Darryl Gammill came up with a way to convert stock-price movements into music. The result was the release in 1985 of "Rhapsody in Big Blue," which was a musical rendition of IBM's stock activity between April 1984 to April 1985.
I haven't been able to find any samples of the album online. I can't even find any used copies of it for sale. This was evidently an extremely obscure record release.
Some explanatory text about reamers from their old website:
Reamers, also known to many as orange juice squeezers or juicers, are one of the fastest growing collectibles in America today. The main reason for this is time and efficiency. They have been replaced by electric juicers which perform the function of squeezing juice faster, and frozen concentrate which makes providing juice to a busy family in today's society an easier task.
The reamers were invented over 200 years ago out of necessity when it was discovered that citrus provided a cure for diseases like scurvy. The first reamers were all producted in Europe. Major china companies such as Bayreuth, Miessen, Royal Rudolstadt and Limoges produced reamers for some of the finer tables in Europe.
The first reamer was patented in the United States around 1867, after the Civil War. It was a hand held reamer. Next came the one piece reamer with a small saucer and a cone that was meant to fit on top of a glass. These were quite messy as they slid and slipped off of the glass. In the 1880's a glass rim was added to the bottom of the saucer to help keep the reamer on the glass. Around the same time, wooden squeezers with a press action were also being used. Two-piece sets with measuring pitcher bottoms and separate reamer tops did not come along until the mid 1920's.
The biggest boom for reamers came in 1907 when a a co-op named the "California Fruit Growers Exchange" was formed. This co-op marketed the name Sunkist to sell fruit to the east coast. Sunkist reamers were produced as a promotional item. However, not until 1916 when the "Drink an Orange" campaign was launched, were reamers marketed to the masses.
I have an old glass reamer — a family hand-me-down. I didn't know it was called a reamer, nor that it was something people might collect.
The Select-A-Size mirror, invented by Milton Doolittle, had a knob you could turn to make yourself look slimmer or fatter. As explained in the 1976 Canadian patent:
A mirror has an upper portion which is held in flat condition by being secured in the upper portion of a vertically extending frame. The integral lower portion of the mirror is flexible, and its curvature is variable about a vertical axis, so that by varying the curvature of the lower portion, there is provided an image of the appearance of a person's body after a weight loss, the upper flat portion reflection a true reflection of the person's face, which would change comparatively little, if at all, after a weight loss. The curvature of the mirror lower portion is varied by rotation of a knob threadedly engaging a screw that moves a lever connected to the mirror. The mirror is supported on a stand or a wall support by a vertically movable member in a hollow tube at the back of the mirror, so that it may be vertically adjusted to reflect the face of people of different heights in the flat portion of the mirror.
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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