Follies of the Mad Men #74

[From Good Housekeeping for December 1949.]

"Subliminal" is not the precise word I want here. Not when the coded message is in big red letters.

"Subtextual?" "Off-topic?" "Suggestive?"

In any case, promoting the maxim "husbands beat wives" in a women's magazine was one way of keeping the girls in line, I guess.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Oct 25, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Domestic, Marriage, Food, Violence, Husbands, Wives, 1940s

All Hail Marshmallow Fluff!

Every year the people of Massachusetts celebrate one of their most noble products, Marshmallow Fluff, in a festival called "What the Fluff." A prime component of the festival are the dancers known as the Flufferettes. Watch them below, then take a tour of the Fluff factory.

Read about the latest festival here.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Sep 27, 2009 - Comments (5)
Category: Food, Parades and Festivals, Regionalism, North America

Deep Fried Butter

I don't have the calorie count, but I'm guessing this product can't be too healthy. Still, I want some. Here's the link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32665106/ns/today-today_food_and_wine/

I really want the grape flavored one.

Posted By: gdanea - Fri Sep 04, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Food

Tactical Canned Bacon

You now never have to worry about having bacon handy after the apocalypse with Tactical Canned Bacon. The bacon, which has a shelf life of ten plus years, is being sold over at Think Geek. The nine ounce cans contains fifty four slices of highly preserved crispy pieces of bacon.

Posted By: mdb777 - Fri Sep 04, 2009 - Comments (3)
Category: Food

Good Wrinkles

A twenty-minute cartoon about prunes? Now, that's weird!

Posted By: Paul - Tue Sep 01, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Food, Cartoons, Documentaries, 1950s

Another Helping of Food Related Weirdness - 4

First up, let's take a moment to savour pest control, Texas Style. Farmer Skip Smith, from Dublin, TX, is so fed up with feral hogs busting in to his watermelon patch and eating his crops that he’s fighting back with the aid of night-vision goggles and a silenced, fully automatic machine-gun. “The same thing that our forces use in Iraq, we're just using them on animals," Smith said, “we shoot about 45 to 50 a week on 1000 acres." Which is a hell of a lot of free bacon (ABC).

But if there is one food that might possibly challenge bacon as the mightily meaty master of my heart, it would be southern fried chicken. So what could be better than a sandwich that includes both? Well, how about one that leaves out that pointless bread stuff and puts the slices of gorgeous bacon between two hot, fresh fried chicken fillets? That is the idea behind what some reports are claiming is the latest creation from KFC, the “double-down” sandwich. Bacon, cheese and the “Colonel’s special sauce” are sandwiched between the chain’s house-style fried chicken in a heart-stopping 1200 calorie mouthful. And the day this launches near me officially marks the end of my banana diet (AJC).



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Wed Aug 26, 2009 - Comments (8)
Category: Agriculture, Animals, Cops, Exercise and Fitness, Food, Candy, Guns

Badger Casserole

It's all badgers, all the time, here at WU!

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jul 28, 2009 - Comments (2)
Category: Animals, Food, Transportation

Chocolate Just Got Better!

Swiss chocolate manufacturer Barry Callebaut, who supply such companies as Cadburys and Nestlé, think they may be on to a winner after secretly developing a type of chocolate with 10% of the calories of the ordinary kind, and which melts at nearly twice its temperature. The company hopes the new chocolate, codenamed "Vulcano", will appeal both to health-conscious Western markets and to Asian and African consumers who have traditionally shunned chocolate because it melts too readily in the local climate. The new recipe stays hard up to 55°C (130°F) and has crispy, light texture according to Barry Callebaut food engineer Simone Cantz (The Guardian).

FYI: Chocolate was, as everyone knows, invented/discovered by the Aztecs. But what is less well known is that they did so at least 3000 years ago, and were probably trying to make beer. Anthropologists John Henderson, of Cornell University, and Rosemary Joyce, of University of California, discovered cacao residues on pottery vessels dating back to 1000 BCE that are believed to be from a drink formed by fermenting the pulp and seeds (PNAS).

(Image by Wikipedia.)

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Fri Jul 17, 2009 - Comments (20)
Category: Food, Candy, Nutrition, History, Archaeology, Products

Got Milk?

Let's have a vote. Is this commercial supposed make you thirsty for milk, or make you laugh milk out of your nose?

Posted By: fyshstyxx - Fri Jul 17, 2009 - Comments (10)
Category: Food, Television, Asia

Swine Ebola - No Joke!

As if "swine flu" wasn't bad enough, Scientific American is reporting that the Ebola virus has been detected in domestic pigs in the Philippines. The particular strain of the virus, Reston ebolavirus, is not known to cause fatal haemorrhagic fever in humans, but is still rated a class 4 pathogen by the US Center for Disease Control (it's highest rating) because of the extreme fatality rate and absence of effective treatment of the disease caused by other Ebola viruses. One farmhand who worked with the pigs has also tested positive for R.ebolavirus, but is asymptomatic.

In this case it seems like most likely that the pigs caught the disease from the human rather than the other way round. However that pigs can catch and potentially pass on the organism to humans is an unexpected, and worrying, development. Michael McIntosh of the Department of Agriculture expressed concern not only that the Reston strain might mutate into something more deadly in its new host, but that the other disease-causing strains might also be using pigs as a reservoir. "What is the level of risk?" said McIntosh, "We really don't know" (Scientific American Article) (Paper in Science).

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Sat Jul 11, 2009 - Comments (8)
Category: Agriculture, Animals, Armageddon and Apocalypses, Food, Health, Disease