Hula dancing on a bomb.

Leatherneck - Magazine of the Marines - Sep 1954
Any user today of word-processing software knows instantly how many words a document contains. Could similar information be obtained for a typewritten document? Certainly!
The US Patent Office features several documents for similar devices, but I'm not sure they were ever produced. They had the theoretical advantage of also being hooked to various punctuation keys, so that when you hit such a key, the counter would also recognize the end of a word, as well as with the space bar.
Source.
A new shade of nail polish from Nails.INC which promises that "the cheese scent will appear when fully dry."
That doesn't sound like a good thing.
And of course, there's the obligatory warning: "While our polish is cheese-scented, it is (unfortunately) not made of VELVEETA. Please don’t eat it."
More info:
nailsinc.com
from the wu archive
"The patient lifted himself by the chin which was cradled in a sling attached to ropes looped to an overhead beam."
In 1937, the American Medical Association warned the public that this device, despite being widely advertised, didn't actually work.

The Muncie Star Press - Apr 9, 1937
Update: The inventor of this device was a man named Bernard Bernard who was, himself, only 5 feet 1 inch tall. Details from
Hygeia (May 1936):
Another scheme exhibited at the World's Fair was the "Height-Increaser," consisting of a self hanging apparatus with a place for the head and with handles to be gripped with the hands. Fixed to an overhead beam, it was guaranteed to add inches to the growth. The promoter, Bernard Bernard, wrote touching advertisements berating the life of a small man and pointing out that his height-increaser was the road to being a "he-man." He admitted that the apparatus cost him 75 cents, but he sold 3,000 of them for $8.75 each. Bernard, who is only 5 feet, 1 inch tall, explained he had never had the time to increase his own height through his device, although he was then 38 years old.

LA Times - July 31, 1932

LA Times - May 1, 1930
Two news stories, published over 20 years apart (1955 and 1976), described beauty contests in the Philippines that were combined with rat-extermination campaigns.
Local residents decided to help the government’s rat extermination campaign by electing as town beauty queen the girl whose admirers deposited the greatest number of rat tails.
The 1976 story makes it sound like the contestants themselves were expected to do the rat-catching. I assume that's a mistake, though it would be interesting to see rat catching included in the talent section of the Miss America competition.

Pasadena Independent - July 27, 1955

Miami News - Feb 18, 1976
Update: Some more digging into the newspaper archive has yielded plenty of other stories on this topic. The practice seems to get reported in western newspapers about once a decade. Apparently using rat tails to vote in beauty contests is a long-established Filipino custom.
Weird Fact: hymn singing can cause mink to kill and eat their young.

Vancouver Sun - Dec 8, 1959
Just as exciting as it sounds!
More info here.