Not all battles are fought with a sword
Photo of a ceramic frog on my parents deck in a gentle summer rain.
I’ve just returned home after nearly a solid month on the road for business and family vacation. So, so behind on so many things (including photos and Flickr!).
Our last trip was a fine week with my parents in Arkansas, where we had much cooler weather than one might expect for this time of year. We even had one really nice, gentle rain, which was an excellent excuse to stay inside and read. Or sit out in the rain if you’re a ceramic frog :-).
Since I’m swamped at GECCO (tutorial yesterday with Riccardo, our paper presentation tomorrow, etc., etc.), I’ll take a few moments to share some seriously weird (no, I mean seriously weird) old ads. The obviously unstable folks at Retro Comedy have collected what they bill as The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time. While I’m in no position to attest to these being the creepiest ever, I can assure that these puppies are guaranteed contenders. Some where just bad, bad ideas (the pig slicing himself up as sausage, the bizarre soap ad above) and some represent an unhinged mind at work (the anti-christ girl eyeing the jam spreading in entirely unhealthy ways).
Many, unfortunately, represent the nastier end of that long, old river of misogyny that runs through our world. A real winner on that front is an deeply awful Lysol ad that opens with
A man marries a woman because he loves her. So instead of blaming him if married love begins to cool, [a wife] should question herself.
Wow. Apparently all men are simultaneously saints who marry only for love, but are at the same time hyper-hygiene freaks who will let their marriage fall apart because their wife smells like a human. Yowza, yowza, yowza.
Go.
Be frightened.
Then get back to work.
P.S. This re-captioning of an old 50’s cartoon is a total hoot :-).