What’s going on here? Sideburns and Leisure Suit are actually showing astronaut Story Musgrave (yes, Story!) a fancy new shuttle vehicle at the Johnson Space Center in 1976. Chemist Robert Clarke and physiologist Charles Sawin assess Story’s reaction, hoping he doesn’t spill his morning coffee. Story will turn 85 next month, still the most formally educated astronaut with six academic degrees.
A patron of a Viennese wine garden refills his glass from a weinheber. A fat cigar, fine wine, a plate of cured meats, perhaps some friendly company. What else could one want? The article from which this came declares this image as an example of the German word, gemutlichkeit, which we’re all going to learn today.
Behance.net defines it as, “A feeling of friendliness and coziness that comes from drinking in a beer garden.” They created this next poster, which you might find helpful, should you choose to add more words to your vocabulary. Perhaps a little humpen and hopfen is in order.
Actually, this isn’t Austin at all. It was in downtown Cincinnati at something called D’aug Days back in the 70s. I used to be more tolerant of weirdness in my youth. Perhaps this is just interpretative dance. But as I age, I understand all the feelings of that family of four. The moon goddess doesn’t need your shaken tambourine, hippies. Go stretch your hip flexors back at the commune. This ground is filthy, and you’re going to get hepatitis–and you probably don’t have insurance, even though that’s the law, so my tax dollars will be paying for your antibiotics. This is clearly not the safety dance.
It’s WWII. An injured soldier tolerates appreciates the twang of a skilled Red Cross Gray Lady, plucking the strings of an autoharp. Why Gray Lady, you ask? Because she has gray hair? No. Gray Ladies were volunteers who performed non-medical services to sick, injured, or disabled patients. They were not nurses, but they could read to patients, write letters home for them, or in this case, perform talents worthy of an appearance on Star Search. My question is: why isn’t he donning an open-backed hospital gown? Instead, he sports a Chinese stand collar, frog button jacket, as though he is dressed for his shift at The Golden Tiger. I don’t get it.
Mrs. James Caufield (because magazines didn’t care about married women’s first names) shapes cotton gloves at the Prairie Glove plant in Carlinville, Illinois on what appears to be a giant fork. At this point in 1967, the firm employed 170 townspeople and churned out 10,000 pairs a week. Is it me, or do they look Goliath-sized?
Personally, we’ve stopped our usage of gloves and simply wear masks and use sanitizer as of late–some wonderfully smelling ones from Bath & Body that we procured yesterday in a clean, manly scent, as well as a Sunshiney lemon one. It is a bit disconcerting to watch a waitress wearing the same gloves at an outdoor restaurant, bring your drinks (touching the rims, which was a HUGE server no-no back in my day), then touch your neighbor’s plates, etc, throughout the entire meal. I would have rathered she just washed her hands repeatedly. Such is our new learning curve.
I’m still surprised how hard it is for folks to figure out how to use gloves, that as soon as they are covered in germs, you toss them, instead of climbing into your car and grabbing your wheel and touching your radio and yanking the emergency breaks. Now you’ve just transferred all the nasty germs all over your car. Folks are stupid. Guess we should stick to the OG gloves when this pandemic is over.
Just look at the grin on the fellow biting his lower lip, as President Warren G (the president, not the rapper) Harding throw out the baseball to start the April 1922 season. Guess that didn’t happen this year.
The originator of the tradition was the portly and oft-ridiculed President William Howard Taft, seen throwing out the first pitch at a Washington Senators game in 1910. (AP Photo, File)
Good form, sir!
But before you go, let’s make sure that you have one bit of trivia in that noggin of yours about our 27th president, that has nothing to do with his size (which seems to have vacillated from 243 in college to a high of 330 and then down again). His father was a former US Attorney General, and he himself was named by President Warren Harding (above) to the Supreme Court in 1921. Yes, he was the Chief Justice of the US. And no, he never got stuck inside a bathtub.
I Don't Get It 