Going to Town

     It is only fair, I think, having given three columns over to the postcards which celebrated the nostalgic days of the outhouse, to point out that modern indoor facilities gave postcard cartoonists a chance to express their world views.  You have enough faith in humanity, I hope, to believe that potty humor does not end at the wooden walls of the little house out back.

     Of course, there are certain themes which do not change depending on the location of the potty.  The dilemma depicted in the postcard at the top of this column can be found in worlds we discussed in earlier blogs.

     Or even earlier blogs than that.

     And we have a few postcards which mention the temptation to sit and read that old catalog in the outhouse, you need to go to the modern age to find a direct cartoon reference to it.

     “Modern age” is relative, of course.  This card is about twenty years older than the gas station one, and is now a century old, and we find the habit already being blamed on boys.  (This, by the way, is the only bathtub postcard in today’s effusion of wit.  The bathtub has its own literature and line of cards.  The whole association of bathtubs and toilets is probably a modern invention, brought on by the need to run plumbing to both.  In the days before indoor plumbing, a lot of people bathed in the kitchen, since that was the place to heat the water.  Single men who did not have access to a handy kitchen for this person could often buy a bath at the barbershop, which had a back room for that, and a tub of water which was changed, oh, once a day.  This made sense in some towns…I guess what this all boils down to is that one of these days, this blog is going back into the bathroom.  You have something to look forward to.)

     And though I could not find a postcard which dealt with this problem in a modern public restroom, we all know that the problem continues into the twenty-first century (though a great deal of graffiti has now been shifted to twitter.)

     But new ways bring new problems, and I can’t imagine the whole domestic situation discussed here existed in the days of the hole cut in the plank.

     And this sitcom situation could simply not have happened in the days of the house out back.  (For that matter, it could not have been shown on a sitcom in the days when this postcard was new.  Anybody here old enough to remember the early 70s, when the sound of a toilet flushing on a sitcom was a national scandal?)

      And though there were experiments with it in the days of the outhouse, the modern pay toilet really did not exist before the potty moved indoors.

     As soon as such a thing existed, of course, the ethnic jokes were unavoidable.

     Establishments which served a large number of the general public saw the benefit of the public restroom—free or tollbearing—immediately.  If customers didn’t have to leave to find a potty, they could stay and shop more.  Though, of course, this created its own problems.

     Children, being of much the same nature in any age, caused the same difficulties either way. 

     Although the new technology was dealing with traditional body functions, and thus produced cartoons having much in common with earlier examples, the new indoor toilet did create new jokes as well.  If nothing in these columns has made you yearn for the days of the little house out back, reflect that in those days THIS classic cartoon would never have existed.

Goimg, Goimg….

     There are those who have exclaimed at the array of outhouse postcards seen so far, and wonder why our ancestors (to say nothing of some bloggers) insisted on dwelling on such a subject.  The fact of the matter is that human beings refuse to take our bodies for granted.  Every normal function has become the subject of literature, art, and, especially, marketing.  Anyone who has watched any modern television must be aware of the expanding numbers of ads for mattresses.  So sleeping is regularly studied.  (I’ll try this joke one more time: If I go to the Sleep Store and take a nap, am I shoplifting?  Yeah, that’s what I usually get.)

     The lore and literature of eating is huge: if you can find a bookstore, take a look at the Cookbook or Diet sections.  The material produced on drinking is of at least similar magnitude.  Postcards cover sleeping, eating, and drinking with a loving but satiric eye.  And if you wanted to discuss sex…well, that was a couple of blogs ago.

     And today we live in an age where commercials for what we used to have to call “bathroom tissue” can call out to us “We all have to go: why not ENJOY the go?”  So is it so much of a shock to find our ancestors interested in this pressing subject on their postcards?

     We have already discussed, a little, the whole Town vs. Country aspect of the matter.    Well into the 1940s, outhouses were a matter of course in some rural areas, and could be a matter of some pride.

     While the much-vaunted indoor plumbing of the city did have its drawbacks.

     Though perhaps the facility itself had some thoughts on the matter.

     The more removed society was from the old outhouse, the more it became a matter of nostalgia.  (Say, that mail order catalog hung up in a convenient place is another matter for reminiscing, such things being also a matter of the distant pass.  If you are missing the connection—and I know some of you have been born since the second Roosevelt administration—the catalog was hung there to serve as a source of toilet paper—once the family considered it obsolete, of course.  I recently ran into a reference, in an old video game, to a fact of life concerning these catalogs.  Everyone used the black and white pages first: the color pages were slicker and stiffer and harder to use for the purpose intended.  Anybody out there with access to the Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward archives know how many letters came in to headquarters about that?    Publishing a simple catalog brings in plenty of complaints, but how did the executives, who were generally old school folks themselves, handle the…where were we?)

     Some people overlooked the discomforts mentioned in the last couple of blogs and recalled the old outhouse as a quiet place to think and read (if nothing else, there was always what was left of the catalog.)

     Others, believe it or else, felt it had romantic associations. 

     (To each their own, I suppose.)

     In fact, the walls and door of the outhouse were considered by many to form a simple refuge from the rest of the world and its many demands.

     Coming soon: Did you think there were no postcards about INDOOR plumbing?

So Young, So Old

     In the original manuscript of my book of old joke quizzes, the chapter of jokes about kids followed the chapters on love and marriage, and cited the remark that “There will never be a victor in the battle of the sexes because there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

     For newcomers to this Monday dilemma, these are jokes which, at least in my opinion thirty years ago, were so old and so often retold that everyone should be able to provide the missing punchlines below.  If you do miss one, you can always say you were just kidding around.      

J1.”These shoes don’t fit!”

     “They do fit.  You just put them on the wrong feet.”

     “But Mom, (          ).”

J2,”If you were a good father, you’d take Junior to the zoo.”

     “Nonsense.  (          ).”

J3.Petey was seven years old, and had never spoken a single word.  His parents took him to specialists and psychologists, but still he had never uttered a single syllable.  And then at breakfast, he looked up from his bowl of cereal and remarked, “Ma, that storm last night must have affected the electricity and shut down the fridge for a while, because the milk on my Snicker Snacks is completely sour.”

     His mother was stunned.  “Petey!  You’ve never said a word before this!”

     “Well, gee, Ma,” he replied, “(          ).”

 J4.  “How much are those puppies,. Mister?”

     “Six dollars apiece, Sonny.”

     “Well,  (         )?”

J5.”Ma, can I go next door and play?”

     “What, with those holes in your shirt?”

     “No. (          ).”

J6.”Don’t tell me you fell in the mud with your new pants on!”

     “Well, (         ).”

J7.Johnny came rushing into the house.  “Mom!  Mom!  Jessica fell in the mud up to her shoelaces!  Come quick!”

     “That’s not so terrible,” his mother told him.  “Jessica can just walk out of the mud.”

     “No, she can’t!” cried Johnny.  “(          )!”

J8.A couple of Hollywood kids were having an argument in the park.  “:Yeah?” saiid one, “Well, my father can beat up YOUR father!”

     “Don’t be a sap,” said the other kid.  “(          ).”

J9.”Why, Patty, you’re growing up into quite a young lady!” said Aunt Matilda.  “What do you think you’ll do when you’re as big as I am?”

     The six year-old blinked and said, “(          ).”

J10.The convict broke up to the surface from the tunnel he’d started in his prison cell days before.  “At last!” he shouted.  “I’m free!  I’m free!”

     “Huh!” said the kid whose yard he’d dug up through.  “(          ).”

J11.”As my grandson, you will be expected to adhere to certain principles of decorum.  There are two words I don’t wish you to use, ever.  One is swell and the other is lousy.”

     “Okay, Grandma.  (          )”

J12.”Dad, can I go out and look at the eclipse?”

     “Of course, son.  (          ).”

J13.”Dad, what makes lightning?”

     “Well, that’s one of those things I never did understand.”

     “Dad, how come some of these roses are red and some are white>”

     “Well, I saw something about that online, but I forget just now what it was all about.”

     “Dad, is there more than one kind of grass or is all this the same kind?”

     “Well, sometimes I think so and sometimes I’m not sure.”

     “Dad…oh, well, never mind.”

     “No, you go ahead and ask questions, son.  (          )”

A14.”Dad, what’s long and green, and has long pincers and about a million legs?

     “I don’t know, son.  What?”

     “I don’t know, either.  (          ).””

And, here, just in case you want to see how I phrased them, are the ANSWERS

A1.These are the only feet I’ve got!

A2.IOf they want him, let them come and get him

A3.Up to now, I never had any complaints

A4.How much for a whole one?

A5.With the neighbor kids

A6.I didn’t have time to take ‘em off!

A7.She fell in head first

!8.Your father IS my father

A9.Diet

A10.I’m four.

A11.What are the words?

A12.Don’t stand too close

A13.How else are you ever going to learn?

A14.But one just crawled down your neck.

Another Game of Go

     There was no way we could cover the complex issues covered in modern American outhouse postcards in one column.    I promise we will not dive too deeply into the sociological implications of the cards, as we are certain to come up in worse condition than we went in, but I hope you have noted these cards tend to come from the 1940s and later, at a point when city folk—the type who regularly went on vacations and bought postcards—had indoor plumbing, and could regard the old outhouse as an amusing sidelight on a car trip into less developed regions.

     We have discussed, and one of our loyal readers has commented on, what the outhouse seemed to visitors from the city.  As seen above, it could be an alarming and startling feature of a vacation on the farm.  After a while, it could become customary, and even familiar (this applies primarily to people who stayed for a while in the world of outdoor facilities.)  But even people who were accustomed to the outhouse had to admit it had its uncomfortable side.

     First and foremost,the outdoor toilet was outdoors.  And the body is not prepared to wait out the weather to take care of its own requirements.  This applied to the tourist at a rustic tourist camp

     And to the farm resident who had the joys out year-round trips outdoors.

     Weather aside, there was also the simple fact that the outhouse was, for fairly obvious reasons, located a certain distance from the house.

     There were other disadvantages to having the outhouse outdoors.  Like any structure not constantly occupied by humans, it might become the shelter of any passing wildlife which needed a roof.  The most common resident I’ve heard about was the spider, but any critter who wanted a sheltered space at night, or a dark space during the day, might, and would, take up at least temporary residence, rendering the homely outhouse an air of the modern fairground Halloween haunted abode.

     You might meet anybody on your way to the little house out back.  (By the way, although some of the architectural variations seen here are due to the cartoonists’ designs, outhouses did vary wildly in structure, height, and other factors.  Note that this one is not only small, but seems to have no door.  Molly Picon tells the story of a visitor to the old country who found the family outhouse had no back wall.  When she complained, she was asked “Who knows you from that side?”)

     There were not a LOT of alternatives to using the outhouse, but where there were bushes, these did exist, and sometimes seemed preferable.

     Sometimes extremely preferable.

     And it wasn’t only wildlife which could cause conniptions.  If some of your loving family had warped senses of humor, there were all kinds of ruckus they could raise.

     A cowboy couldn’t even count on his horse or dog for support at times like these.

     On the other hand, the temporary nature of the outdoor toilets (which had to be moved from time to time, allowed for modifications which even city folk could not boast, as seen here with the slide-a-size invention here which allowed you to choose a comfortable seat, unlike your cousins in town who had to make do with One Size Fits All.

     Coming Soon: we Keep Going and Going

Going On the Road

     You weren’t expecting to see a fishing postcard again so soon, eh?  Well, Cheddar Macaroon, you actually are NOT seeing one.  This card is a representative of another mighty theme in postcard sending in the mid-century: the Outhouse Postcard.

     Technically, an “outhouse” is any farm building which has been constructed outside the main house, though large buildings, like the barn or the stable, have their own names.  But a tool shed or a building for miscellaneous storage can, and sometimes is, referred to as an outhouse.  But the outhouse saluted in a great deal of American literature is the outdoor toilet facility, the “little house out back”, as some polite folks called it.  (There are less polite names, and you can look these up if, indeed, you can’t figure out what they are without looking.)

     We do not have space here to cover the spot held by the outhouse in American literature over the past century or so.  The outhouse was becoming a thing of the past a century ago, which some people were grateful for, and others objected to.  A few souls complained that having a sewage line running to the house was unsanitary (those chamberpots were not, I suppose), and some people missed being able to get a moment’s rest outside the house, without the noise of the rest of the family.  (Any parent who has tried to use the indoor toilet alone knows how this worls.)

     So why did they turn up on so many postcards?  Well, for the modern city dweller of the mid twentieth century, the only places one might encounter an outhouse were places one might go on vacation.  And by mid-century, the main buyers and senders of postcards were people on vacation.

     Travelers in the era before the modern gas station with clean, or at least available, restrooms had to find what “rest stops” they could.  (This has to be one of the most popular postcards of the day: the pairing of lorgnette and outhouse was irresistible.)

     And the average tourist cabin or trailer park was so associated with outhouses that  combining the ad for one with a picture of the other became commonplace.

     Publishers vying with each other to see how many bit of wordplay could be fit into one card.

     This column does not choose winners in these competitions.  However….

     Some tourist tra…spots in fact advertised their outhouses rather than the place you were actually coming to see.  (As time went by, these places often kept the outside appearance of an outhouse but put a modern restroom inside, a sort of cheating which most visitors approved.)

     Tourists also encountered the outhouse at popular places where outdoor plumbing had not quite been figured out yet, as in this beach resort where the gag still has me puzzled.  To get paint exactly there, they would have had to sit down with their bathing suits still on, which seems at the very least to be a bit untidy.  I believe I’m overthinking these things again.

     But the days of the rural motel outhouse and its appeal to vacationers was on the wane.  As time went by, more and more of these facilities were modernized, until even roadside rest stops had actual plumbing instead of a hole in the ground.  City dwellers on a trip could simply assume they would find modern conveniences wherever they went.

     Which, of course, could lead to other embarrassments.

Like a Horse and Carriage

     Yes, yes, it’s Old Joke Monday, when we visit portions of a failed book project of mine, a quiz book filled with what were then really old jokes without the punchlines.  Being an expert at old jokes, you are expected to supply the missing bits.  No one has asked, by the way, but yes, there are more jokes in each category than I have shown you here.  So we can keep doing Old Joke Monday for EONS.  It makes me humble to think that, after all these years, I have invented another reason to dread Mondays.

     Today’s theme is jokes about married life, which followed the section on jokes about romance.  It is more logical, now that I look at it, The jokes about romance weren’t all that romantic, and if those people got married, this would no doubt be the result.

J1.”Just got a bicycle for my wife.”

“Really? (          )/”

J2.”My husband is a complete idiot!  He’s driving me nuts!  I can’t sleep or eat, and I’m losing weight!”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

“I will.  (          )”

J3.”You don’t love me any more!  When you leave for work, you won’t even kiss me goodbye!”

“But, my dear (          ).”

J4.”Sir, can you tell our viewers how you managed to stay happily married for eighty years?”

“Well, we decided early on to divide the labor.  My wife makes minor decisions and I make the major ones.  She decided where we should live, where I should get a job, where our kids went to school and things like that.”

“And what do you decide, sir?”

“Well, I make the MAJOR decisions, like (            )”

J5.”I suppose when you got home so late last night you and your wife had words.”

“Yes, but (          ).”

J6.Congressman Brosniky’s wife shook him in the wee hours of the morning.  “Honey,” she whispered, “I think there are burglars in the house!”

     “No, my dear,”: he said sleepily, “(          ).”

J7.Numberless are the things a wife can think of to ask when her husband is drifting off to sleep.  “Henry, Henry!  Did you put the cat out?”

     “Why?  (          ).”

J8.”Henry!  Henry!  I just heard a mouse  squeak!”

     “Well, (         ).”

J9.”Henry, it’s cold outside!  Go close the window!”

     “Mmmm,” said henry, and rolled over.

     Melissa tried again.  “Henry, Henry, get yup and close the window!  It’s cold outside!”

     Henry pulled his nightcap farther down over his head.  Melissa punched him in the shoulder.

     “Henry, you get up right now and close that window!  It’s cold outside!”

     Henry threw off the covers and marched over to the window, slamming it shut.  “There!  (          ).”

J10.The train pulled away just as the couple reached the platform.  “There!” he shouted, “If you hadn’t dawdled and kept going back for things you thought you forgot, we wouldn’t have missed the train!”

     “Yeah,” said his wife, “And if you hadn’t rushed me (          ).”

With any luck, you know all these ANSWERS  only from hearing them in jokes, but here they are.

A1.Wjhere can I get a deal like that?

A2.As soon as I’m down to size 7.

A3.There’s nothing I’d like better than to kiss you goodbye.

A4.Who the President should name to the Supreme Court, whether we should open trade with China, what Congress should do about Social Security, and stuff like that.

A5.I never got to use mine.

A6.In the Senate, perhaps

A7.Is it on fire?

A8.Get up and oil it

A9.So now it’s warm outside?

A10.We wouldn’t have so long to wait for the next one!

Current Events

     Well, let’s have at it, shall we?  I have mentioned the phenomenon and promised that one day we would discuss it, so let’s just get around to the five hundred pound gorilla in the room.  Or, to be more accurate, the five hundred pound woman in the boat.,  The gag is at least as old as the postcard, and probably older: some poor, skinny bloke—the skinnier the better—is trying to take a lady—the larger the better—out on a body of water in a small boat.  The boat needs to be just long enough that the lady’s weight will put the man’s end of the boat up in the air, generally too high for his oars to reach water.  (There are one or two where a family man is at one end of the boat trying to row his entire family, which is crowded at the other end, somewhere, but I hold this to be a different joke  The classic form is a one-on-one match, a symbol of man’s constant striving against the forces of nature, a philosophical…stop.  Way too early to get this deep.  We’ve haven’t even pushed off from the cok yet.)

     These first two examples take their punchlines from the world of pop song.  The first is not, as it might seem, a reference to Row, Row, Row Your Boat—though that would work—but the somewhat cheekier song Row, Row, Row, about a lecherous young man who uses his boat to lure in women, but reserves Sundays for going out with his girl Flo, who apparently adores the way he rows.  (Flo is not a mere passive love object, either, as witness the line “He’d kiss her now and then: she would tell him when”.)

     The second song is more of a world-weary number, a mournful lament by someone who has worked very hard and would like to stop now, please.  Our artist has taken this literally.

     I think there should be a special category among postcards for the ones which nag: nag you to call, to write, to visit, or just to get to work.  This postcard could apply to anyone of those, but sweetens the message by acknowledging that a person can give a hundred and ten percent, throwing himself into a job, and still not get anywhere.  (What is the dog doing, by the way?  Getting ready to catch a fish?  He can’t be admiring his reflection, as the water is rippling, and he doesn’t look desperate enough to be abandoning ship.  In any case, he doesn’t seem to be at all interested in the general predicament, nor does he add much weight to his end of the canoe.)

     Another popular type of postcard is the one which contrasts a cheerful postcard sentiment with a picture of what actually happened (the vacationer who is “making a lot of contacts” is actually covered with mosquitoes, for example.)  This gentleman is completely clueless about what to do next.  Or perhaps, since he got THIS far somehow, he is just wondering why HE didn’t get any ice cream.

     The most popular caption for this sort of picture, though, involves keeping one’s end up.  This phrase stayed current longer in England than in the U.S. but meant pretty much the same thing in both countries.  Derived who knows when from an image of two men carrying a heavy object, which will go nowhere unless both men keep their end of it off the ground, it meant to do what you promised or do what people expected of you.  This is generally completely at odds with what’s going on in the picture—hence part of the fun—and plays daintily with the word “end”.  (Oddly, none of these postcards concentrate much on the LADY’S end, just the end of the boat.  This is not what happens in the most popular postcard to use the phrase, which involves a lady who has failed to jump over the net after a tennis game, and Is keeping her…yes, I know.  I was going to explain it for the slower readers, but we can continue if you’re going to be that way about it.)

     This is a nice use of areal photographic background, to bring the situation home.  AND the couple in the boat have been so compellingly drawn that,. Even though they’re small, they can completely distract you from that background.  (I was looking at it for the third time before I said “Hey, those folks offshore are real!”  yeah, sometimes I’m one of the slower readers myself.)

     That’s one of the few where the boat is actually sinking, but this one is pretty close.  And I believe it’s the young lady who is speaking the line, to the rower’s amazement.

     And this chap has simply seen enough of these postcards to provide himself with an answer to the problem.  These pictures CAN be educational.

Conxider Both Sides

     I don’t much care for guest writers in my spot, but I have allowed a few of them today.  So maybe you’ll find something unexpectedly worth reading  Don’t fret: we’ll get back to normal next time, I promise.

     I have been neglecting half the story of what makes postcards so interesting because it’s generally on the wrong side of the card.    But today I thought we could take a field trip into the world of that unique feature of postcards: the message from the sender.

     Postcard collectors are of two minds about this message.  I wish I had a dollar—or a bullet—for every donor[DC1]  who said “Oh, and here’s a bunch of old postcards.  I threw away the ones with messages on them because I knew you didn’t want those.”  Some collectors DO want the most pristine example available, something that looks as if it just came off the rack five minutes ago.  But others relish the little bits of history which come with a card from Strawberry Point in 1911.

    A lot of these messages will impress you not by the message (Let’s admit it up front: the majority of these messages are “How are you?  I am fine.”) but by the handwriting.  Your expert veteran postcard sender developed a style of lettering which allowed for the maximum message in a small space.

     The beginner can generally be distinguished by their belief that they have way too much room for what little they have to tell.  They start out low on the card, in big letters, and then make their words smaller and smaller as they think of more to tell, with postscripts crammed in wherever they’ll fit,

     Well over a third of the messaged postcards I’ve dealt with have the messages written sideways.  Either this was believed to provide more space, or people knew that if they addressed the card first, and then wrote right to left, they’d wind up smearing the ink of the address (this warning is for right-handed writers only)

     Of course, in the beginning, when postcard messages were considered the least important part (before 1906, only a small white space on the picture side could be used for messages).  So companies gave a larger portion of the back to the address, leaving very little space for communication.

            Diagonal writing appealed to some people: it allowed for longer lines of writing than straight sideways, and gave the illusion of more space

            Besides allowing scope for people who honestly had very little to write.

            Special recognition must be made, of course, for the wise guys like Nick the Bum, as seen above..  And how many postcards were mailed with no sentiment on them but “Guess Who?”  A nice little joke, really, for a penny.

    The best solution really belonged to the era when messages were not allowed on the back of the card at all (though some publishers went on using this into the Divided Back Era.)  If you felt you could trust the US mails to get it through, you could buy romantic little postcards with small envelopes pasted on the front.  In these envelopes would be a small piece of paper which could fold out to respectable size, and which allowed you to write on BOTH sides.

     Some call it American Ingenuity; some call it cheating the system.  Potato, potahto.

 [DC1]

Love Makes the Head Go Round

    Yes, it’s true: we have returned to our Monday of old jokes.  For those teeming millions who have just joined us, these are selections from a quiz book I wrote eons ago, meant to test your knowledge of genuinely antique snippets of humor.  (The first one here can be dated pretty specifically to the 1920s or thereabouts.)  The answers, which you won’t need because you know them already, are left off and supplied at the end of the column.

     Today’s excerpt comes from the chapter called Romance, something a wit once called “the most fun you can have without laughing.”  Maybe laughing helps.

J1.The bandleader called to the audience for requests.  A man in the front ca;;ed “Play a  love song!”

    “Got it,” said the conductor, and nodded to the band, which struck up “Hold That Tiger”.  The man in the front roared, “That’s not a love song!”

     The bandleader shrugged and said, “(          )”

J2.”Have a good time at the movies?” asked Olivia.

     “Men these days!” snapped Velvet.  “I had to change my seat foru times!”

     “Did someone try to flirt with you?”

     Velvet snorted, “(          )”

J3.Tim ran into Emmett at a class reunion.  “I suppose you’re married now,” Tim said.

     “Not so far,” said Emmett.  “I’ve been proposing for years without avail.”

     “Oh,” said Tim.  “Well, maybe )         ).”

J4.”You’re dating Velvet?  How’s it going?”

     “Well, last week I took her candy and we went to the movies.  Monday night I gave her flowers and took her to dinner.  Do you think I should kiss her>”

     “Heck, no.  (          ),.”

J5.Jerry wasn’t all that interested in how his nails looked, but the manicurist at the barber shop was a stunner, so he agreed to have his nails done while he got a shave and a haircut.  The more he looked, the more he liked, so he asked, “What time do you get off work?  I know a little place off geothe Street….”

     “Sorry, siir,” she said. “I’m married.”

     “Why not ask your husband if he minds if you’re late getting home tonight?” Jerry said.  “He might be a swingerm, too.”

     “You can ask him yourself,” she told him.  “(          ).”

J6.Elroy found himself in an old-fashioned building where the elevators were still run by hand. The uniformed operator in his elevator was an attractive young woman, so he sidled up right next to her and struck up a conversation.  “This job must be really tiring, with all the stops and starts all day long.”

     “It’s not the stops and starts that bother me,” she told him, “(          )”

J7.”I do worry about you since you moved into your own place,” said Ada’s mother.  “When you go out on a date you don’t invite the man up to your apartment, do you?”

     “Of course not,” said Ada.  “Last night’s date took me to his place.  (         ).”

J8.”Want to dance with me?” said Amanda.

     “I’m a little stiff from bowling,” Roland replied.

     “Oh,” said Amanda.  “(          ).”

J9.”O brought you this candy,” said Bob.  Sweets to the sweet.”

     “Thank you,” said Kathy.  “)         _”

J10.”How was your date with Phil?”

     “Some date!  I had to slap him five times!”

     “To keep him from getting ftresh?”

     “(          )”

This is the place where you check to see whether you phrased the ANSWERS better than I did,

A1.It is to a tiger.

A2.Eventually

A3.you should try a veil

A4.You’ve done enough for her already!

A5.He’s shaving you

A6.It’s the jerks.

A7.Let HIS mother worry

A8.I don’t care where you’re from

A9.Have some nuts

A10.To keep him awake!

High Tech, Bye Tech

     Once upon a time, when I was young, I was given a digital watch.  Digital wristwatches were a VBD (Very Big Deal), as this technology was still very new and seen only on the arms of those who were AOTC (Ahead of the Curve).  It was such a new technology that, like most new things, it was exceedingly expensive.  Sears Roebuck, the source of my watch, in fact offered a cheaper and more reliable alternative, which is what I received.  It was actually an analog wristwatch where the gears inside had been designed so that instead of turning hands on a face, they turned discs under a face.  At 8:99, these discs pulled the eight, a zero, and another zero under the openings for hours and minutes, and, as sixty seconds ticked away, gradually pulled up a 1 to replace to the second zero.  It was ingenious, intricate, and obsolete within a few weeks.  The LEWD display was refined to a point at which it appears on most of our devices (Digital watches were for a short time available for a dollar in vending machines, but this was still in the day when putting four quarters into a vending machine spoke of Conspicuous Consumption.)  All the work which went into producing an analog digital watch was pushed aside as the world moved on.

     History is filled with such examples of high tech wonders which are now utterly, utterly consigned to the back shelves of closets.  I never owned a beeper, nor yet a Blackberry, but I did own a portable word processor.  Word Processing goes way back to the nineteenth century: businesses desperately wanted devices which could produce copies of letters without someone having to copy them longhand.  (Yes, for years people filed letters by putting them under tracing paper in a ledger and tracing the entire letter.  If you have an Abraham Lincoln letter which is on transparent paper with a big blue number up in the corner, you may, er, want to reconsider your retirement plans.)

     You may check the history of word processing devices elsewhere, how the word processing typewriter was supposed to be an essential for any high-tech office (t was a typewriter which could record keystrokes on magnetic tape, so a letter someone else had been written could be called up and edited).  The glory days of the word processor, as far as retail stores are concerned, was the period between the invention of the personal computer and the realization that a personal computer would be useful to someone who was NOT a techno-geek.  My word processor was a device about the size of a three-ring binder, with a screen which showed about 600 characters at a time (you scrolled to see longer documents) and could store nearly a hundred pages of material in its memory.  It was ideal for people who wanted to write letters or short stories on the go.  It could be connected to someone’s computer printer and print pages, too (otherwise, why bother?)

     You know what happened.  The personal computer took over the market, with its word processing software.  The portable word processor lingered a while, for people to use on a bus or airplane (the battery was good for a whole hour) until phones and tablets took their place.  (My word processor would NOT, for example, hook up to the Internet so I could send my prose elsewhere.  The Internet as we know it hadn’t been invented yet.)

     But the greatest niche invention of my youth is one so thoroughly forgotten now that a quick Internet search turned up no references to it whatsoever.  It was an educational product which was so fascinating in itself that I remember not one second of the content, though I remember the technology very well.

    Those of my generation will remember what watching an educational film in class meant.  The shades would be pulled, the lights would be switched off, and then the teacher, or some tech savvy kid, would thread the film through the sprockets, fit it into the take-up reel, and switch on the projector.  If everything worked, the sound would blare, the picture would appear on the screen, and the film would collect on that all-important take-up reel (and not coil into piles on the floor,.)  Afterward, the whole thing would need to be done backward so the movie would be on its original reel.  (Some of you from the generation which did this on videocassette, at least, will remember rewinding.)

     This was a LOT of work, and, of course, so a technology was sought which would avoid all this.  Different kinds of film loops were used, which at least obviated the necessity for rewinding, but few of these caught on until some genius came up with the film loop cartridge.  Suddenly, just about any moron could show a film: you took the cartridge, jammed it into the back of the projector, and pressed “PLAY”.  The cartridges were not big: about one minute’s worth of movie was all that could be easily stored in a cartridge.  But that was enough for some purposes: in shop class or a science lab, one process could be shown over and over (since the loop would repeat until switched off.)  It could be viewed in limited space: no longer did that tech-savvy student also have to set up a screen.  One could sit in a cubicle and watch instructions on how to light a Bunsen burner a hundred times in a row, if that amused you.

     The other niche market for this technology weas, of course, pornography, where watching the same procedure over and over…okay, I thought you’d get it.

     Less than three years after this appeared in my chemistry class, the videocassette came to my school.  Now up to eight hours of material could be slid into a slot on a device and, provided your tech-savvy kid hooked up the TV properly, could be watched straight through.  The ability to watch one minute of film over and over seemed suddenly less magic. The loop cartridge projector joined the analog digital watch and the laptop word processor in the hall of Great Forgotten Inventions.  (Maybe some time we’ll discuss wire recordings, or that chap who invented a way of recording sound long before Edison played his first phonograph.  If the chap had just thought of a way to play back his recordings….)