Month: January 2020

Orange You Glad You’re Not A Wicker-Weaver?

Famagustan orange baskets make their way to Livadhia, where hopefully, a wicker market exists.

Nat Geo July 1928

Main Street has yet to be paved, and the donkeys tire easily.

The goats, however, are doing just fine, thank you very much.

If oranges prove to be in short supply in Livadhia, the baskets can be used for other things.

What could go wrong?

When The Substitute Is Wearing White Diamonds

The Dust Bowl by Duncan & Burns

If you’ve frequented this blog, you know I loooooooathe White Diamonds. Having endured the presence of not one, but two Boomer women in my life who sported the scent, I can honestly say that it makes my stomach churn. Colognes are so subjective. In any event, these poor kids wish they were breathing the scent of rank perfume. Instead, they were stuck in an Oklahoma one-room school smack dab in the middle of the Depression, covering their mouths against the dust that had permeated the air and suffocated cattle. Dust pneumonia, aka the brown plague, proved lethal for children and the elderly. Makes the cedar pollen plumes of smoke in my home state seem tame.

Photo by Bert Garai/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Paddle Away From Lena

KU Delt pledges dubbed Lena the Hyena as Queen of their Paddle Party in 1946, the same year cartoonist Al Capp Capp introduced Lena as the “ugliest woman in the world.” So hideous that Capp could not bear to render her, he enlisted his readers (in 381 newspapers where his L’il Abner comic strip was seen) to send in their drawing of what they thought Lena looked like. Over 500,000 readers responded. Al Capp persuaded Boris Karloff, Salvador Dali and Frank Sinatra to judge the drawing and the winner was the cartoonist Basil Wolverton. His rendering is what you see above. (https://www.tattooarchive.com)

Personally, I think his grotesque work looks like he was on an endless bad acid trip, but it takes all kinds of artists, and to each his own. Below are tame examples of his other renderings and styles.

https://www.slideserve.com/