Wacky li'l boxes.

Americans of a certain age will remember Wacky Packages, a line of cards and later stickers that parodied consumer products in a very MAD magazine style. In fact, they featured the work of some MAD creators like Drew Friedman. Wacky Packages were made by Topps, the premier baseball card company, and if memory serves also came with a stick of that lousy gum. Wacky Packages were one generation back from the Garbage Pail Kids, with that same gross-out humor.

I had plenty of the stickers, but never used them except on my loose-leaf binder and the like. A friend of mine plastered his bedroom door with Wacky Packages stickers (Comic Book Heroes stickers too, also made by Topps). That kind of thing didn't fly in my house. My dad wouldn't have killed me, but the disgust and disappointment radiating off him while he gently scraped the stickers off my door would have made me glow with shame for days. 

Nevertheless, I was amused to see this box of fun at the checkout at Walmart. 

Topps, through Super Impulse, has released the classic Wacky Packages as packages, tiny little 3-D replicas sold in containers like this. You get five products in a package for six bucks, which may be overpriced, but who cares? It's nostalgia! (Super Impulse, by the way, also makes a whole lot of fun stuff in small form, including the miniature Pac-Man console I got as a stocking stuffer a couple of years ago.) 

Let's see what Wacky Packages came in this set. (Thanks to the Wacky Packages fanpage and mall for historical information.) This is what's stuffed in the box:

No gum.

First, there's the paperwork --  a checklist so you can collect 'em all! It even notes which ones are rare, meaning they're holding back production to increase collectability and value on a handful. 

On to my packages! You'll note that no products have been updated; some of the actual products parodied on the checklist don't even exist anymore, like Duz detergent, Mr. Big bread, and Chun King foods. The packaging for the others has changed a lot since then. But these are still the same wacky parodies they were in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Otherwise, what's nostalgia for? 

First, for old times' sake we have an actual sticker, a miniature replica of the Grazin' Bran from the fourth original series. 

In the packages themselves, we have 

Liptorn, one of the very first products from the 1967 trading-card era, before they were stickers.

Windaxe is fun -- "Break Glass to Remove Axe." From the 13th series. 

Saran Wrap as Sorry Wrap, 7th series. 

A takeoff of Birdseye's International Recipes from the period, specifically the Bavarian Style Beans & Spaetzle (11th series).

Hey, I got a rare one! Pupsi-Cola (original sticker: 10th series) was called Rare on the Super Impulse checklist. I'm rich! Let's see... Nah, looks like I didn't get the really rare red sparkle edition. Meh -- best offer?

It was a fun trip down memory lane, although seeing these Wacky Packages and others online reminded me that most of the humor came from the shock value of looking at brands adults valued treated like garbage. Some are more clever than others, but most are kinda dumb. Nothing wrong with a dumb joke, though. Never stopped me!

I doubt I'll be holding on to these. Except for books -- and I want to trim down that library whenever we move -- I don't collect anything on purpose anymore. Ever since I had to sell my comic books in a hurry before my parents moved (I had no room in my little apartment), the collecting bug has gone out of me. But like so many things, it was fun while it lasted. 

Chinese Death Virus again.

I think the thing I hate most about this terrible virus from Wuhan, besides what it does to people who contract it, is how it makes us all look at our friends and families as harbingers of doom, monsters crawling with death. It makes the simplest in-person human transaction into a threat.

Of course here in the southern stretch of the Empire State, where a combination of a large and close population and corrupt morons for leaders has led to the worst outbreak in the nation, we have more reason than other Americans to feel this way. I mentioned we had dinner guests on Saturday; they showed up wearing masks, not presuming to go maskless until we assured them we didn't mind. It hadn't occurred to me to make the same offer to them, but that's where we are. On Sunday I was at a church group meeting in person for the first time since late winter, and we sat around, spaced apart, masks on and hand sanitizer near the door. I can't get used to this and I hope I never do. 

I told my wife I'd just as soon get the damned disease and get immune to it, but she pointed out that that was A) stupid and B) possibly no help since there was a reinfection case in the news and C) definitely no help because things were not going back to normal just because I got sick and recovered. 

I'm trying not to look at this in any political way, but of course it's hard not to, because since the Baby Boomers preached that the personal is political in the sixties, every goddamn thing has to be political. People lash out with political messages about this and hide behind science, unaware that the science about this disease is far from settled and changing frequently (a blind spot I see even in the medical press). The most common memes I've seen of this variety are stoopid Trump supporters who refuse to mask up. Well, you can't attack political opponents and then pretend it's not political. 

On the other hand, many people think the whole mask up / quarantine / damn the economy / close everything movement will end the day after Joe Biden's election to the presidency. I suspect not, but who knows. Public health professionals certainly did not inspire trust by claiming that bigotry was more dangerous than the virus; not only did they veer out of their lane by making a public health statement outside their area of expertise, they ran right into the guardrail. Why the hell should anyone trust them now? The personal is political, because people like that made it so.

"Trust me. I wear glasses."

I guess what bothers me the most is that everything, every single stupid thing, that comes down the pike has to be a means for Americans to attack one another. This is not confined to the Left. But I have noted before that the only historical Americans that the Left likes are Americans who fight other Americans, not the enemies of America. It's one reason we don't get many war pictures anymore, but there always seems to be another freaking Joe McCarthy movie in the works. 

Fred's Book Club: Another Brick.

Welcome to Wednesday, or whatever it is when you see this. It's Wednesday here, and that means it's Hump Day, and time for the Humpback Writers, who don't actually have humps, unless they have some around that they haven't shown me. Nobody tells me anything.

Today we delve into recent history to have another look at "real" communism in action.

British journalist Christopher Hilton, who was a sportswriter for most of his career, compiled an amazing collection of stories of the Berlin Wall in 2001's The Wall: The People's Story. It's a street-level view of the rise and fall of the famous barrier that came crashing down in 1989. For almost forty years it was at the eye of the Cold War, and by the start of the eighties it felt as if all the world was watching, as if Berlin was at the very center of the world. Not the Middle East, nor Kabul, nor Tokyo, nor even New York City, where I lived, but that bisected German city, one half of which was an outpost of freedom in a desert of communism.

Hilton seems to have talked to a lot of people; in fact, he seems to have talked to everybody. After summarizing the tensions between the East and West in the postwar period, he describes the origins of the wall that began in the city and spread its arms across Germany. Prior to that, thousands of East Berliners traveled to the western half every day to work, the half that had shops filled with goods. Many tried to move permanently, leading to worker shortages, particularly of the smarter workers (the "brain drain"). For that reason and a number of others, the East Germans, despite prior assertions to the contrary, decided that a wall must go up.

It didn't start with bricks at mortar; on the night of August 13, 1961, it started with wire. The East German Factory Fighters, a kind of civilian reserve, began the installation.

Two Factory Fighters in shirt sleeves walked with a coil of the wire wrapped in a ball round a stout stick, a Fighter holding each end of the stick. As they walked, the wire automatically uncoiled and another Fighter, kneeling, lifted a strand of it and hammered it into a concrete post using cleats, gathered another strand and hammered that in, then another -- row upon row, neatly spaced -- until the wire was head high. An elderly couple were escorted from the wire by a policeman, the sadness and the powerlessness expressed by the stoop of their shoulders.

That very night, illegal crossings began.

At 10.30, a crowd of 4,000 lingered on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate but for an insurrection to occur would mean bursting past their own police, then the cordon of Factory Fighters, then the armoured personnel carriers with the water cannons, then the Eastern police, before reaching Unter den Linden; and Unter den Linden had been cleared, anyway. At 10.45, a report came in that ‘a male person’ had swum the Teltow Canal.

They would continue into 1989.

Part of the new wall ran right along apartment buildings, and East Berliners started jumping out the windows to escape to the West.

In Bernauer Strasse workmen swarmed the ground floors of the apartment buildings, bricking up windows from the inside. Residents called to people in the West for help and clambered onto window ledges to drop to the pavement. The West Berlin Fire Brigade hurried there with safety nets anticipating that, when the bricklayers reached the upper floors, residents might jump.

Hilton does a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the night the wall rose and the days that followed, when the United States and its allies tried to determine the best course of action against this surprise move. Three hundred trucks towing artillery were sent, and to many it looked like the wall was the spark that would begin World War III.

Hilton's book spends many riveting pages on the period following the initial wall construction, but goes on to tell the stories of those living in its shadow for decades, those who risked everything to escape, and those present when they tore the damned thing down.

Anyone interested in history would find this a fascinating read, I think, and for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, it's crucial knowledge. We are faced with a real possibility of Cold War II, thanks to the actions of the Chinese Communist party, and we have a generation that has no idea what communism really looks like, or why someone would risk death and torture to flee it. Hilton, who passed away in 2010, strives to be fair to the East German and Soviet leadership, and yet the bald, brutal face of communist dictatorship cannot be prettied up.

Maybe our youngsters now would say that it wasn't "real communism." But it's always real communism. This is what it always is.

Spring pictures.

Okay, enough with the depressing things for a bit. Here are some pictures I got while walking around. The National Geographic people may not come hammering at my door to buy them, but hey, I write novels, not picture books.

Here we have an example of the concrete worker's art, a planter apparently awaiting whatever plant will adorn it for the summer.

I guess they put the pebbles around to keep it upright, but I think it looks a little silly. Tell you the truth, the first thing I thought of that it looked like a spittoon for the Thing from the Fantastic Four.

"Reed, will you please speak to Ben?  He keeps missing the spittoon and now there are pebbles all over the floor!"

"Ben, why are you spitting so much?"

"Because, Reed... It's SLOBBERIN' TIME!"

Speaking of elegant concrete sculpture, we also have this content and well-dressed chap, although a bit worse for weather wear. Yes, allow me to present Monsieur Grenouille Faux;

Fake frogs are okay, but with all the rain we had, we had enough of the real thing around here. In fact, the same day Nipper and I passed M. G. Faux in the morning, we encountered Monsieur Grenouille la Vraie in the evening:

I wonder if M. Faux and M. la Vraie have met?

We've also had plenty of wildflowers, some of which don't suck. I mean, most wildflowers are more weed than flower. This one was okay.

What that always puts me in mind of is "Fields of People" by an underrated English group, the Move. A friend of mine got me into their stuff long after their heyday had passed -- also after the heyday of Electric Light Orchestra, actually, which is what the Move morphed into. "Fields of People" is a cover of a song by Ars Nova. I like "Fields of People" a lot ("Fields of people... there's no such thing as a weed...") but I used to have more tolerance for hippie stuff. Now my home is a tambourine-free zone. Anyway, it's a fun song, from the album Shazam, but unless you really dig sitar music, bail after the main song portion. (Side note: The lead vocal by Carl Wayne was recorded on the street, the rest in the studio.)

Finally, we have a horse-drawn hay rake that has been turned into a planter.

I love this thing. I admit that I had to look up olde tyme farm equipment to find out what it was; I've explained this city slicker's knowledge of farming to you in the past. I think they family is a little optimistic; I don't know what's growing in the planter but it's overwhelmed by the machine itself. Still, I wouldn't care. I love old stuff and I'd probably just sit on the seat, wearing an Amish hat, chewing straw, whittlin', and making wise country remarks to people like an idiot all day. Good thing I don't own it.

That's what I've been seeing around this spring; how's it with you?

Wonders!

I had this CD of one-hit wonders of the eighties. It was a freebie I got while working at a magazine a little over a decade ago. My wife, who loves eighties music, said with disgust that she only liked three of the songs, and one she had on the actual album, and shouldn't count because the artist had demonstrably more than one hit. So there you go.

But I got to thinking about that beloved and benighted decade of the eighties, and wondering if, as I had in the past, that decade had more one-hit wonders than the sixties did. The sixties was notorious at the time for hustling acts off and on the stage. A 1965 episode of The Flintstones ("The Masquerade Party") lampooned the phenomenon (and Orson Welles's War of the Worlds hysteria) when a band called the Beasties with a hot hit is thrown out of the record office to make way for the new band, the Way-Outs. And of course Tom Hanks's musical masterpiece of 1996, That Thing You Do!, is all about one-hit wonders, set in the year 1964. The film's band is even named the Wonders.

But to answer my question: Which decade had the most artists or groups with just one solid American hit? I have no recourse but to turn to Mr. Wikipedia, which of course has compiled a list of said wonders dating from the late fifties, located at this link.

So which decade comes out on top? It's a tough brawl. For every Standells ("Dirty Water") there's a Godley & Creme ("Cry"); for every ? and the Mysterians ("96 Tears") there's an Eddy Grant ("Electric Avenue"); for every Youngbloods ("Get Together") there's a Cutting Crew ("(I Just) Died in Your Arms"). The list represents enough musicians to populate a city.

And now, for your listening pleasure,
"Der Kommissar" by After the Fire.

The Wiki page didn't number the lists, and I don't have the patience to count them, so I pasted it into an Excel document -- my most productive use for Excel so far this year -- and it did the count. And the winner is....

It's not even close. The eighties had 105 one-hit wonders; the sixties, with 42, didn't even beat the seventies and the nineties, which each had 54. The eighties was an extraordinary decade for chewin' 'em up and spittin' 'em out, and also for non-musicians to elbow their way into a hit (Bruce Willis, Eddie Murphy, Patrick Swayze, even Rodney Dangerfield). It also mattered that the eighties seemed to be a huge jumble of emerging and departing pop music styles, an era where rap and punk crashed into disco and New Wave and rock, which fed the endless need for bands, while the sixties had hits from longstanding solo artists that your grandma loved who could still knock the Beatles off the #1 spot. When Sinatra and Como are still topping the charts, it leaves less room for the Surfaris of the week.

Of course, I have objections. XTC, for example, is listed as a one-hit wonder for the tiresome 1986 moan "Dear God" (#37), but the much superior 1989 "Mayor of Simpleton" was a hit that same decade (#15), and yet they never broke the top ten in the American Billboard chart. God knows how many other such errors are on this list.

Still, even allowing for such miscues, the sheer number of eighties one-and-done artists has to make it the top decade for the type.

It may seem sad to contemplate the fate of the one-hit wonder, the act that thought it had finally broken out of the pack and reached the big time only to plummet straight back into obscurity. But keep in mind that, as sad as it may seem to have only one hit, that's one more hit than most other bands ever get.

Metropolitan meals.

I've run several entries on this blog based on a collection of promotional cookbooks I inherited. I thought I'd gone through them all -- but imagine my surprise when I found one I'd missed!

Metropolitan Cook Book sounds pretty modern and urbane, doesn't it? But the name doesn't have a direct connection to city life; it comes from the sponsor, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

One might expect a life insurance company to issue a cookbook if it was going to be filled entirely with healthy recipes to make sure you keep living and keep paying premiums as long as possible. But this is a basic home cookbook with a lot of recipes for the newbie family chef. I suppose the idea was to get into the home with an invaluable kitchen aid, and when you started to think about insurance -- say, when the Little Ones started to come along -- you'd know where to turn.

The year: 1964.

I was especially interested in the illustrations in this book. The food is all friendly, a nice, happy kind of drawing. And yet the gags don't make a lot of sense. Have a look at these:

I just don't know if these fruits count as what the Great Lileks calls quisling mascots, or even cannibal mascots. They seem to be eating pudding rather than fruit desserts, so maybe not. Looks like we have an orange, a pear, maybe a blueberry, and I don't know what the other one is. Obviously being in the dessert chapter has made them all fat.

Here it looks like the eggs who signed up for food service are mad at the chick that has had the nerve to hatch from an egg. Because why? Because hatching out of the egg killed it!?! But then what's inside the other eggs? The implications of this one are awful.

And this one is even worse. Here you have little fish in the fishbowl who look an awful lot like the children of the fish on the plate, who should be dead because he (she? MOM?!) is already on the plate, being served with a glass of Chablis and parsley and a lemon slice. They're happy to see her (except the little one on top who is mocking her) while zombie fish mom looks worried. "I'm afraid Harold is just never going to grow up to be dinner." What the hell is going on here?

After these disturbing cartoons, the straight-up quisling/cannibal pig hawking sausage is almost a relief. Notice that he can only appear in silhouette; the other pigs will destroy him if they find out who he is.

I usually look for the weirdest recipe in these ol' fogey cookbooks, but really, there was nothing scary to modern tastes. I saw no tomatoes in aspic, no deviled peaches and anchovies, no Velveeta toast, nothing to make the current reader say "Oh, how boring" or "Oh, how gross." It really is a good basic cookbook.

The one recipe I include is to demonstrate a word usage that's gone out of style. "Glorify" still means to bring or elevate to glory, but in the sense of mere improvement as here, it's only used in a sarcastic sense (Merriam-Webster gives this example: "the new position is just a glorified version of the old stockroom job"). But in the middle of the last century it was often seen in ads for cosmetic products, and even for homely hash:

It's a rare example of a word losing a colloquial exaggeration. "Awesome" is a more typical case. As comedian Bill Engvall likes to point out, awesome used to mean things that struck one with awe, not things that are just neato-keen.

Anyway, if you're interested in more recipes from the Metropolitan book, let me know; we'll see what else can be glorified. Meanwhile, here are links to the other old cookbooks I blogged about:

First entry (ugly fish!)
Coca-Cola cookbook (really!)
Swanson chicken 1 (meet Sue Swanson!)
Swanson chicken 2 (they fired Sue Swanson!)
Creamette pasta (they fired the babe on the box!)
Goya beans (human beans!)
Amaretto di Saronno (secrets revealed!)
Wesson Oil (for more about "glorify"!)
The Incredible Edible Egg (for better behaved eggs!)
Schaefer Beer (Beer-B-Q!)
Wok cooking (wok everything!)
Southern Comfort (booze!)
American Dairy Association (butter!)
Waring Blendor (family blending!)

Also, my tips for writing or editing cookbooks and the only healthy-eating book you'll ever want to read.

Bon appetit!

Covers.

Yesterday I was writing about the darker side of Stan Lee, but I have to admit his Marvel Comics were eating DC's lunch in the mid to late sixties. It took a while for DC to realize that older kids were reading comics, kids who wanted more serious plots and characters, and Marvel gave them what they wanted while DC was still giving them the Legion of Super-Pets. 

One of DC's approaches to fix this in the late sixties was to elevate the role of artists, for more dramatic stories and covers. Results were mixed. But I loved the issues where they would play with the superhero logos. They looked great and told the reader that they were trying to be more interesting, to drop off some of the moribund and silly business that had accumulated on DC's popular heroes in the forties and fifties. 

I always liked the Blockbuster. DC has never done much with him, though. Well, he's pretty dumb.

Classic evil triumphant pose. Not the first appearance of Black Manta, but an especially villainous one.

The Flash has one of the best rogues' galleries in the business. Batman and Spider-Man are the only heroes with a better corps of enemies. 

This last one was of particular interest -- the large Justice League shield logo was removed, the letters squashed above a triumphant Superman. Of course everyone always thought Superman could beat up the whole League by himself; Jerry Seinfeld even got a whole bit out of Superman's superiority (used in the "Stand In" episode of his sitcom). And some covers in the series showed hero-vs.-hero fighting. But this was the first one where we actually saw the whole League's collective crap beaten out by the Man of Steel.

And best of all was the villain of the piece -- who else but the Key? 😀

Mwah ah ah!

Seaver.

I was saddened to hear about Tom Seaver, a.k.a. Tom Terrific, the Franchise, having to withdraw from public events at the age of 74 due to the onset of dementia. It is a horrible disease, and I'm at least glad that he was wise enough to hold on to the financial resources to deal with it. So many don't.

A friend of mine had to spend her last years in a nursing home -- she never lost her mental faculties, thank God, but so many in that place had, and when I'd visit her they were like living specters, hollowed-out shells of who they once were. It was a county-run facility, but the treatment seemed to be pretty good, for what little could be done. Kindness, mostly.

I imagine that Seaver's smart money management and successful winery will enable him to have superior home care as needed. It is a shame he will miss the celebration this summer of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Miracle Mets.

Dan McLaughlin of National Review and his Baseball Crank feed had an excellent piece on Seaver's amazing career, explaining as only a real nuts-'n'-bolts baseball fan can why Seaver was such an extraordinary performer on the mound. Seaver's stats are great, but they only tell part of the story.

In fact, my favorite Seaver tale comes from David Halberstam's book October 1964, a book not about the Mets -- how could it be when they were 53-109 in 1964? -- but about the twilight of the dominant Yankees and the rise of the tough Bob Gibson Cardinals. Bob Gibson was a terrifying presence as a pitcher, who could be as brutal on battery mate Tim McCarver as he was on opposing batters. But Halberstam tells the story of how, in the late 1960s, when Gibson was getting older, he got a rude jolt from a young man from Fresno, California. In a spring training game, Gibson had thrown at John Milner of the Mets, hitting him in the ribs, for the crime of doubling off Gibson twice in spring training. A few weeks later Seaver and Gibson were opposing pitchers in a regular season game and Seaver went to work:

Gibson was up with two outs, and Seaver would be the next Met up in the next inning, so there would be a chance for Gibson to retaliate if he so chose. Seaver threw three pitches inside at Gibson, driving him farther and farther away from the plate; the last pitch came in so close that Gibson had to spin around to get out of the way, using the bat more like a cane than a bat. Then it was Seaver's turn to bat against Gibson. The first pitch came in fast, and just over Seaver's head. The umpire had come out from behind the plate at that point to try and stop it, but Seaver pushed him aside. "Shut up," he said, "this is none of your business." At that point Seaver stepped away from the plate and yelled out to Gibson, "As far as I'm concerned this is over. But if you want to continue, we can keep going at it, and you better know that I throw a lot harder than you do now, you old fart." And that indeed ended it. 

Halberstam wrote that Gibson "respected strength in others: he knew another samurai when he saw one."

Seaver had been a Marine Corps reservist, and the lessons he learned there he did not forget. He was interviewed by Michael Morrissey in the New York Post about it in 2003:

In 1962, Seaver considered himself a runt and a late-bloomer without much focus. Shipped out to boot camp in Southern California, the 17-year-old knew on that first day that his life was about to change.
     “I didn’t know if it was tough or not,” Seaver said. “All I knew was I had someone yelling at me – and I hadn’t even done anything yet.
     “I went, ‘Oh, this is what my dad’s been talking about.’ I can remember saying that to myself – to this day.”
     During the Vietnam War, Seaver served an eight-year commitment, including three months of boot camp, three months of active duty at Camp Pendleton outside of San Diego and 5½ years of reserve obligation.
     “I’ll tell you what: you walk out of graduation from boot camp three months later, and you’re damn proud of yourself and proud of that uniform,” he said.

And by his talent and his personal grit, he actually made the Mets uniform something to be proud of too.

Happy trails, Mr. Seaver, and thanks for being our Franchise.

The Name Game.

Come on everybody!
I say now let's play a game
I betcha I can make a rhyme out of anybody's name!
The first letter of the name, I treat it like it wasn't there!
But a B or an F or an M will appear
And then I say bo add a B then I say the name and Bonana fanna and a fo
And then I say the name again with an F very plain
and a fee fy and a mo
And then I say the name again with an M this time
and there isn't any name that I can't rhyme!

What's your name?

"Buck."

Buck!
Buck, Buck bo uck, Bonana fanna fo F--
Uh, what's YOUR name?

"Art."

Art!
Art, Art bo art, Bonana fanna fo F--
Huh?
All right, what's YOUR name?

"Rich."

Rich!
Rich, Rich, bo B--
Damn!
Never mind; what's YOUR name?

"Castor."

Yeah, rhymes with Bastor, right? You?

"Taggart!"

No. Next?

"Duff."

Skip it.
I'm not taking chances with you people.
Anyone got a normal name?

"Rumplestiltskin."

Ooookay... anyone else?

"Chiranjeevi!"

Chiranjeevi?!

"It's normal in my country."

All right... [deep breath]

Chiranjeevi!
Chiranjeevi, Chiranjeevi bo Bhiranjeevi Bonana fanna fo Firanjeevi
Fee fy mo Miranjeevi!
Chiranjeevi!

That's enough
I'm gonna go lay down
From now on I'll stick to chess
When you bonana fannas come to town

Butter believe it.

Today we have another amazing recipe pamphlet from the collection I inherited, mostly from manufacturers or their organizations promoting their wares (such as eggs, beer, booze, blenders, pasta, woks, cola, chicken, more booze). Today it's butter, baby, and you'd better believe it!

This almost doesn't count as a pamphlet. It's a 3x5 fold up, which may very well have come in a box of butter. But in that little pamphlet are no fewer than four different recipes for cakes (chocolate, spice, pound, and birthday) and five different recipes for frosting (vanilla, chocolate cream, chocolate fluff, butter marshmallow, and browned butter), none of them weird -- no Rum Cake Flambe here -- and all made from scratch.

I know it's hard to believe, in an era when cakes are bought or come out of a box mix, but there was a time when people had to make cakes from scratch. Why, if these were any more scratch, you'd be churning the butter yourself.

But what exact time was this? The front tells us it comes from the American Dairy Association, which copyright I find is owned by the Dairy Management Inc. and goes back to 1941. But this must be newer than that. For one thing, the name "American Dairy Association" is in all lowercased letters, which associations and companies did not do in the 1940's. This comes from a less serious time. The boys are wearing cowboy party hats, but those kinds of things were popular from the thirties to the seventies. And I don't know from girls' haircuts, but that looks early 1960's to me. My wife says it looks like the hairstyle that Patty Duke wore in The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966), so I think I am right. You actually could buy boxed cake mixes as far back as the Great Depression (says Wikipedia), but there was a lot more resistance to that kind of shortcut back then than we would ever see today.

Does it promote butter? You bet! Here, along with two recipes, is "The Butter Bonus":

You may wonder why anyone would have to push the butter; didn't Americans always drink butter and bacon grease with their coffee in those unenlightened days? Actually production of margarine, which was much cheaper, overtook butter in 1958 in the U.S., according to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. So what we have here is Big Butter fighting back.

Returning to the question of the date on this un-copyrighted publication, I draw your attention again to that cover art, specifically the platter upon which the birthday cake sits. It turns out that it turns, and plays "Happy Birthday," and you could buy it:

Tops off the gayety of a birthday party!

So I did a search, and found a photo of the platter in this ad from the Detroit Free Press, February 16, 1964:

So we can see that the plate also had a fairly cute clown on it. And the offer expires February 28, 1965.

There's been a lot of birthday cakes over the clown since then, as they say. A baby who celebrated his first birthday with that brand-new revolving clown platter would be at least 51 today. I did a search to see if any of those platters wound up on eBay, but couldn't find any.

Anyway, there's no expiration date on delicious cake recipes, which I've given you. If you want the frosting recipes, drop me a line at the usual place (frederick_key AT yahoo.com) and soon you'll be making cake and frosting from scratch too! I have no information on churning butter, though.

Hair yesterday, back tomorrow.

I saw an ad on TV for this product, which caught my eye:

So you're wondering:

1) Why did I see an ad for this product? Don't I only allow manly, masculine programming on my TV, the kind of shows that would never have advertising for girlie products?

2) Why would I care about Root Cover Up by L'Oreal? Isn't that only of interest to people who have, y'know, hair?

Well, to answer your snotty questions in the order in which I made them up:

1) Yes, of course I only put on manly, masculine programming, but my wife had the remote control because I was, uh, cooking. Manly food!

2) While it's true that I would enjoy more hair on my scalp than nature has seen fit to bless me with, my hair or lack of it has nothing to do with my interest in the product, which is all about the design of the package.

Because the fact is, this is a revival of a classic. In the post-war era, and proceeding into the late 1970s, hair salons (which have always been expensive to equip and thus redecorate) favored pink and, even better, turquoise:

Your chair's ready.

Furthermore, the slim serif font used on the can harks back to the era typified by this 1960 ad for Toni's home perm kit:

I'm very favorably impressed. We see revivals in products all the time, but I can't remember one that harked back further than the hippie era. This harks back to the era known to the Great Lileks as the Twilight of the Grown-ups.

Maybe it was not developed as retro so much as a Mad Men inspired product design. Either way, good on you, L'Oreal. Have a Lucky Strike and a Rheingold on me.