Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 72

Another one that I've seen before. Last time I saw The Cloister, I sort of hauled off on them:

It looks like a swamp with a golf course going through it. I can't imagine who this ad would appeal to beyond the retired banker who is looking for someplace to take the girl from the secretarial pool who is starting on the track to be promoted to trophy wife.

Mind that was my reaction to the old ad. I liked the look of the website much better.

Here for the 1976 version, I like this ad a bit more than the 1996 one (but it still looks less than thrilling). On the other hand, I took a quick peek at the website and wasn't as enthralled as before. Now it looks more like you can book a room in the Brooks Brothers Spring/Summer catalog.



I just love the hell out of this ad. I like that it looks like the guy is living in his garage full of junk. And look at that sleeping dog! What a great sleeping dog.

If you were to have ordered one of these catalogs back in '76, I've got happy news for you: They're going for about twenty bucks on eBay

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 71

It's been a while since I dipped my toe into this project. I was thinking of spinning it off into another blog, but now I think that if I can go for half a year without touching it, I can just as well keep it in the fold for the time being.

We've seen Maupintour a couple of times before. I'd like to say something new about them, but I can't think of anything.


They don't seem to have a tour to Greece set up for the coming future. There was one in 2007 that ran about $3,000.



I was happy to see that these guys are still going strong. Here's their site. Check out all the interesting gigantic houses that they build!

Wait, scratch that. They're in receivership.

Great Moments in Episode Summaries

I never noticed

I've always ignored the different spellings of "vampire" regarding Varney, thinking that it was some sort of spelling convention that didn't matter that much or that the text was "vampyre" and people were updating it to "vampire" for convenience sake.

But the first text page in the book (in my previous post) shows the title of the book as "Vampyre" while the cover spells it "Vampire":


Of course nowadays we force all our fictional vampires to go to High School, so we expect them to be able to spell. In Victorian times, all the young fictional vampyres had to go work in a coal mine or perhaps a bobbin factory.

The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

Every so often, I make an attempt to read the whole of Varney The Vampire. I generally stall out round about the end of the first volume, and I think that I might end up doing the same thing again soon (both attempt and fail).

One thing I can say from my half experience with it is that I'm always delighted with the first chapter. It's completely lurid and overblown, but good heavens, it's fun.

I am baffled by my autofill

When I start to write a title in Blogger, my browser helpfully starts suggesting that I might want to use a post title that I have used before, either for an actual post, or one that I composed at some point and then jettisoned, having thought better of it.

Apparently at some point I was considering a post with this as a title:

Allow me ingress to your establishment, fair bouncer, wherein I might shake my humps.

I frequently forget how absurd I am. I imagine that is to my benefit.

The internet has proved me wrong again

Remember a few weeks back, when I said that my cell phone won't work with Twitter?

Wrong.

And the first person to follow me is some guy who is pretending to be the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland!

copyright oddness

A recent trip to the library led to the discovery of The Fox at the Manger by P. L. Travers (best known as the author of Mary Poppins).

Here is the copyright info:



The book rolled off the press with a copyright date of 1962, and that date was corrected with a rubber stamp to 1949.

The first thought was that this could be the first American edition of a book that was originally published in 1949, and apparently the typesetters were confused, printed a number of books with the current year, and then had to fabricate a rubber stamp to make the correction before the books were released.

But no - a survey of information available on the internet (down to the index to her papers at the State Library of New South Wales) confirms that the book was written and published in 1962.

So why was someone going to the trouble of putting that stamp in?

My contribution to the bus meme

Breaking news from the world of snack food

"Pringles, the popular snack food in a tube, are not potato crisps, a High Court judge has ruled."

Turns out that Pringles are only 42% potato!  So what are they?

"Pringles are more like a cake or a biscuit, it claimed, because they are manufactured from dough."

The Pringles folks are happy with this because now there is no VAT.  They're cheaper to sell, and cheaper to buy.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if celebrating the redefinition of the snack as a weird potato flavored franken-cookie is really going to help sales at all.

Added bonus:  "It also argued that potato crisps - unlike Pringles - . . . were not packaged in tubes."  Well, not anymore at least.

This Moment in Pod was alright and the song went on forever

I'm really enjoying the Ziggy Stardust Remixed album.

Go get it for yourself.

++++++++++++

And now the song that is stuck in my head is this one:



++++++++++

Lux Interior died! Crud.

I have now chosen my profile picture!

Twitter

For the past couple of days, I've been thinking of writing a post about how Twitter seems to have gone completely nuts.

This was before we got a twitter feed from Stephen Fry caught in an elevator:



I think the might even top Danny Wallace from last week:

"I am driving a 1974 VW camper van through Bloomsbury with my schoolfriend Will who is dressed like a Smurf. "



I've been kicking around the idea of Twittering for some time now (I have been subscribing to a number of Twitter rss feeds. I think that this is might be even more useless than some people think Twittering is. (What would be the verb for lurking on Twitter? Twurking?)), and I always come down to the same thoughts.

1. I don't feel like I blog enough. This is just going to be another thing keeping me from that.
2. Heck. I can just make little short posts, if that is what I think the internet demands of me.
3. My cellphone is crap and I can't Twitter from it. So the only time that I can Twitter currently is when I am on a computer. This means that most of what I will be saying is "I am on the computer" and "I am at work"
   
4. And so forth.

Of course, knowing how I operate, I realize that declaring that I will not be doing it for a while means that I will most likely cave and start it up next weekend.

Beirut - Elephant Gun

I had this song stuck in my head all this past weekend.

Get it while it's hot

Ubuweb is currently hosting six out-of-print Momus albums.

I've had a couple of Momus discs kicking around for a while, and I've pulled them out occasionally, but it's always felt like I needed to spend more effort to pay attention to it then I've had inclination to give.

I've started playing these in the background at work, which is possibly not the best way to go about it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of some brains to eat

Coming soon to a bookstore near you:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

There's a discount if you pre-order from the publisher.