no horse ever "did" like that. 

(Wasn't there a Romper Room caterpillar that you rode that was something like that? Let me think. . .) 

The pooping dog is quite a bit after my time, but I do remember the stir it caused when Barbie came out with Tanner. The idea was repeated some time in the '80s (?) with Pax, my Poopin' Pup, a much fuzzier, cuter dog who nevertheless produced the same stuff. Put it in one end, and it comes out the other.

SPECIAL BONUS AD! This one may only faintly resemble Marvel the Mustang and Blaze, but it's a mechanical horse, what the hell! This one DOES take batteries. What horse do? This one does.

POST-PONY: Sometimes, it just all comes together. Looking for that Romper Room riding caterpillar (which turned out to be Inchworm, with a jingle too dreadful to repeat here), I found - a riding DOG, so much like a cross between Digger the Dog and Gaylord that it almost made my hair stand on end! Well, not quite. But it's interesting.

Elizabeth Holmes: Blah, blah, blah

Glyptodon!

Disco glyptodons

Coloring pages

Glypto Do's and Don'ts

GIFs

Glyptodon (from Greek for "grooved or carved tooth" – Greek γλυπτός sculptured + ὀδοντ-, ὀδούς tooth) was a genus of large, armored mammals of the subfamily Glyptodontinae (glyptodonts or glyptodontines) – relatives of armadillos – that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape. With its rounded, bony shell and squat limbs, it superficially resembled a turtle, and the much earlier dinosaurian ankylosaur – providing an example of the convergent evolution of unrelated lineages into similar forms. In 2016 an analysis of Doedicurus mtDNA found it was, in fact, nested within the modern armadillos as the sister group of a clade consisting of Chlamyphorinae and  For this reason, glyptodonts and all armadillos but Dasypus were relocated to a new family, Chlamyphoridae.

Glyptodon Temporal range: Pleistocene (Uquian-Lujanian) ~2.500–0.011 Ma  PreЄ Є O S D C P T J K Pg N ↓
Fossil specimen at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Superorder:	Xenarthra
Order:	Cingulata
Family:	Chlamyphoridae
Subfamily:	†Glyptodontinae
Genus:	†Glyptodon[1] Owen, 1839
Species
G. clavipes Owen, 1839 (type) G. elongatus Burmeister, 1866 G. euphractus Lund, 1839 G. munizi Ameghino, 1881 G. petaliferus Cope, 1888[2] G. reticulatus Owen, 1845 G. rivapacis Hay, 1923[3]

GLYPTO-BONUS: One more animatronic/plug-in Glyptodon!

Elizabeth Holmes demonstrates her product

Which is exactly nothing.

Autochrome 2

Autochrome

Do you need to feel better today?

A YouTube classic which deserves to be seen again. What baffles me is how many people protest in the comments section about how "cruel" this is, about how badly-injured the precious little ducklings were. Pshah! These are rolling fluffballs whose downy little butts are barely touching the pavement. Feathered tumbleweeds. They quickly right themselves and go toddling off  after Mom. That's the whole point of the thing.

Elizabeth Holmes: up to her elbows

In what, you may ask? Why, in human blood. For this is the currency Elizabeth Holmes deals in.

These nanoclips from some of the more drooly videos about Holmes (prior to 2016, when she was finally assassinated by the truth) only add to my astonishment at the lengths she would go to in order to appear sincere. Here she is in a lab coat - and may I say, after reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, this woman has never been within ten miles of such a thing - earnestly at work purifying blood samples  and saving humanity at the same time. For that is what she lives for.

The fact that someone at Theranos would set up a dummy lab so that this dummy of a woman could pretend to be working in it isn't so surprising. What surprises me is how many people gushed over her, fawned, crowned her "the next Steve Jobs" (as if the first one wasn't  bad enough. Wasn't Jobs known for stealing other people's ideas?)

At any rate, I want to get off this obsession now and on to a more palatable one. But I just had to  share this with you. Note her robotic movements, android face, and other less-than-human features. It scares the hell out of me, it does. Think of it. She nearly had our blood.

Astonishing power

Elizabeth Holmes: Surprising Lies

Blogger's note. I am sorry to confront you with so many surprising facts all at once. I will attempt to refute them as best I can. This is from an extremely out-of-date article from back when Elizabeth Holmes was telling everyone she was a genius, and they believed her. I will attempt to refute these 21 surprising facts, or at least until I run out of steam or get bored and quit. (21? Are they  freaking kidding??)

21 Surprising Facts About Billionaire Entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes

See how much you really know about America's youngest female billionaire.

It's really only in the past year that we've come to know and admire the world's youngest female billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes. Her incredibly unusual business strategy had her flying under the radar for more than a decade as she built her revolutionary blood-testing company, Theranos.

("Flying under the radar" is code for "covering their asses so they won't get their asses thrown in jail".)

Now Holmes is ranked No. 1 on the Silicon Valley 100, Business Insider's list of the most prominent (and coolest) people in Silicon Valley.

Here are 21 surprising facts you may not have known about America's coolest multibillionaire:

(Note. "Coolest" means what?)

Ranked No. 110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014, Holmes topped the list of America's Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.7 billion.

Holmes was born in 1984. Considering her already incredible achievements, that in itself is surprising to many.

(Um. I was born in 1954, and nobody runs around in circles because of it. When you were born isn't all that significant when you've committed such an astonishing amount of fraud. All it proves is that it's never too soon to be a criminal.)

At just 9 years of age, Holmes wrote in a letter to her father, "What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do."

While still in high school, Holmes completed three college Mandarin courses and sold C compilers to Chinese universities.

(Lies. Lies. Lies. She wrote that letter a couple of years ago. She quotes it during absolutely every interview. "See, everybody? See how I was a selfless, burning idealist even when I was a little, little girl?")

Holmes went to Stanford for chemical engineering, and during her time there, filed her first patent (for an advanced drug-delivery patch). She then dropped out of college just before her sophomore year.

She once traveled to Singapore to spend a summer working in the Genome Institute labs on groundbreaking SARS research.

(The proof? Poof!)

Holmes was exceedingly private in the first 11 years of building her company. She's made a huge splash since appearing on the cover of Fortune magazine last summer.

Her company name, Theranos, is a combination of the words therapy and diagnose.

(Note. I prefer the similar term THANATOS, which is Greek for death.)

Since launching in 2003, Theranos has developed blood tests to help detect dozens of medical conditions, including high cholesterol and cancer, using just a drop or two of blood drawn from a pinprick in your finger.

(No they haven't. There is no Theranos. There is no blood-testing technology. Elizabeth and her henchmen hacked a Siemens blood-testing machine and stole its data after realizing their own equipment was about as useful as a toaster.)

Part of Holmes's inspiration came from her aversion to needles; her mother and grandmother even fainted at the sight of needles.

(Not true. Just theatre. Made up. Went over well with crowds. Sociopaths like to drill their way into your heart with warm-puppy, vulnerability-based bullshit.)

Holmes assembled what can be described as an all-star board of experienced and accomplished people in the corporate world: George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and Bill Frist, among others.

(Wait, well, that - yeah. Sugar Daddies, all. She batted her presumably-false eyelashes at them, wore tight sweaters - and by the way, those famous black turtlenecks were NOT in imitation of Steve Jobs, who wore crewnecks, which is a kind of t-shirt - and did whatever other favors they asked. Kind of makes you sick to think of 90-year-old men going all gaga over a sociopathic fake blonde.)

Holmes met Sunny Balwani, who would later become her company's COO, in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school, during the time he was getting his MBA from Berkeley.

(According to Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, Sunny Balwani  is more like a bodyguard/thug or something out of a bad gangster movie. He does not possess the intelligence of a gnat. During that whole book, I never figured out what Sunny was doing there.)

Holmes is often compared to visionary Steve Jobs and told Mercury News she    launched her company after "thinking about what is the greatest change I could make in the world."

Like Jobs, Holmes wears a daily "uniform" of a black suit with a black cotton turtleneck.

Holmes has set her sights on more than simply dominating the blood-testing market; she wants to create a whole new market called "consumer health technology" that will see consumers more engaged in their health care.

(Oh Jesus, stop, stop, STOP! Her vacuous fake idealism is the worst of it. Holmes simply doesn't care. Nothing was real, none of it was real, and none of it bothered her in the slightest, including the very real danger that her fucked-up testing could cost human lives.) 

As of last year, Holmes had 84 patents to her name (18 U.S. and 66 non-U.S.).

According to CBS News, Holmes spends every waking hour in her office and doesn't even own a TV at home.

(And you believed her! In light of what we now know, I am beginning to wonder just what she did all day.)

In March this year, Holmes became the youngest person ever honored as a lifetime member by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

(Oh boy - get one of those long-arm stretch-out things with the hand on it, and snatch that award back! Horatio Alger is all about "rags to riches", but since when are riches necessarily tied to human decency?)

According to The New Yorker, Holmes "can quote Jane Austen by heart, [but] no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn't date, doesn't own a television, and hasn't taken a vacation in 10 years ... She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery."

(I want to see that celery.)

She abstains from caffeine, limits the amount of time she sleeps, and works seven days a week (Insights by Stanford Business).

(Doing what exactly?)

Holmes is notoriously secretive, and while she's been criticized by industry peers as such, insists she must protect her technology from the prying eyes of competitors.

(And. You know what else. Didn't work out, did it, Elizabeth?)

PUBLISHED ON: JUL 1, 2015

How things change in only a handful of years!

Can millennials count to twenty-five?

Sometimes I just get so tired. I don't want to diss millennials too much, because, after all, they are The Future. We're in their hands, or we will be, and there's nothing much we can do about it.

But if they work retail, shouldn't they be expected to - uh, ah, er - know something about money?

I think what may be happening is that they are shown how to scan a bar code, at which point their training is "done". This is called "buying something". The payment is a tap on a machine, so they don't need to worry about that either.

Money confounds them. They don't know what it is.

Being pensioners and fairly poor, we're the type to count out change for things, just so we keep track of what we are actually spending. All this has gone by the boards, like writing in cursive and learning to tell time from a clock face. (Both have been scrapped and are no longer taught in schools.) It's much more OK to jam a card in a machine, or (better yet) tap it, then sort of forget about the total while you shove the item in plastic and hurry on.

The concept of spending money - actual cash money - isn't real any more. Bank balances. Loans. Debt. What are they? It's all a sort of grey oblivion, until one day it catches up with you and you realize you are living so far beyond your means that you can't scrape up enough to pay the rent.

So. Today I had two pretty vivid examples of millennials who couldn't count. I mean, AT ALL. One was a young man, a very pleasant young man from another culture, so he's excused or partially-excused, but why on earth, during his training, did he never have to handle any money, let alone learn to make change? I guess Walmart just assumes no one pays any attention any more. It just "goes on a card", and you're finished. 

Typical of the older, poorer generation, I set a small item in front of him and put down a handful of assorted cash. There was a five dollar bill, a few toonies and a loonie, and a lot of new-looking quarters. (I only mention this because I wondered if this was why he found it so perplexing.) He looked at the  five, sort of put it to one side, hefted the toonies and loonie and began to poke his fingers into them (to count them, I assume). Then the quarters. There were  at least eight of them. He picked up one quarter. He sort of squinted at it, held it up to his eye, turned it this way and that. Flipped it over to look at the other side. Then he put that quarter to one side. Then he picked up the next quarter, inspected it carefully, turned it this way and that, and - 

On and on, each time, for eight quarters.

Of course, I (and everyone else in line) wondered if Walmart had a new policy of scrutinizing quarters, the way you would a fifty or even a twenty. Maybe shiny new quarters were counterfeit! Maybe I had a mint in my basement and feverishly turned out quarters all night long so I could fool Walmart and get my garden hose for free. But this just seemed surreal. He kept pushing the quarters around the counter like little silver curling stones. Finally he picked one up and held it by its edges for the longest time.

"Are these worth twenty-five cents?" he asked me. I assured him they were. 

Was this nickel confusion? Not likely. Every nickel in Canada has a beaver on it. They aren't the same size as quarters. They're thicker and smaller in diameter. But I doubt if he knew what a nickel looked like anyway. When he gave me my change, I just took it and left. Didn't even bother to look.

But that wasn't the end of it!

An hour or so later I went to a craft store to buy some different-colored sheets of felt for a project. They had gorgeous felt in the place, every sort of rich colour, so I picked out a lot of it. The price was two sheets for $1.25, clearly marked with a sticker on each sheet.

I bought sixteen sheets, which I assumed would be eight times $1.25. The cashier, young and sweet and (until I rang the bell) glued to her phone, dutifully began to ring up one sheet after another, after another, after another. The total was absurdly high. I realized she had charged me sixteen times $1.25.  I insisted it wasn't right and that the price was on the label, but the label was covering the bar code, so she had to actually ring it in rather than scan it. So she was completely confused.

Two for $1.25 was just too complex a concept to master. It HAD to be $1.25 each. That's what things cost, didn't they? One item, one price?

I knew she was upset because I was challenging her reality. I was nice about it, but I insisted I wouldn't pay double what the item actually cost. I had to lay out two sheets of felt and say, "These cost $1.25." Then lay out two more sheets of felt and say, "These cost $1.25." Finally she got it, more or less. We worked it out, but I still think she thought she was being nice about it to get rid of me.  

All she knew how to do was scan bar codes. That's what a clerk does now. Some of those self-checkout things allow you to use cash, but I've heard they're on the way out.

So I will be forced to card-tap, and no longer deal with a living, breathing, mistake-making millennial person. I wonder why that upsets me so much?

Glory be to Dog!

Almost enough to make me turn dog. But I know I'll stay cat. In this, I am only a tourist.

Horsy fan!

Helicopter hair

"See you in the funny papers": the legend of Tillie the Toiler

It took me a while to figure out just what was going on here. They're paper dolls from old newspapers, obviously, but they look a little different. I know who Tillie the Toiler is (who doesn't?) - a famous newspaper comic-strip office girl who basically gets chased around her desk a lot. This strip was so popular that it ran from the 1920s flapper era all the way into the late '50s. There was even a movie made  from it, starring Marion Davies (more about her later). 

One of the most popular offshoots of Tillie's exploits was the Fashion Parade. Tillie had more glamorous clothes  than any working girl I've ever heard of. But that's because they were designed by her fans! The newspapers that carried Tillie had an ongoing contest in which readers could submit their dress designs to Tillie's creator, Russ Westover, and someone in the art department would try to make them look like something (not to say that SOME of the kids didn't have talent). It was a nice idea, it promoted reader participation, and made everyone  feel as if they were somehow part of Tillie's magical, exciting, well-clothed life.

It interests me that, along with their names, the page always included complete addresses for the guest designers. Genealogists have used newspapers for years to sift out information about ancestors, and to discover a published document that has not only the name but the address of a long-lost relative (not to mention, if you were lucky, a date) would be a tremendous find. Who knows how many people Tillie helped to find a lost link in an ancestral chain. If a fictitious character can be of this much help to people long after she's gone, then what is wrong with all the rest of us?

(Don't be surprised when this gif/slideshow starts to go REALLY fast!)

About Marion Davies. A very talented B-movie actress mainly known for being the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the titan who was the subject of Orson Welles' biting satire Citizen Kane. Davies and Hearst rolled around in diamond-encrusted splendor, but there was a peculiarity in one of the opulent rooms: a statue of the virgin Mary set in a prominent place. Hardly appropriate for a couple so flagrantly living in sin.

This prompted some wag - some say Dorothy Parker, but it's not quite good enough for that - to write:

Upon my honor
I saw a Madonna
Standing in a niche
Over the door
Of the glamorous whore
Of a prominent son of a bitch.

BIG DISCOVERY! It's Sunday afternoon, I just had a recipe not turn out and I am kind of pissed off because I'll have to throw it all out.  But I was happy to uncover a mystery about Tillie. I dug a little deeper into the movie, and discovered it wasn't Marion Davies who played her at all. It was someone named Kay Harris. Wait a minute! There couldn't be two Tillies. One was obscure enough. 

I had to figure this out. It couldn't be a very early TV show, could it? The kind I love, love, love, the kind from 1948 which seems to be the first year a cathode ray quivered in the air in the living rooms of America?  But no. She wasn't on TV at all, but in a movie from 1941, a B-movie obviously, the kind Turner Classics loves to show in the middle of the night (usually in an endless series no one knows or cares about). A bit more checking revealed that the first version with Marion Davies was a silent made in 1927. Though YouTube usually has fragments of almost everything, it didn't have Tillie the Toiler, not in either incarnation.

In fact, it looks like she hardly existed at all. Now all we have are these beautiful paper dolls from the funny papers, and a strange fragment of genealogy with mysteries unlocked, but only partially solved. 

POSTSCRIPT. Do I detect the odor of frying Spam? Not any more! For a while at least, I will have to restrict my comments.

Elizabeth Holmes: She Who Does Not Blink

The wizard of corporate fraud reveals how truly sociopathic and manipulative a doe-eyed blonde can be. I've been spending a lot of time doing gifs and YouTube videos of Holmes, slowing the speed so that the underlying expressions can spill out. Open those windows of the soul, baby.

If you haven't heard of her, Holmes is a self-styled Steve Jobs lookalike (or sound-alike: her voice is somewhere in the basso register) who claimed she had invented a device that would - no kidding, she really said this - "change the world". It was a tiny gizmo called a "nanotainer" which would revolutionize medicine, health care and the human condition for all eternity. Her genius empire was called Thanatos - oops, I keep on doing that! I mean THERANOS. Some sort of portmanteau of "therapy" and "I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge". 

There is no Theranos, there WAS no Theranos, just two vapid blue eyes, a vast expanse of  very white teeth, and an ego the size of Jupiter. Holmes literally sold  a product which didn't exist, which never existed, over a period of ten years, earning roughly NINE BILLION dollars. How she pulled this off, this gargantuan fraud, convincing people she could run hundreds of different blood tests using just one drop of blood - it's the stuff of movies, and one is being made right now. I highly recommend John Carreyrou's brilliant dissection of the whole mess, Bad Blood - a book so absorbing I don't want it to end. 

Like they say, you can't make this stuff up.

I want this!

j

I wish this would just make itself.

How mild, how mild, how mild can a cigarette be?

Unusually short for a 1950s ad. This came out back when TV was "radio with pictures", and every ad had a chorus singing the jingle. This one is so gorgeous, I can see how people were seduced into smoking. Camels, smoke Camels. . . 

"Mild" was, of course, code for "doesn't cause cancer". Lots of people think there was no public awareness of the link between smoking and fatality back then, but there was. Lots of it. A stern warning had been published in Reader's Digest, not exactly an alarmist publication, and very widely read and trusted. It's just that the cigarette companies systematically drowned out people's fears with outrageously false claims. One could prove that a cigarette was harmless merely by taking the "30-day test". If a woman's throat seemed OK after smoking Camels for 30 days (!), then surely they would do no harm over 30 years.

Logical? Never mind, it raked in the billions. The other thing people believe is that no one smokes any more, that the tobacco companies are limping along and about to  fold. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Smoking is bigger than ever in the third world, where Big Tobacco exploits people's misery by offering them the only "pleasure" they can afford, cheap cigarettes no doubt made from crappy ingredients. 

Filters, recessed filters, charcoal, low-tar-and-nicotene cigarettes, even the screaming fallacy of "It's Toasted" - none of these ploys made a goddamn bit of difference to people's health. It had all been a very carefully calculated sham. Mildness, flavor, taste, "I smoke them because I like them", and my all-time favorite: "If you want a treat instead of a treatment" - none of these seductive little promises meant one less coffin sold.