Buying the New Yorker 1986 - Back Cover

And it's a damn good thing they forgot the coffee. If everyone in the passenger section had a piping hot Styrofoam cup of joe when the plane pulled a maneuver like that, it would be ugly.

On to the historical:

The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, founded in 1927 , is an independent Non-for-profit organization for the collective of over 560.000 coffee growers of Colombia. Within Colombia, the Federation provides a network of agricultural expertise and quality control to insure the highest standards for Colombian Coffee. Around the world, Federation offices work with appropriate trade and media channels within each country to promote the consumption of Colombian Coffee.

I pulled that quote from juanvaldez.com

Here is the page on juanvaldez.com that you can go to to see television ads that are contemporaneous to this print ad.

And on to 1976!

And so "so it goes" goes.

I wake to news of the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

I have been half dreading this event for some time as I have long anticipated my annoyance at the inevitable overuse of the phrase "So it goes" in his obituaries.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - Interior Back Cover

For all the Marianne Moore car naming story fans out there: "Toronado" is a made up word.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 88

I was all prepared to presume that this little newsletter was long gone, but I kept finding old articles like this one in the New York Times that mentions Passport:

In existence for 18 years, Passport is for the sophisticated, experienced traveler who cares more about comfort and cultural attractions than expense. Each month subscribers get the eight-page Passport newsletter plus an ''extra'' - sometimes a two- to-four-page special report called Visa; sometimes a booklet such as the recent one on 132 unusual museums in Europe.

Passport's publisher, Moris T. Hoversten, believes in brevity and frankness, whether laudatory or critical. For example, a Visa report in March on a new Caribbean resort said: ''We recently spent four days there. Glad to leave in spite of the fact that it's one of the most beautiful settings in the Caribbean. Several other people also glad to leave. Felt they were being gouged and treated like second-class citizens.''

Moris T. Hoversten began to sound like an interesting fellow, so I kept digging to see what I could find. And look! I ended up finding the magazine!

I tried to dig around and find a good cranky snotty review to quote, but it costs $89 to log in. Toss in another ten bucks and you get the actual magazine sent to your house and everything!

"Striped and Baggy." That pretty much sums up my entire wardrobe in 1986. One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to get this post up is that, God is my witness, I swear that I saw this exact ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker. The fact that I have not been able to find it proves to me that I have now been doing this long enough to have gone insane.

And I think HWW LTD has gone out of business. Pretty hard for them to be putting ads out if they are out of business.... Unless that's what they want me to think!

Questers had a website for a while, now you can buy their domain for as low as $14.99. Rainbow Falls is probably still there: the thing is I don't know which one Questers was going to take you to. There's one in Tennessee, one in Hawaii, one in Ontario, one in Washington State, and I could probably find ten more if I wanted to spend another half hour or so looking for them. Perhaps they had found 32 places named Rainbow Falls and only did tours to them. That would be confusing, but sort of fun.

And love that font in the header by the way.

Occasionally, in moments of frustration, my parents would explore the possibility of taking advantage of some form of boarding school. I suspect that The Tasis Schools were not on their radar, as they were in the market for something more inexpensive and needlessly punitive. I am particularly struck by the fact that here we see them advertising the day school option for the younger enrollees. In order to take advantage of this, one would have to live nearby (or hire someone to live nearby) so that young Schmedley can go off to day school. Many of the schools seem to have gone by the wayside, leaving only schools in England, Switzerland and Puerto Rico. I tried to come up with some droll statement about the third location, but nothing that I can come up with can hit the right target.

I have to say that I find these last two ads completely adorable. The one for Ponte Vedra Beach looks like it came straight out of the fifties. Ponte Vedra is interesting historically in that during World War Two, it is the site that a German submarine successfully landed and unloaded a team of spy saboteurs. These spies split up across America to wreak havoc, but didn't get terribly far as their leader, thinking better of this whole wheeze, went off to the FBI and ratted the whole bunch out.

They also have golf and tennis.

"Books-on-File." "Since 1958." Write them a letter with a title of a book that you're looking for and they'll write you back with information about how hard it might be for them to find it. I have a bad feeling about this.

Listening to the World - Akrotiri and Dhekelia

Wikipedia says:

Akrotiri and Dhekelia are two areas on the island of Cyprus that comprise the Sovereign Base Areas Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. The bases were retained by the UK following the transition of Cyprus' status from a colony in the British Empire to an independent Commonwealth republic within the Commonwealth of Nations. The United Kingdom retained the bases arising from the strategic location of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

The upshot is: no independent radio from this entity, it's all British Military rebroadcast hubs and signals from Cyprus.

Rats.

Great moments in web-based book marketing

If you haven't seen this site, for Miranda July's new book (US UK), I urge you to have a look right now.

Listening to the World - Afghanistan

The next stop on my tour is Afghanistan. Afghanistan's radio industry seems to be bounding back from what I will refer to as "infrastructure problems."

Much of the radio that I've found from there seems to be sponsored by either the BBC or Voice of America. I think that's cheating, so I kept poking about.

I was then able to find a number of stations that were religious or news-related. Finally I was able to come across a couple of music stations.

The first, Radio A.F.G., seemed to be precisely what I was looking for: a live stream that seemed to be working and music. There were a few breaks and the occasional bit of what sounded like comedy skits, but predominantly music. The music, to my ears, seems to mirror what I've experienced with the rest of Afghan culture (which is barely enough to have a decent opinion, so bear with me) -- by virtue of its location it seems to me to be a mixture of Indian, Muslim, and Russian influences, manifesting in that order. Different enough from Indian music to make me notice differences, (the instrumentation, for example), but a couple of hours in I was up for a curry run. I spent about three days total on this station and only heard one track that I could consider a cultural interloper: Zamfir's "The Lonely Shepherd" of all things.

On closer examination, Radio A.F.G. doesn't meet my criteria, however. It looks like it is web based, and the dj's aren't actually physically in Afghanistan. (There are two from Canada, one from the US, one from Denmark, and another from "Hollandistan" - there is a slot open, if you speak Pashto, this might be your big break!).

So continuing to search, I was able to find Arman FM, which broadcasts a signal to Jalalabad, Kabul, Mazar, Herat and Kandahar. Unfortunately, there is no live feed. There are a few mp3s, but the number of dead pages and my inability to find anything that is dated more recently than 2005 makes me a trifle concerned. So I have just signed onto their mailing list.