In the postcard, it looks a little like a colossal jellyfish, with the lit up parachutes. That is sort of eerie!

Yes, but the ride is not. Hence, it (the parachute ride) was…

I included recent photos of the structure, and info about modern lighting, so I know the tower structure is still there!

For sure. It seems like a solid idea. Well not the tophat part, but the rest. Much better than just your arms.

I never knew of them either. But I don’t know if that’s because they never caught on, or because I don’t know shit about 1800’s lumberjacking. I wonder if maybe steam power destroyed the market for these. But feels like it could’ve had a niche. A water or steam powered sawmill beats it, but you have to get the logs there. You could set up one of these on-prem to segment logs too big to easily move to a mill. But I’m speculating. Maybe it was too narrow a niche, or came too late, to find a market?

Good spot, I didn’t even notice the logo line!

The little building off to the side, in the photo above, is a mini McD’s museum that the company built. Seems like this store wasn’t financially worth keeping open, but restored it for history reasons.

With low sales, damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and the lack of a drive-up window and indoor seating, the restaurant was closed, and McDonald’s planned to demolish it and incorporate some of its features in a modern “retro” restaurant nearby. … With both the public and preservationists demanding the restaurant be saved, McDonald’s spent two years restoring the restaurant and reopened it. The restaurant now features an adjacent museum and gift shop housed in a replica of the original McDonald’s location in San Bernardino.

I wonder how the ratio of McD’s wage, to burger price, compares to today.

I have no idea how much they paid back then.

Good detective work! I’ll update.

Sinus nanobots

I do not want to be the first human test subject for the sinus nanobots.

Haha yeah. I get where they were coming from though. The 1st half the century saw an incredible explosion of scientific and technological progress. Intercontinental airplane flights instead of weeks on a ship. Electrification of homes. Television broadcasts. Eradication of entire terrible diseases. Massive progress on so many fronts.

It seems natural to think the same rate of progress will continue. So… sure, maybe another decade before we get cars that both have radar and fly and float? And that’s a thing we could have done by 1964, on a one-off highly impractical basis. It just couldn’t be economic or practical at scale.

Instead, we got flatscreens replacing tactile knobs, and logging of our GPS locations for sale to the highest bidder.

The retro-future was better than the actual one we got!

The past is stranger than I am even capable of imagining.

The decline of this practice and the recognition of the harmful effects of tobacco led to the figure of speech “blowing smoke up one’s ass”, which means lying to someone to flatter them.

TIL.

You are welcome. I also found this, after I made the main post. Kodak Girl has got a pretty comprehensive wikipedia page -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Girl

Lots of talk about the cultural impacts, even the impact it had on real life fashion where her striped dress style was in for a while.

Haha yeah that got me too. “Might be 4 plus a half cigarette remainder. Might be 5 and 2/3. But around 5 somewhere, we are pretty sure.”

is code for you wanna do it right now

Different times I guess. Hard for me to imagine anything less sexy than getting, or for that matter giving, a snoot full of cigarette smoke at close range.

Maybe it’s something that makes sense if you’re a smoker?

Haha yeah I thought just after I hit post, she probably got WAY less than $1000. Even inflation adjusted, probably still not.

Range of sources, I didn’t save every URL but here’s one from the Univ of Toronto,

https://library.torontomu.ca/asc/files/2013/10/DSC_0329.jpg

Main image in the post from,

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/310000/velka/kodak-camera-vintage-poster.jpg

Also I didn’t know it at the time I made the post, but there’s a whole wikipedia page about the Kodak Girl. I’m off to read it now! It has a few other examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Girl

I want to know how that photoshoot went down.

“Hey, Yolanda, we’ll give you a thousand bucks if you let some guy who couldn’t make it in Hollywood blow smoke in your face from a few inches away. But you have to pretend you like it.”

Just noticed in the 1917 ad, the Karo Lady is literally an anthropomorphized ear of corn. And not shy about showing off her rows of shapely kernels, haha!

Frankly I don’t want anthropomorphized food. Feels too close to cannibalism!

Ah, I wonder if it was this guy! --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sacchi

Haha yeah the Bogie guy would totally fool me from the side view! It’s the 2nd ad where you see him from the front, where I can tell it’s not actually Bogie.

I agree about the Ingrid lookalike. She’s pretty, but not really a ringer for Ingrid. Ingrid had a unique look, and might be very hard to find a lookalike.

The Bogie lookalike is not too bad. Especially in the side profile, less so from the front.