Jessica Krane was the inventor of "face-o-metrics." This was a technique for removing wrinkles by stroking your face. At least, Krane claimed that wrinkles would disappear.
I like that the blurb on the jacket of her book declares, "BASIC WOO is for you— and so is EXTENDED WOO!"
'Basic Woo' was one of her wrinkle-removal techniques, but of course 'woo' can also mean bunk, poppycock, etc. Was the highlighting of this word some kind of surreptitious message to readers from a copywriter?
My Macbook's dictionary notes that the meaning of 'woo' as bunk originated in the 1970s "probably in imitation of a wailing sound traditionally attributed to ghosts and humorously associated with mysticism and the supernatural." So, since Krane's book was published in 1969, 'woo' wouldn't have yet had it's modern meaning. Still, an odd coincidence.
No one likes to make fun of THE FAMILY CIRCUS more than I. In fact, if you go beyond the jump, you'll see a couple of samples of the re-captioned cartoons I frequently post on Facebook.
But I have to say that I have new admiration for Bil Keane after reading about his somewhat gutsy and altruistic trip to Vietnam.
In 1963 and 1964, Sheaffer Pen ran an ad campaign in which they made a variety of predictions about future technologies of the 21st century. The company contrasted these technologies, which must have seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky at the time, with the timeless performance of a Sheaffer pen. The surprising thing is that all their predictions have come true: instant mail delivery, checkbooks that balance themselves electronically, portable visual phones, ring tape recorders, camera sunglasses, credit card rings, electronic translators.
They don't all exist in the specific form that Sheaffer imagined (credit card rings?), but in each case the equivalent or better exists.
As far as I can tell, the term "stacked job" (as it was used in 1960s-era computing) was roughly equivalent to what today would be called 'batch processing'. It was a stack of jobs (or programs) to be run by the computer.
When the Northern Arizona University Data Processing Club came up with the idea of awarding a young woman the title of "Miss Stacked Job," they admitted, "We didn't know how many, if any, girls would want the title." They ended up with ten contestants. Kathe Kline was the winner.
As far as I can tell, the selection of a "Miss National Car Care Queen" was a one-off event, not repeated in subsequent years.
But it managed to attract the attention of George Kirstein, owner of The Nation magazine, who included it in a story he wrote titled "The Day the Ads Stopped" (pdf), published in The Nation in June 1964. The story imagined a future America in which all advertising had been banned and as a result:
One could no longer discover from reading the Times, or any other paper, who had been named Miss National Car Care Queen or who had won the Miss Rheingold contest.
In late August of 1968, 22-year-old Tibor Sarossy set a record by riding a motorcycle from New York to Los Angeles in 45 hours, 41 minutes. He had rigged up extra fuel tanks on the back of his bike so that he only had to stop for gas four times. Also, he wore a condom connected to a hosepipe to avoid stopping for bathroom breaks.
Attempting to set a speed record for driving across the United States is known as doing a Cannonball Run. The term traces back to 1914 when Erwin Baker was nicknamed "Cannonball" by the media after he drove his motorcycle coast-to-coast in 11 days and 11 hours. That may seem slow today, but it was before modern highways and widely available gas stations. So, for the time and driving conditions, it was incredibly fast.
The current motorcycle record for a Cannonball Run is 32 hours, 27 minutes set by Felix Hofmann in October 2023.
Sears had commissioned famous actor and art collector, Vincent Price, to assemble a collection of art and gallery paintings that would be merchandised through its stores, making fine art more accessible to all Sears’ customers. They gave Price carte blanche to travel the world to put the collection together. After that first opening in Denver, the program was broadened with exhibits of art in ten additional Sears stores and after the first 1,500 pieces of art has been sold, it was expanded nationwide to all Sears stores. The program ended in 1971, but more than 50,000 original artworks had been sold during its time.
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.