For Carl Andre is a 1970 artwork by Lynda Benglis. It consists of a heap of polyurethane foam sitting in the corner of a room. It's owned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The title refers to the sculptor Carl Andre, known for his ultra-minimalist works. For instance, one of Andre's more famous works, Equivalent VIII, consisted of a rectangular stack of bricks. The Fort Worth Art Museum catalog notes:
Benglis uses Andre's name in her piece, but the point she makes is not strictly pejorative. The work is an ironic and humorous homage to Andre's art, which is characteristically made of ordered, flat, modular shapes combined with simple slabs of metal or stone that sit directly on the floor or, like Benglis's piece, are installed in the corner.
So it's not "strictly pejorative," but maybe it's slightly so? Or satirical?
Apparently the contest continued beyond 1956 (first and second images), because the advertisement that follows is from 1959.
Ann Daly (No. 25) screams as she is declared "Miss Color-TV" in beauty contest at Palisades Amusement Park, N.J.; other contestants stand alongside her.
The future in which our energy needs were met by white clover never materialized.
I wonder if there was something special about white clover that produced more/better gas? Or had they simply succeeded in producing the kind of biogas that can be derived from any plant material?
St. Lous Post-Dispatch - Nov 17, 1935
Lowry City Independent - Dec 26, 1935
Two Students Learn Secret of Clover Gas
ST. Paul, Minn. Nov. 6 (1935) — Discovery of a method for manufacturing a commercially adaptable gas from ordinary clover was claimed today by Dean R.U. Jones, head of the MacAlaster college chemistry department, for two of his students.
Dean Jones attributed "great possibilities" to the discovery. William Mahle and Harold Ohlgren, the latter a football star, said they developed the gas from a secret process, accidentally encountered.
Both seniors, Marle and Ohlgren conducted experiments under the direction of Dean Jones and Prof. R.B. Hastings of the college physics department. They worked with white clover plucked from roadsides.
"I am convinced," Dean Jones said, "there are great possibilities in the boys' discovery, and I believe it can be worked out commercially. I am proud of the boys, for I gave them a problem and they went far ahead of me."
I would have enjoyed seeing the dogs emerge from the viol itself, but--as I interpret the patent--they are in the box at the base of the instrument. Still, a musical instrument filled with beer is also acceptable.
In her 1690 pamphlet Mundus Muliebris, Mary Evelyn included a recipe for a woman's facial lotion. She called it "Puppidog Water for the Face":
Take a Fat Pig, or a Fat Puppidog, of nine days old, and kill it, order it as to Roast; save the Blood, and fling away nothing but the Guts; then take the Blood, and Pig, or the Puppidog, and break the Legs and Head, with all the Liver and the rest of the Inwards . . . to that, take two Quarts of old Canary, a pound of unwash’d Butter not salted; a Quart of snails-Shells, and also two Lemmons . . . Still all these together in a Rose Water Still . . . Let it drop slowly into a Glass-Bottle, in which let there be a lump of Loaf-Sugar, and a little Leaf-Gold.
The recipe was intended to be satirical, but Fenja Gunn, in her 1973 book The Artificial Face: A History of Cosmetics, notes that it was satire rooted in contemporary realities — notably the persistent rumor that Elizabeth I's pomade was made from puppy dog fat, and the seventeenth-century belief that drinking puppy dog urine was good for the complexion.
The medicinal use of puppies, known for their moisturising quality, is detailed in French physician Ambroise Paré's The Method of Curing Wounds by Gun-Shot (1617), which included a recipe for a healing balm that requires boiling two young whelps. The same recipe can be found in Nicholas Culpeper's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1653). To make 'Oleum Catellorum or Oil of Whelps,
Takes Sallet Oil four pound, two Puppy-dogs newly whelped, Earthworms washed in white Wine one pound; boil the Whelps til they fall in pieces then put in the worms a while after strain it, then with three ounces of Cypress Turpentine, and one ounce of Spirits of Wine, perfect the Oil according to Art.
Dr. Pepper celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1960, and in honor of this ran a contest with the unusual prize of a diamond doorknob. Specifically: "a doorknob of special design encrusted with 50 small diamonds and a huge two-carat, blue-white diamond mounted in its center. As the grand award the diamond doorknob will be attached to a $25,000 Swift Home having a family-size Refinite-Shedon swimming pool in its backyard and a new Rambler station wagon in its driveway."
Edith Dillion of Roanoke, VA eventually won the prize. Reportedly she sold the house but kept the doorknob. And perhaps the doorknob is still owned by the Dillion family.
Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.
Chuck Shepherd
Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre.
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