Jane’s Crazy Mixed-Up Future

Sorry! The line-art iphone app is toonPaint. It’s a buck-99. Enjoy. (Ploughing through the comments, gleaning the queries and assertions, and enjoying them, as always. Every day you guys validate, to use the annoying word, my decision to leap to wordpress and add comments. Hope you like it, too – with most sites I view comments with a small amount of horror, but not here.)

The day was spent waiting for snow. The sun sat high in the sky, uninterested in anything, barely able to pierce the scrim of high thin clouds; the wind was one of those aimless mistrals that bustled around looking for something to harass. It felt like March, but you have to ask yourself how many Aprils that feel like March you must endure before you start saying “Man, this March feels like April.” It’s the same every year. We put our hope in April as the one month that’s free and clear of technical winter. The world “April” either comes from the Latin word for “opening,” or from the Greek word for Aphrodite, since the Romans dedicated the month to her Latin incarnation, Venus. The Romans borrowed so many gods. Wonder how many they gave back. Here, take Pluvula, we’re not using him. God of well-buckets.

Some interesting things today, gleaned from a recent scanning session. Old product design. Better, or worse? I’d argue that simpler is better, unless it’s generic and dull. (Market Pantry, I’m looking at you, he said through gritted teeth, because I hate that phrase, and used it only as an excuse to note how annoying it is. Somehow a teacher’s reprimand gets used all over the internet as a means of emphasizing a particular deficiency or highlighting a certain product or company. It’s a cliche. So is “baby bump,” which is just a hideous cliche. And if anyone wants to reply, and starts their argument with the wimpy internet fave “Ummmmm . . . .” before making a correction or assertion, try “Errrrr….” this time, because I have it from good authority that Errrr is the new Ummm. No, “uhhhh” won’t be used past June 2011; sounds too stupid.) (Also please stop painting things like Pokeballs and putting them online. You’re a fargin’ adult, or at least close to it. Give up the Pokemon. Childhood belongs in a storage locker you can visit when you please, not a backpack you carry around every day. Thank you.)

Sorry. A fit of pique there. Here’s some 1957 product design taken from a magazine. Oh really? you say. I thought you went back in time and took pictures and ran them through some filters that simulated the resolution of the medium of the era. Jeez. You’re having one of those days, too. Anyway, marshmallows:

What’s the deal with the guy on the tiny tractor?

Bacon. In case you wondering if it had sweet smoke flavor:

Chicken things in a foil box:

And meat in steak format:

You’l note they had some similar branding across the different products – two out of three have the red . . . thing-shape, and all have the Swift’s Premium logo. Good thing they added “premium,” lest people think they’re getting the ordinary stuff they sell to ordinary people in ordinary stores.

If I went back in time, this is what would fascinate the most – not the cars or the fashions or the buildings. We like to think it was all cool swoopy neon drive-in-type places, but really, those were few and far between; cities were mostly legacy architecture, if you will, with modernity mostly represented by signage and store-front makeovers. Significant, yes, but above the sheet metal and the buzzing neon, an old brick building from the 20s, or a sad stoic relic from the 30s, its vogue now gone and outmoded. The products and the magazines, thousands of perishable items designed for the all-important NOW. It would be almost overwhelming, like stepping into a parallel universe – our trips to the supermarket teach us over time what everything should look like; we get used to the combination of styles, the holdovers, the current fads, the labels designed to look like Tomorrow. To find a store where everything’s different all at once, except for Campbell’s soup and Heinz Catsup, would be interesting. You’d find a few items that still survive to this day, usually on the bottom shelf of the supermarket, purchased by God-knows-who, doomed to be discontinued when the target market passes from this earth.

But if you did go back in time, the temptation to converse with shoppers would be . . . tremendous. Imagine standing in a Safeway in 1967, noting a young mom buying “Jane’s Crazy Mixed-Up Salt.”

Excuse me, late-20s married mom who doesn’t really endorse the whole counter-culture thing, but finds the product’s name to be funny (really, salt with psychological problems? It’s like something from a Woody Allen movie!) and likes to think she’s open to new experiences, do you know it’ll take you four years to get through this container? But you’ll use it on cottage cheese salads. Your friends will always ask you why your salads are different, and you’ll want to tell them, but there’s no sin in having a secret or two, is there? Tell them ‘oh, it’s just some spices,’ and they’ll get it. That’s your dish. That’s the one you always bring. It’s not as if you couldn’t bring something else, but that’s what they always ask you to bring: that cottage cheese salad of yours. Exact quote. Well, here’s how that plays out for the rest of your life. You’ll run out of Jane’s Crazy Mixed-Up Salt in 1971, 1975, 1979, and then it’ll last for six years, because the kids are out of the house by then. You put it on their eggs, remember? They liked that. When they came home from college you always made sure you had some. You didn’t buy another one until 1985. After that, you bought a shaker every, oh, seven years or so. Sometimes you’ll just throw it out because you thought it was stale, and there are so many other spices to choose from – believe me, it’s more than Jane’s and Lawry’s in the future. But if you want to buy a shaker in 2011, it’ll be there. Bottom shelf. Same label. You’ll recognize it right away. What? No, we won’t be wearing one-piece bodysuits and padding around in soft slippers and riding hovercars. You’d be surprised how much it looks like today. All the major differences are off-stage, so to speak. Money, for example – no really uses it as much, it’s mostly plastic rectangles. Everyone has a computer, that’s no big deal. Our phones are computers. No, we don’t have a base on the moon, but we have an unmanned craft around Mercury right now, and some robots on Mars. Anyway, just so you know: go ahead and get attached to that spice blend. It’s not going anywhere. How do I know these things? I’m from the future. Yes, grown-ups wear sneakers in the future. I know these look like the ones your kids have. It’s . . . complicated.

I’ve been watching “Space: 1999,” which I recall being enchanting for about two weeks when I was a kid. Oh, we watched it, because there was a sci-fi drought. It had cool elements, and seemed quite serious in the first series, but I couldn’t get my brain around the concept. The idea of a moon flying through space at speeds sufficient to bring about a new plot element every week was nonsense, and I was alarmed by the constant destruction of Eagle spacecraft. It’s not like they had spares. It seemed as if they blew up an Eagle every week. By the second week they were already doing things like going into black holes, aging dramatically, and meeting the conscious essence of the universe. I prefer my Black Hole Centers to be Hellish and full of madmen trapped inside evil robot bodies, thank you.

That’s the biggest WHAT THE HELL scene in any Disney movie, by the way.

LATER

No snow. It was supposed to have begun by now; nothing. There may be hope. Checking the wires . . . looks like it’s been downgraded to slush and a coating. So there is a God. That’s settled. Millennia of disputation, solved!

New today: a heapin’ helping of colorrific 1930s food ads; I think the new stuff starts here, but if I’m mistaken, you only have to endure three pages until you get to the fresh additions. Bleatplus for members. See you around, and thanks for the patronage.