Old Timey Ads
And headlines, and articles, and images, and miscellany unearthed by the guy who makes Wondermark.
old timey ads on twitter @wondermarkfeed • curator @malki
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This is straight-up something out of Game of Thrones.
How big are these pies we’re talking about? Enough to contain twenty-four live birds, or a small human being? Is this a “the monarch needs to demonstrate excess as a metaphor for wealth” type situation?
Anyway, I’m glad this tradition has lived on, albeit only in the form of the stripper cake.
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Would this be cocoa with only 1/1000th of a molecule of cocoa powder in it?
MMMM DELICIOUS
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This is my favorite part about cryogenic fantasies: “People disgusted with the present times might have themselves kept for a more enlightened age.” This provokes so many unanswered questions! Who will freeze you? Who will thaw you? Who makes the decision when the age is “enlightened” enough to hit the defrost switch on your Popsicle-body? And why would the future want your old ass around anyway?
Now I really want to write a character called “Disappointed Victorian Cryonaut”:
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EXT. CITY STREET - DAY
The Cryonaut looks around at traffic, his eyes wide.
CRYONAUT: Ah! The future! Surely this is a more enlightened age!
TAXI DRIVER: Get out of the road, you nutcase!
The taxi HONKS and speeds past. The Cryonaut’s face falls as a single tear runs down his face.
CRYONAUT: Bah! This age is as vulgar as the last!
He KICKS a piece of trash, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.
CRYONAUT: I’m never gonna get to an enlightened age
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Sets of false teeth used to be made from pachyderm ivory or actual human teeth, and it was common for teeth to be recycled through more than one set of dentures. Just picture a warehouse somewhere, with tiny little drawers filled with hundreds of teeth carefully sorted by size, color, and amount of wear, a hunched-over man in a headlamp and leather apron picking through them with long, silver tweezers. “Ah, this one,” he says, rooting through the pile to find an incisor from some long-dead peasant’s corpse, ripped from his skull by grave robbers looking for rum money. “This one will go in your mouth.”
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Little girls wear corsets?
“Listen here. We gotta make this corset ‘superior to all others.’ So I want it to be the boniest. The stiffest. The most constricting and shapely corset a child has ever worn. We want them to be unable to take this thing off. And if they do, their organs sag out like a bag of rotten milk. You know how to sell corsets, boys? Nail ’em when they’re young.”
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Dead Triplets…
Before cellophane (sorry, Cellophane®) was popular, was “seeing the things you buy” a real guessing game? “I’m sorry, Leopold, I’d love to feed you something, but what that’ll be is going to be a mystery to us both — I’ll just grab this from the icebox, drop it into a pot, stir it with my eyes closed, and we’ll eat it without breaking eye contact with each other.”
I guess when the alternative is unwrapping something from wax paper or butcher paper? How did people store food before 2005, I can’t remember
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I love how Lascelles’ Pills are just an afterthought here. “Chillie Paste not do the trick? Knock a few of these back too, what the heck. It’s all just opium anyway.”
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I suppose this article’s doomsaying proved correct. Who puddles anymore? NOBODY, that’s who.
Puddling was an Industrial Revolution means of making iron and steel. In the original puddling technique, molten iron in a reverberatory furnace was stirred with rods, which were consumed in the process. It was one of the first processes for making bar iron without charcoal in Europe, although much earlier coal-based process had existed in China.
Later, it was also used to produce a good-quality carbon steel; this was a highly skilled art, but both high-carbon and low-carbon steels were successfully produced on a small scale, particularly for swords, knives and other weapons.
