Here's a small sampling of artist Mitch O'Connell's fabulous Valentine's card collection gallery. (These are real cards, not something Mitch made up.)
Just in time to send to your Valentine sweetheart, a huge selection of the offbeat, odd, perplexing, inappropriate, outlandish, bizarre, sexist, eccentric and far-out funny cards, all collected in one place ...for YOU (with love)!
Subject matter includes anger issues, from punching, stabbing, shooting your loved one to running them over with your car. "A woman's place is in the home" themes with pots 'n pans, brooms and dust pans expressing how your heart beats for them. "Find the hidden penis" is a M.O'C Blog Valentine favorite with suggestively placed rulers, logs, bananas, balloons, rocket ships, and hot dogs showing how you really, REALLY feel!
Crate-digging for old records on eBay, my brother found this bizarre health gadget identified as having been produced in Bombay in the 1950s. The seller writes:
Very rare and old Twin Transilluminator in Box from India 1950 in good condition. Its medical Instrument for sinuses and Eye therapy. Its made of steel and backlit. its electrical. on box has some description and photos about how to use this Instrument. Its rare and unique medical Instrument and must for medical instruments collectors. The size of box is 9 inch in length, and its width is 5 inch.
What the heck is the history behind this gizmo? More photos below.
The New York Times' City Room blog explores “Lady Life Guards,” an "oddly racy newsreel" made around 1940 about female lifeguards on a beach in Brooklyn. The video made the rounds on blogs this week after being featured on blog Sheepshead Bites. The Times' Andy Newman describes it as "a gently leering 10-minute tour de force of visual double-entendre and soul-stirring call-of-duty gee-whiz."
In 1938, researchers at Bryn Mawr College published a paper on Egocentricity in Adult Conversations. In order to accurately record the pattern and content of conversations as they happened in real life, the researchers used several methods that would be considered ... sketchy ... today. Among them: Hiding underneath female college students' dorm beds. — Maggie
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Vintage paperback. "A Harlequin Book", Toronto, 1951. So Harlequin was publishing more than romances in 1951. The original paperback book is quite faded looking. The scanner pepped it up quite well, even though I hadn't asked it to. I'll have to look into that. :)
A quick Googling revealed that this was for the motion picture Aelita, Queen of Mars, which Wikipedia describes as "a silent film directed by Soviet filmmaker Yakov Protazanov made at the Mezhrabpom-Rus film studio and released in 1924 (...) based on Alexei Tolstoy's novel of the same name."
Some describe it as the USSR's first sci-fi flick. Archive.org has the entire 80-minute film available for online viewing here, though the quality isn't great. It's also on YouTube, and here's part one.
Illustration from a 1960 Cinzano ad, shared on Flickr by photographer and vintage ad aficionado Paul Malon of Toronto. His collection is extensive and excellent.
Some astute commenters in the Ukelele String Harvest video thread pointed out that this recent video is basically a re-creation/riff on this earlier, classic weird video, from a 1957 BBC show called "Panorama." From the Alexandra Palace Television Society, here's the whole story:
PhilAreGo happened upon this brochure for the Santa Fe Railway, and offered the following interpretation os the scenario depicted on the cover.
Wow! Get a load of them eyebrows! The two guys look like they're hoping to get her alone for some wicked doings, but she looks downright carnivorous herself. The standing man looks like he's dropping something into the drink of the seated man. All the while, the lady is staring at the chest of the pill-dropping man, where she knows that mere inches away, beats his juicy, delicious heart. I find it hard to have any sympathy for whatever happens to these three in the next few hours.
Phil then shows what the illustration would look like by retouching the eyebrows, making them lighter and then even heavier.
A couple of weekends ago I took my 15-year-old daughter to the fabulous Farmers Market in Los Angeles. It isn't a typical farmers market. It was established in 1934 at the corner of Third and Fairfax, and over the years it has grown into a charming, bustling cluster of shops and restaurants. It has a great toy store, a bunch of really good restaurants, produce stands, butchers, home made ice cream shops, nut vendors, florists, barbers, shoe shine stands, and other specialty shops. It's got a distinctly old school feel, and thankfully has not been modernized. The whole place is covered so you can walk around in the rain or the blistering sun. It's one of my favorite places in Los Angeles.
Sarina and I had a great time visiting the Shine Gallery there, a place that sells vintage memorabilia. Somehow they are able to get their hands on large quantities unused novelties, magic tricks, and other ephemera. My overall impression from visting the shop was that people in those days had a nasty sense of humor. Here are a few of the things we came across there:
These plastic cigarette cases have passive aggressive messages printed on them, such as "Take one you cheap skate," and "Leave one for me! Chiseler."
In vintage ad archivist 
Illustration from a 1960 Cinzano ad, 
PhilAreGo happened upon this brochure for the Santa Fe Railway, and offered the following interpretation os the scenario depicted on the cover.
