Come one, come all! Feast your eyes on the Only Bumflap That Matters! As the ad — ganked from a 1980 issue of Smash Hits — states, this was merely one of an entire line of hindquarters drapery available for sale. If you were curious about which other artists were available for posterior display, here’s […]

Say, kids, what time is it? It’s crappy merchandising time (which, to be honest, is all the time in the fetid realm of geekdom)! At first glance, the above ad from a 1993 issue of Wizard appears to be just another pitch for some overpriced licensed garbage. Puzzling, but hardly remarkable for an era where […]

Guys, it was 1993. That was well enough into the decade for even sleepyheads like myself to rouse themselves from fitful slumber and catch a whiff of the zeitgeist (redolent of trying to extinguish a tire fire with a tanker full of rancid milk, but that may have just been a Woburn thing). It’s downright […]

This strategic alliance between J.C. Penny and Clairol was the Reagan Era’s answer to the Super Soldier Project — only instead of punching Hitler, the object was to sell as many home perm kits and wide-shouldered blazers as possible. “Gentlemen, our agents have revealed that the Russians have taken a decisive lead in asymmetrical earring […]

It wasn’t the sweat-reeking mix of overconfidence and pleading desperation that baffled me. Nor was it the hand-written scrawl passing as a professional pitch or teaser lyrics that evoke more pathos than pop potential. Those all tend to be a common element in these paid-placement bids to bypass the the big label gatekeepers, though turning […]

It also responds really well to whitewashing and a quick run through a spin cycle, and can be easily tailored for various regional climates and prevailing fashions. Though it does tend to get quite messy with use, you can always leave it for someone else to clean-up after you’re done with it. (DISCLAIMER: Ketchup stains […]

My journey through Panorama has reached its abrupt conclusion with the June 1981 issue, but not before TV Guide‘s doomed-from-the-start bid for an upscale audience served up a chilling glimpse into the World That’s Coming… National Video was one of the first major tape rental chains to emerge from the home video gold rush, and […]

The most significant item in the April 22, 1965 issue of LIFE was not the feature article on the politcal unrest in South Vietnam or the editorial on normalizing relations with Red China or Loudon Wainright’s musings on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on obscenity. It was this two-page spread by General Electric… …heralding a […]

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been working my way through the first season of Other Space and the (presumably) final season of Community. Both have been pretty great so far, yet the experience has been marred by the buggy catastrophe of Yahoo Screen’s interface. I know the Little Search Engine That History Passed By […]

When I was seven or eight years old, my dad brought home a shiny new vacuum cleaner. This replacement for our increasingly temperamental mid-1960s cannister jobber wasn’t just any vacuum; it was a metallic brown harbinger of the World to Come. Shaped like a flying saucer, the new vacuum lacked any form of wheels whatsoever. […]