Small consolation to find that the Chinese finger-cuffs (''the more they struggle, the tighter they're bound!''), the black-eye joke and the bloody (or black) soap might well have worked as promised...see Jean Shepherd's (A Christmas Story, &c.) unforgettably evocative portrait of the old Johnson Smith novelty catalogs of comic-book-ad fame (he played Boswell to their, er, ''Doc'' Johnson Smith), reprinted in his collection A Fistful of Fig Newtons.
Fool your friends! Climb inside your own giant 6-foot Polaris submarine - with working periscope! 7 Secrets to Wisdom! Feed your whole family with giant 6-foot butter beans! Pet monkey fits in a teaspoon! Sell cards and seeds and salve to your neighbors and earn Christmas cash! Watch their faces as they scratch themselves mad after you pour itching powder down their backs - or place the whoopee cushion on their chairs! Hours of fun (TM)!
I remember that ''itching powder'' - it felt for all the world like ground fiberglass. All the fun of those catalogs came purely in the reading - the gap between tantalized promise and hoped deflated upon delivery could not be measured by ruler - but only by Professor Pearson's spectroscope...
Flash forward a night from Comment #1 to find me Googling ''high-powered pellet rifle'' toward a prospective purchase, and I find among the results ''Top Ten List of Some of the Worst Products, Including the Pet Rock and Lawn Darts; Products Range from Dangerous to Downright Dumb'' by Walt Crocker over at AssociatedContent.com (''The People's Media Company'') -
''Number 6. X-Ray Specs: How many kids bought these out of the back page of a comic book hoping to be able to see through that cute neighbor kid’s dress, only to end up with eye strain. At least now we have all of the racy stuff and the violence on video games.''
3 comments:
Small consolation to find that the Chinese finger-cuffs (''the more they struggle, the tighter they're bound!''), the black-eye joke and the bloody (or black) soap might well have worked as promised...see Jean Shepherd's (A Christmas Story, &c.) unforgettably evocative portrait of the old Johnson Smith novelty catalogs of comic-book-ad fame (he played Boswell to their, er, ''Doc'' Johnson Smith), reprinted in his collection A Fistful of Fig Newtons.
Fool your friends! Climb inside your own giant 6-foot Polaris submarine - with working periscope! 7 Secrets to Wisdom! Feed your whole family with giant 6-foot butter beans! Pet monkey fits in a teaspoon!
Sell cards and seeds and salve to your neighbors and earn Christmas cash! Watch their faces as they scratch themselves mad after you pour itching powder down their backs - or place the whoopee cushion on their chairs! Hours of fun (TM)!
I remember that ''itching powder'' - it felt for all the world like ground fiberglass. All the fun of those catalogs came purely in the reading - the gap between tantalized promise and hoped deflated upon delivery could not be measured by ruler - but only by Professor Pearson's spectroscope...
Flash forward a night from Comment #1 to find me Googling ''high-powered pellet rifle'' toward a prospective purchase, and I find among the results ''Top Ten List of Some of the Worst Products, Including the Pet Rock and Lawn Darts;
Products Range from Dangerous to Downright Dumb'' by Walt Crocker over at AssociatedContent.com (''The People's Media Company'') -
''Number 6.
X-Ray Specs: How many kids bought these out of the back page of a comic book hoping to be able to see through that cute neighbor kid’s dress, only to end up with eye strain. At least now we have all of the racy stuff and the violence on video games.''
Sounds like a prospective reader for POP.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/
article/48956/top_ten_list_of_
some_of_the_worst_products.html
?page=2
The only value that x-ray specs have to kids is that they teach them not to believe what they read.
Post a Comment