Bring Out Your Dead

Guess what's happening in this picture -- Dia de los muertos? CSI exhumation? Art show?


It's an antique sale -- and the antiques are dead people. Note to self: if the bones are old, the state of Ohio stops worrying about whether or not they're human remains. Addendum note to self: there are some creepy, creepy collectors.

How To Be a Super Secretary

Super-Secretaries aren't born on another planet nor created in the neutron fire of an atomic exposion -- no, they just know how to behave in the workplace:

See all the rules here.

Modern Woman Monday: Get Myself A Girl Like You

An old promotional invitation for the After Easter Ball, arranged by the White Lily Socials, at the Bahn Frei Turn Hall, Sat. Eve., April 13, 1912.


Printed on the back, is the following cheeky and charming song:

I've Got to Go and Get Myself a Girl Like You

Little Miss Muffet sat down on a tuffet, whatever a tuffet may be,
When young Sammy Snyder sat down right beside her and spoke unto her soothingly;
Be quite alarmless, for I am quite harmless,
But I saw you were human like me,
So I thought I might sit and look at you a bit,
And this is the answer, said he,
The more of you I see
The more my heart tells me:

REFRAIN:

I've got to go and get myself a girl like you,
That's some job to do,
For they come feew, but believe me,
If I can't find one just like you,
I don't care who you belong to,
I'll come right back again,
Right straight back again and steal you.

Little Miss Muffet stood up on her tuffet, and said, Vas is los mit your head,
You're feverish, mercy, run right home to nursie and tell her to put you to bed;
Where can you find sir, a girl of my kind, sir,
If your optics could "op" you would see,
That while boys will be boys and while girls will be girls,
There is only one me, and that's me.
Said he, I guess that's so
But still I guess I'll go.

Hoidy Toidy

My, how toilet seat technology has improved: today, you can get barbed wire embedded in them, or get ones that add unimaginable degrees of functionality of your regular toilet, but in the sixties you just had appliques:

Realize: this ad is a full-page in the Home Modernizing Guide, full-color, towards the beginning...it cost a lot of scratch to get your fractal fleur-de-lis in front of someone just dying to replace their already uncomfortable hard toilet seat with something exactly the same -- except for a little image on the cover. This, in 1965, was "a step up to a new high in bathroom elegance" -- which leads me to believe that American Standard thought the previous level of bathroom elegance was simply having a toilet seat to cover the hole.



Yup, that's all of them -- "delicate sea horses...gay bouquets...golden fleur-de-lis...handsome arabesque arrangements" -- molded into the cover with raised detail, so that as you're scrubbing the seat down you won't rub off the sea horses. I don't think I've ever lived used a potty with pictures on the seats; any sort of brownish, greenish details are off-putting to me, but those seem to be the key colors here. In the sixties and seventies, harvest gold and olive green were de rigeur home interior colors, but I can't imagine why anyone thought they'd be good toilet colors. I guess I shouldn't talk; our toilet seat is a plain-old white model...if only I could rub my bare butt on one of these fine examples of bathroom elegance, I'd change my tune.