LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Exciting news! Not really. But doesn’t the phrase “Exciting News!” instantly steel you for something that’s either A) neither, or B) exciting for someone whose set of interests is different than you own? It’s something you get in an email forwarded six times by relatives, about some cause or event you couldn’t care less about. Theory: “Exciting news!” is used most to discuss something about the school fundraiser, and never to announce fundamental change in the Iranian government.

Anyway, exciting news. The next cheap book is coming next week. It will not require a Kindle. It will not exist, really. You can put it on your iPad and your Fire if you wish, but really, it’s just a big website. A 150-page website. If response is good I might try to hit up a publisher with the Exciting opportunity, but it’s such a strange and minor thing. So that’s coming on Monday, for the low-low price of $1.99 - a nice way to support the site, if you so choose to do. NOTE: all contributions through the Paypal site will automatically receive a free copy.

And . . . there’s a large website that might give it a little boost. So this might help pay for the dog’s operation. Not that I can’t pay for the dog’s operation. Even if I couldn’t I would cut back on something. Not that he necessarily needs an operation. We’ll see how that tooth does. I can say he’s certainly happier than before - you note these things in subtle ways. His gait speaks of a reduced amount of onerousness. His head is held higher. His tail isn’t up, but it’s been years since he raised that mast. After a certain age they stop asking for trouble.

Worked at home today, waiting for the plumber, who did not come. Tomorrow. Did the work blog; spent some time trying to track down a former governor. Not Jesse Lord, no. I imagine he would regard me as part of the Lying Media, even though I knew him slightly before the guber thing, and before he went (lip noise made with index finger: beebedee beebedee beebedee). We both worked at KSTP AM, although at different times - I guest-hosted for a show that came on after his, so we ran into each other at the shift change. Or rather I got out of the way so we did not run into each other, because I would have been crushed against the door frame. Had him on my show while he was running for governor; he was reasonably reasonable in that bluff YEAH WELL THE THING IS fashion he had.

No, I was trying to find another governor. I had four phone numbers. Nothing worked. I’m guessing he just uses burners and throws them away after a week. Maybe he’s on the lam. Who’d know?

When I finally left the house it was a trip to the grocery store to get lettuce for Taco Tuesday. If you scoop up greens from the salad bar you pay about .49 cents, and don’t feel wasteful throwing away a big carved-up head of lettuce. Iceberg lettuce seems like such a needless thing - first of all, you could airlift thousands to a drought zone and people could be rehydrated. All that mass and all that water for nothing. Iceberg lettuce makes you realize that celery does have a flavor, and also that the term “iceberg” - something cold and devoid of taste - was not chosen casually.

I felt bad just buying .49 worth of lettuce, because I can’t imagine the margins are good. There’s the plastic container, and the rubber band. See, they switched containers; the old one had corners you crimped to keep it from opening, and it worked great, but for no reason known to man they switched to something that can only be secured by a series of hand-manipulations so complex they make the handshake between 33rd Degree Masons look like two Eskimos rubbing noses. Since the container opens up the moment it’s jostled, they put a rubber band around it at the cash register. Or did, because now there’s a box of rubber bands by the container, as if to say: WE KNOW. WE KNOW.

This is good, though, because I never buy rubber bands, depending on the kindness of strangers. The mailman. The newspaper, sometimes. The grocery store. Once I bought a big bag, not realizing they were perishable. Really: when I used them years later they snapped like sparrow bones.

So I have a spot in the kitchen drawer for rubber bands. Sometimes there are some; sometimes there aren’t any. I don’t know the reasons for the former or the latter. No one thinks about rubber bands much, until there aren’t any. Then you either buy some, if you’re an office manager, or just wait for them to replentish, somehow.

Which they always do.

I suppose I could have taken two rubber bands to cinch the taco greens, but that wouldn’t be right. And it’s little moral decisions like this that give you the illusion of generally ethical behavior, isn’t it? As if taking pride in the small easy things means more than the big ones that come along every year or so, and you take a mulligan, or whiff it, or otherwise take the frictionless path to untroubled sleep.

Anyway.

Before I get to Products, some products, seen at the aforementioned grocery store. This is actually good coffee, but I wonder if the marketing department looked at the package and said “not sure folks will know it’s dark roast.”

And a million granola marketers cried out in pain at once:

Your industry spends decades trying to separate itself from the Smelly Stoner Hippie image, and they go and blow it all. Why would I take the advice of these people on anything? "Hey there, we let our kids run around the commune naked so they don’t get any of that stuff the Man teaches them about sex being dirty, and let ‘em know the natural feeling of chicken poop between their toes. My old lady is cool with me having what the squares would call “an affair” with some of the other chicks - she’s real spiritual like that. Me, I smell like a goat. Here, have some food we made. We named it after a bowel movement."

So the granola industry figures well, it’s just one package, we can probably survive that. (Satisfied chuckle.) What else do these guys make?

A font note: just in case you’re one of those people who thinks fonts are just, well, letters, note: the traditional couple has late 19th century / early 20th fonts - on the top, something you’d find on a letterhead for an industrial concern; below, a good ol’ American-pasttime font that indicates beer or baseball. The Sixties couple have an Art Nouveau font, for no other reason than people saw it on posters in college. That’s it. Has nothing to do with the era whatsoever, but it’s become linked to the Sixties.

The weekly salute to bygone logos and packages, wherein we learn something about commercial culture and consumer goods of other eras. This will never come in handy. This will never win you a bar bet. But that doesn't matter, does it? It's the pleasure of learning about 1940s chili sauce bottles with pictures of old ladies on them. Yes, that pleasure. Let's begin.

HOOVER!

From 1939, the Future of Streamlined Cleaning:

No more would wind resistance make your vacuuming less efficient! Hoover’s headlights were a brilliant innovation, and made the device look like something Buck Rogers would use. The design, I believe, was by Henry Dreyfuss, an industrial designer who’s probably up there with Raymond Lowry.

I grew up watching Mom push around a Hoover Convertible. Of course, they have a fan page.

BORDON:

The usual Bordon ad, this time for a type of cheese they had to rename:

It'll bring a man around? Well, it was based on Limburger cheese, so yeah, that'll get his attention. Wikipedia says it’s made “subtly different by the use of a different bacterial culture for smear-ripening.” I like cheese. I’m not going to investigate smear-ripening.

A series of corporate sales, a fire and some bacterial contamination led to the decline of Liederkranz, and it went it off the market for a quarter century. It returned this year, made by DCI Cheese.

These are the people of my land:

PENCILS:

We learn something every week: why, for example, pencils are yellow.

This tradition began in 1890 when the L. & C. Har dtmuth Company of Austria-Hungary introduced their Koh-I-Noor brand, named after the famous diamond. It was intended to be the world's best and most expensive pencil, and at a time when most pencils were either painted in dark colours or not at all, the Koh-I-Noor was yellow. As well as simply being distinctive, the colour may have been inspired by the Austro-Hungarian flag; it was also suggestive of the Orient at a time when the best-quality graphite came from Siberia. Other companies then copied the yellow colour so that their pencils would be associated with this high-quality brand, and chose brand names with explicit Oriental references, such as Mikado and Mongol.

So the name of a Central-North Asian ethnic group became associated with pencils. Of course.

The pencils were made at a factory in New York on the site of the United Nations building. Eberhard Faber was eventually bought by Faber-Castell, which took pride in the product:

Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell had his pencil durability test published in The Economist magazine for the 3 March 2007 issue. In this test he threw 144 pencils from the 30-meter tower of his castle and not one broke.

The count had some time on his hands. The ad also had:

Those round things fascinated me as a kid - the eraser went around and around! It had a broom! I remember the erasers being unusually hard, but perhaps it had just spent too much time in the drawer.

A sign of changing times: no one advertises rubber bands in national magazines anymore.

COLOGNE:

A 50s favorite for kids looking to get Dad a Father’s Day gift:

Stag was made by . . .

Once one of the biggest chains in the country, it’s all gone. The products are still available, but the chain is gone. Except when it’s not: I snapped this in the Black Hills in 2009. The color scheme was one of the last remnants of the popular hues of the late 30s: this was the palette of the promotional materials for the 1939 World's Fair, for example.