Kansas City News Blog

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Paint Me the Story of Frankenstein

Authors: Dennis Green (text) and Derek Fox (art)

Date: 1976

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlop

The Cover Promises: "A book to scare you out of your wits! And who paints the pictures? YOU!"

Or: Oddly bossy kids-book fun in the tradition of "Dance Me the Tale of Paul Bunyan" and "Pee Me in the Snow the Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

Discovered at: Half Price Books, Overland Park

Either a dream-along treat for imaginative kids or some cynical feat of art-job outsourcing, Dennis Green and Derek Fox's Paint Me the Story of Frankenstein insists that readers participate in a mad scientist's act of unholy creation. The book's shoddiness notwithstanding, that's kind of cool, and your Crap Archivist supports the authors' decision to force kids' imaginative participation in Mary Shelley's story through painting rather than corpse-exhuming.

Green and Fox hew closely to Shelley's original. As always, Dr. Frankenstein quickly learns the first lesson of R&D: When crafting an abomination before God, manage expectations, even in the prototype stage.

​NOTE: this scene takes place not long after Dr. Frankenstein quit The Guess Who.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

You Would If You Loved Me

Author: Sol Gordon, Ph.D
Date: 1978
Publisher: Bantam Books

Discovered at: Avenue Thrift, Kansas City, Kansas

The Cover Promises: "Sex Lines! You've heard them. You've tried them. Here's What you can do about them."

In short, snappy answers to stupid come-ons!

Representative Quotes:

• "Don't worry. You'll only bleed a little." (page 69).

• "Male: I just oiled my machine. Want to see how it works?
  Female: Why don't you give it a cold shower and see if it rusts?" (page 15)

Americans have never found it easy to sit their children down and not have the big talk about sex, so it's only natural that, eventually, we have left such awkward non-discussions to the schools, where not explaining condoms, pregnancies, or the ins-and-outs of ins-and-outs has in many districts been official curriculum for over a decade. The small price to pay for this convenience? Record outbreaks of chlamydia.

Thirty years back, parents had fewer options. To help out, Sol Gordon, PhD, has stuffed a paperback with hundreds of the "lines" young men have purportedly used to talk young women into bed. Unlike sex-ed, he covers all the bases, from the evergreen "Let's make tonight something to remember," to the boastful "The hookers usually pay me afterwards," to the educational "It is said that having sex on the Jewish sabbath is a double mitzvah -- which means 'good deed.'"

Also: "Are you a dyke or something?"

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Scientific American

Date: August 23, 1913

Discovered at: Westport Antiques

Representative Quotes:

• "Probably the first whole-hearted aerial attack in modern warfare will be delivered from a very large and safe dirigible, a craft that can at least boast of a practical firing platform, notwithstanding the danger of conflagration." (page 142).

• "Pedagogy in this alleged twentieth century is about in the same position as was astronomy in the age of Galileo." (page 141).

For all its grand talk of battling airships, and its many photographs of resplendently whiskered men wired to apparatuses right out of a steampunk "Mouse Trap" game, this crumbling old Scientific American reveals at least two truths of American life that have only grown truer as the decades have passed: Our faith in new technology and our corresponding habit of only worrying about the safety of that new technology after the inevitable disasters.

Just as newspapers of late 2001 burst with advice for preventing future attacks identical in every particular to the one we had just endured, this 1913 broadsheet concerns itself with potential Titanics. (The original sank in April 1912.) The editors endorse two solutions. First, build larger, hulled lifeboats equipped with engines.

Second -- HA! There is no second, because lifeboats = FAIL!

"A safe ship needs no lifeboat, and the long line of these craft, lining for hundreds of feet the upper deck of our great passenger steamers, is in itself a confession of failure. ... Theoretically, thoroughly subdivided and carefully navigated ships need no multiplicity of lifeboats."

By this logic, the vulcanized "skins" a bloke might slip into for consorting with a dollymop are a confession of his shameful inability to stiff upper-lip his way through a touch of the syph.

The editors express no safety concerns about the zeppelins and air-ships that parade through the "Aeronautics" round-up, even though the dangers of such are plain to anyone who has ever witnessed parade workers trying to wrangle a helium Garfield.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

​ The Choices of Men: A Novel of Male Power and Sexuality in a Feminist Age

Author: T.S. Tyrone
Date: 2001
Publisher: 1st Books Library

The Cover Promises: "For too long, we've been hearing a monologue and women have been doing the talking. Choices gives men a voice, too."

Representative Quotes:

• "'If I stay home and let my hormones loose on my disinterested wife, at her whim with a simple 911 call, I can be charged with marital rape and carted off to jail where the odds are greatly in the other guy's favor that I will be the one who actually gets raped while my wife gabs to her friends all night on the cordless about my despicable behavior!'" (page 56).

• "The reason this book is first being published electronically is that fiction print publishers are dominated by female editors who know that primarily female readers buy fiction." (page 157)

By 2001, the long-oppressed straight American man had had enough. He'd let women get jobs. He'd let them net two-thirds of his income. He'd even adopted the use of "they" as a singular pronoun in cases where he felt uncertain of the antecedent's gender. But wouldn't you know it, some of these uppity gals still don't put out on demand, even to their husbands!

Such is the dilemma faced by Guy, the hero of The Choices of Men, T.S. Tyrone's self-published novel about men reclaiming control of their family lives ... and their wives' points of entry. Imagine the Promise Keepers, but horny.

Here' the situation. Guy's wife Jill won't sleep with him, even though Guy pays the bills. This spurs Guy to contemplate the economic realities of their relationship.

"She can't have it both ways. Either she earns the right to a regulated monopoly by providing service to the customer or I damn well am entitled to go out into the free market to get my needs met."

Maybe he should spend some time with that free market's invisible hand.

​ Your Crap Archivist appreciates the role that crazy preachers have played in the grand pageant of our nation's history.

As purely American a development as baseball or individually wrapped slices of cheese, these holy hell-raisers deserve applause for their great contribution to the national character: our tendency to blame complex social problems on the unrelated and newfangled.

For the first Studies in Crap Crazy Preacher Invitational, your Crap Archivist has lined up impassioned tracts on a common theme: How everyone who ever so much as hully-gullied will boil for eternity in a pit of fire. (See ya, Tom DeLay!)

In one corner, we have Dan Gilbert, whose angry 1942 pamphlet Hell Over Hollywood dared to expose secret Jewry in the movie business! In the other, we have the Billy-Graham-hating evangelist John R. Rice, who honored his Prince of Peace by naming his publishing company "Sword of the Lord"!

Gentlemen, start your batshittery!

​ Dan Gilbert's The Heritage of Hell vs. John R. Rice's What's Wrong With the Dance?

Representative Quotes:
Gilbert: "Conceived in hell and brought forth by the brothel, the dance has established its immoral dominion over the life and destiny of the larger element of American youth." (page 39).

Rice: "Listen to me, sisters, you bunch of hens. You who have been carrying on these dances in your homes, don't open your chops. You have paved the way for lewdness, trained boys and girls for it." (page 24)

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

​ A school year's worth of My Weekly Readers

Date: 1936 - 1937
Publisher: American Education Press
Discovered at: Prairie Village estate sale

The Cover Promises: In the Depression, Americans couldn't even afford news.

Representative Quotes:

• "The dog in the picture has a letter to mail. The dog puts the letter into the mailbox." (Cover story, December 14-18, 1936.)

• "Children play with the chickens. Little chickens are not toys." (Above-the-fold headline, March 22-26, 1937.)

Between the fall of 1936 and the following spring, the world boiled in changes. Civil war broke out in Spain. Prince Albert ascended to the British throne. In Flint, Michigan, workers seized control of a GM plant, ushering in the era of the UAW; meanwhile, on an island somewhere in the south Pacific, archaeologist Indiana Jones settled for all time the question of God's existence: "Yes He does, and just close your eyes when He gets in one of His face-melting moods."

Of course, none of this made My Weekly Reader: Edition Number One, the newspaper for the most wee of kids. Even in the thick of the FDR/Landon election, young America was fed "news" like "A big duck lives with the pig" and "Children like to look at squirrels."

While this may seem innocent, good Americans even then had to monitor the schools for leftist indoctrination.

​ Liberal sex-freaks!

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

John Lennon in Heaven: Crossing the Borderlines of Being

Author: Linda Keen
Date: 1994
Publisher: Pan Publishing, Oregon
Discovered at: 2nd Chance Thrift, 63rd & Troost

The Cover Promises: Pink-clouded adventures in heaven with the guy who sang "Imagine there's no heaven."

Representative Quotes:

• "'I thought when I died, I would finally get some rest from fans -- but shit no! I didn't become 'free' until I could find me way out of those bloody clouds.'" (page 36)

• "'Take this and bear it honorably,' says the man in white, presenting John with an exquisite, gleaming sword which materializes out of the Light." (page 214)

Author Linda Keen claims to gad barefoot through the dandelions with dead John Lennon. He's her afterlife BFF, her "personal spirit guide," and he can't stop telling her how she's very much like him, death and genius notwithstanding.

They'll talk on and on about how tragedies on earth are no big thing since our souls learn from them, and then he'll look at her with a Beatley twinkle and say "Well, dearie, you and I have a hell of a lot in common."

Or: "I haven't had a conversation like this since Huey Newton."

Together, they amble through meadows and past Mystic Oceans, having adventures, dishing the secrets of creation and Beatledom. John complains that Yoko keeps throwing memorials for him, boasts about his past lives in Arthurian times, and then, after some 200 pages of tedious bullshit, passes bravely through an underground chamber in which their own corpses lay decaying in coffins.

There John Lennon meets an ancient man in white named Pendragon -- as in "King Arthur" Pendragon.

Pendragon is so impressed by John and Linda's moxie that he bestows upon the peace-loving Beatle an invisible sword made of light, and I guess also advances him to level 8 and the Goblet of Fire.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Male Annual

Date: 1971
Discovered at: Brass Armadillo Antique Mall, Grain Valley, MO

The Cover Promises:
Swamp nymphs, rapist bikers, Nazi bordellos, and, for the fetishist, "A Florida Dirt Farmer's Terrifying Ordeal: 'Coyotes Are Breaking Into Our Homes!'"

Representative Quotes:

• "The girl turned and smiled, her voluptuous breasts beating a pulsating cadence under the pink gown she wore. She walked to the mattress and knealt in front of him, revealing her inviting nipples." (page 72).

• "Harry was surprised at himself for stopping. He had long ago learned and had since lived by the age-old adage -- no woman means it when she says 'no' in any form or manner." (page 68).

By the early 1970s, the sweats -- or men's adventure magazines-- had to start putting out.

Just as that demure pioneer Playboy led stroke-mag readers to the pinker pastures of Penthouse, and then to a sort of manifest destiny with the spread-eagled horizons Hustler, so too the lusty tall-tales of men's adventure magazines of the '50s and '60s -- "Man-Hungry Hussy of She-Devil Island!"; "Terror if the All Girl Posse and Their Necktie Parties" -- gave way to the raw, unimaginative grind of this Male Annual.

Gone are the "true" stories of pirate queens and panther goddesses. Instead, the lead article here is"I Star in Those Wild 'Turn On' Movies," a grim blow-by-blow of life on the set of one of the very movies killing magazines like this one. Reading it, your Crap Archivist couldn't help but wonder: Why would the American he-man read about ladyparts when every city in the country now had a theater where he could watch them?

While spiced with topless photos the publishers wouldn't have dared just a few years before, the porn-girl article holds to the men's adventure tradition of peddling sadism while still denouncing it. "Photogenic and bosomy" actress April Johnson gets to the rough stuff just a couple paragraphs in.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

​How to Be a Business Superhero

Author: Venture capitalist Sean Wise
Date: 2008
Discovered at: Half Price Books, Westport

The Cover Promises: Generic, clip-arty superheroes are much cheaper than the licensed ones.

Representative Quotes:

• "All Green Lanterns report to the blue-hued immortal Guardians of the Universe, so even while the individual patrolmen have virtual autonomy, in the end they each have a boss to report to. The same is true in business." (page 55)
  
  
• "So how do Business Superheroes ensure they follow Professor Xavier's example and not get caught up in the zealotry of Magneto? I suggest a three-pronged approach." (page 199)

Look! Up in H.R.! In the goofy, self-important tradition of Jesus, CEO and Ronin: The Way of the Samauri, up bounds How to Be a Business Superhero, a two-fisted burst of you-are-not-a-drone workplace inspiration based upon an entirely specious comparison. As in all such books, this one insists that success in your office depends upon your ability to make-believe that you're a character of legend - preferably one whose exploits have shit-all to do with business.

A self-professed comic geek who seems to have been bitten by a radioactive Chicken Soup for the Executive's Soul, author Sean Wise suggests you find workplace inspiration in the spirit of superheroes like the Hulk, whose adventures stomping the U.S. military somehow teaches us this business secret: "Don't Get Angry. . . . The best leaders (and business superheroes) are able to channel their feelings into more positive outcomes."

So, no "ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT SMASH!" Instead, being a Business Superhero means that you model your life on the Hulk's by being nothing like him.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power. ​

20 of My Favorite Baby Photos

Author: Constance Bannister, "World Famous Baby Photographer," and Lover's Lane All Meat Weiners

Date: 1953
Discovered at: Antique mall
The Cover Promises: Babies! Weiners! The two great tastes that, uh, not so much!

Representative Quotes:
"The photographs in this booklet are among Miss Bannister's favorites. We hope they will give you a chuckle and help brighten your days." (page 1)

"Sausage stretches the food budget." (page 2)

"Sausage is a highly nutritious food." (page 3)


Steak and eggs. Tax and spend. "Yankees" and "suck." The history of twentieth-century marketing is the history of pairing words up with such precision that their corresponding ideas lock into something grander than either alone -- preferably something that moves your product. Think chocolate and peanut-butter, and you think Reese's.

It's understandable, then, that the good folks at the Lover's Lane All Meat Weiners would want in on this action. But what to pair their weiners with? Popcorn had claimed "movies," and apple-pie had a monopoly on mom, so they had little choice but the one remaining ideal beloved by the vast majority of Americans: babies.

Yes, babies and weiners. One's made of lips and assholes, and the other is what you get when a casing machine and some by-products love each other very much! One plumps fleshily up against a delicate membrane, and the other might have cheese baked right inside!

Today, just tagging a blog post with "babies and weiners" is enough to get us investigated. In innocent 1953, though, this inspiration might have had some potential. Lovers Lane contracted Constance Bannister, a photographer with several best-selling baby books to her name. Together they whipped up 20 of My Favorite Baby Photos, a curious freebie pamphlet offering adorable babies in unguarded moments, wacky, adult-oriented captions, and -- well, it's best you see for yourself.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

​ A Bill of Divorcement Volume I: But And If Thou Marry

Date: 1994
Discovered at: Waldo estate Sale

Representative Quotes:
"If marriage is to have any chance of being mutually fulfilling, both partners must ignore modern notions about the place of men and women. The feminist-liberal-Marxist ideas do not work, never have worked, cannot work, and ought not work!" (page 169)

"DO NOT MARRY ONE WHO LISTENS TO ROCK MUSIC." (page 103)

Like skirt-lengths and the Dow Jones, the relative craziness of America's craziest preachers serves as a kind of cultural thermometer, rising and falling with the times. In his ladies-smell-bad marriage guides of the late '60s and early '70s, Tim LaHaye sought to restore traditional "family" values in a country gone mad while still teaching the very '70s belief that maybe a man should get his wife off, too.

That's a far cry from the primness of crazy preachers both past and future, including LaHaye himself, who gets through his entire Left Behind series without once reminding men about the clitoris.

By the Clinton era, America's crazy preachers had come to mistake neuterhood for a principle. From Dr. Roy Branson's But and If Thou Marry:You see, by the '90s, crazy preachers had reached a new consensus. From Dr. Roy Branson's unmelodiously titled But and If Thou Marry:

​
Not if you're doing it right!

​Nobody ever accused the Cult of L. Ron of PR expertise.

As we pointed out in yesterday's Studies in Crap post, the hilariously titled promotional pamphlet "Scientology: Something CAN Be Done About It" features a doozy of a photo-illustration guaranteed to offend, say, three-fourths of the world's religious believers.

It presents the great leaders of religious history, from Buddha to Christ, all lined up evolution-chart style beneath a dinner-jacketed Scientologist wielding his oversized official handbook.

The implication: All of religious history has been building to this schmo measuring your thetans.

​ What truly startles, though, is the inclusion of Mohammad just to the left of that bored looking bed-sheet Jesus. Yes, only the prophet's eyes and hands are visible, but that's not likely to comfort followers of the Hadith rules that strictly forbid any such depiction. Remember those Danish cartoons a couple years back?

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.  ​ It's been just over a year since the lord first commanded your Crap Archivst to reveal to the world the great heaps of crap clogging creation. Since then, Studies in Crap has exposed the finest in crazy preachers, out-dated sex guides, existential coloring books, and Limbaugh family Jell-O recipes.

My proudest entries: How to Be Happy Though Married, Tim LaHaye's ladyparts-smell-funny book of marital advice, and McAllister Ransom's brilliant/scarifying run-on of a novel Fuzzy Mules, Pink Slippers Volume One: Came a Clown. Everyone else's favorite entry: Bill O'Reilly's filthy audiobook Those Who Trespass.

Instead of a meal, this week we have a buffet. Here's seven ill-conceived publications worth being confused by.

1. First, some good news in the struggle against Tom Cruise's overlords!

​

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
​
Adventures of Shoney's Big Boy No. 51

Publisher: Paragon Products, Pompano Beach, Florida
Date: 1981
Discovered at: Independence antique mall

The Cover Promises: The Big Boy has a hidden message for you!
Also: The Big Boy is friends with a  blonde who lives in a pop-up book and a ginger boy with a TRS 80 for a Torso.

Representative Quote:
"Dear Big Boy --
I am a big fan of yours. I like fancy sports cars and playing polo. I hope to grow up to be just like you.
-- William Ogden, Texarkana, TX."

The surprises in this freebie Big Boy comic book start right with the name. By the '80s, the Big Boy -- that plastic, pompadoured monument to the ass-widening effects of a burgers-and-boulevards lifestyle -- had ended his long affiliation with the Bob's Big Boy Restaurant chain.
Now, he shilled for Shoney's -- the chain of choice for those who find the fanciness of a Denny's alienating.
 
At the time, some considered this a violation of a great American tradition. Your Crap Archivst can't work up much feeling for the sanctity of old advertising logos, but I can see how the Big Boy's post-Bob's gig seem demeaning, something like a hangdog boxing champ meet-and-greeting the mobs at Caesar's. Still, he was engineered to sell hamburgers, so what's he going to do? A big boy's gotta eat.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
​
The Counterfeit Candidate

Author: Kent H. Steffgen
Publisher: National Issues, Las Vegas
Date: 1976
Discovered at: Mission Hills estate sale

The Cover Promises: "Legalized abortion, forced school bussing, women's lib, sex education in the schools, freeing of the criminal, overtaxation, doubled spending, socialized medicine, economic strangulation, land-use control -- this is a conservative?"

ALSO: Maybe it would just be easier if the fringe right released a list of everyone who isn't a socialist.

Representative Quotes:
"In 1969, he signed a bill to outlaw the internal combustion engine by 1975." (page 14)
"New York is on its way down for real. It is never coming back; repeat, never. It will either end up a ward of the public government or in a state of anarchy, one or the other." (page 37)


This spurious little volume, Kent H. Steffgen's second book-length attack on the then California governor, assails the wrinkly ol' nappy-time legend that today's conservatives imagine twinkling down from his starry heaven like God in It's A Wonderful Life.

Yes, before they came to believe that Reagan's tough-talk and military spending somehow led to the 70 years of infrastructure neglect that destroyed the Soviet Union, some John Birch-society doubting Thomases dared to trash the Gipper. Steffgen snarls that Reagan is "an impostor," a "hopeless incompetent," "a practicing socialist" and "the smoothest salesman socialism ever had." He even predicts that a president Reagan would be "the biggest spender since Franklin D. Roosevelt," which is total -- oh. OK. We'll give him that one. 

Anyway, reading such invective, your Crap Archivst feels a naïve twinge of hope. Perhaps today's political discourse can learn from the stupidity of the past! Permit me to address directly any members of the talk-radio right who might have stumbled here on their hunt for things to be outraged by:

Dear Talk-Radio Right,
Do you really want to sound like this asshole?
-- Alan

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
​
Tackle, Block, Stop

Author: Charlotte Graeber and Joe Boddy
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers
Date: 1985

Discovered at: Actually, this was a Christmas gift a decade ago

The Cover Promises: Get him off balance, and even little white boys can take T down.

Representative Quote:
"Mr. T scowled down at me. 'It don't matter who he is,' he said. 'When it feels wrong, it ain't right! Don't let nobody mess with your body.'" (page 17)

While best know for his punchy/shouty roles as the trash-talking Clubber Lang or the air-travel averse B.A., Baracus,  Mr. T had by 1985 begun to demonstrate a public-spiritedness at odds with his action-hero brethren. Unlike your Bronsons and Schwarzeneggers, Mr. T let Nancy Reagan wriggle bonily in his lap. He rapped with the kids about treating your mother right and how to practice the pants-be-damned art of "recouping."

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Rambo Coloring & Activity Book

Author: Frank Stinga and Carrie Fink
Publisher: Modern Publishing
Date: 1985
Discovered at: Brass Armadillo Antique Mall, Grain Valley, MO

The Cover Promises: You expect and demand little of your children.

Representative Quotes:
"Rambo is a real freedom fighter." (page 8)
"Rambo is a real woodsman." (page 18)
"Ka-pow!" (page 14)

Not long after the extraordinary success of Rambo: First Blood, Part II, 1985's R-rated orgy of torture, guerrilla warfare, and sensual moments spent tying bandannas beneath waterfalls, market research conducted for Carolco Entertainment revealed a surprising fact: The United States was now home to just enough terrible parents for a syndicated cartoon based upon Sylvester Stallone's Vietnam-haunted ammo-fetishist to achieve profitability.

Of course, Rambo and the Forces of Freedom, the resulting series, eliminates the movie's killshots and avoided First Blood concerns such as PTSD or Rambo's wish that this country love its soldiers as much as its soldiers love it. Instead of smearing himself in mud and strangling Vietnamese soldiers, cartoon Rambo jumps over a motorcycle and then dispatches the driver with a cardboard box. (It does share with the movies a devotion to lingering shots of a half-dressed Rambo prepping for battle.) Any time spent with Rambo and the Forces of Freedom should scratch one theory about Sylvester Stallone movies: They're not cartoons. Cartoons, at least, are inventive.

What's not inventive is this detestable ancillary product, a coloring book created with such contempt for its audience that, somewhere, George Lucas must be jealous.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Public Health and Social Security in the USSR

Author: Either an upbeat cadre of Soviet propagandists or, for you FOX viewers, Obama with a time machine.

Publisher: USSR Ministry of Health
Date: circa 1963
Discovered at: Prairie Village estate sale

The Cover Promises: Soviet men are so vigorous in all capacities that women must peer upwards, on constant alert, ready to catch the newborn comrades that rain from the skies.

Representative Quotes:
"A uniform system of free medical attention operates throughout the Soviet Union." (page 14)

"There are increased pensions, depending on the service record, which are granted to teachers, doctors, civil airways air crews, ballet dancers, many categories of circus performers, and people of a number of other professions." (page 21-22)

Engineered in some Ministry of Smiling Babies & Glorious Sunshine to demonstrate that life in the Soviet Union is, was, and always will be a series of escalating triumphs, this cheerful pamphlet trumpets the USSR's progress in delivering free health care to its people. The verdict of the apparatchiks working whatever idea assembly-line that pumped this out: Everything's super, and getting super-er.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

 

SUCK IT UP Buttercup!

Author: Robert D. Cass

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing, New York

Date: 2007

Discovered at: Donated by Mark Lisanti

The Back Cover Promises: "Finally, a book that leaves nothing up to chance. Absolutely every word us put to good use."

Representative Quote: "This is important, everything else is BOGUS don't stop. Don't stop. Don't stop. Keep going. Keep going. Keep your desire burning, keep it burning, burning, burning, burning, burning, burning. Keep the fire burning. Don't stop. Ever. Don't Stop. Ever." (page 71)

At first glance, SUCK IT UP Buttercup! inspires something approaching awe.

For more than 400 pages it hollers and pants like some demented pep-squad, chanting that you should keep going, ignore the BOGUS, and for God's sake SUCK IT UP. Paging through this the first time, agog at its shapelessness, its run-ons and repetition, its hectoring positivity, I could almost feel the spittle flecking off author Robert D. Cass' lips.

 
Consider this burst from page 21:

"Whatever it takes is what you need to do. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Don't ever, ever stop. Don't ever stop. Never ever, ever give up your right to keep going and keep fighting and keep striving to be everything you can be. Fight for your right to be successful and don't take no for an answer. Fight, fight, fight. Keep going, don't stop. Don't stop fighting. Keep going, keep going, who cares what anyone thinks?"

You see, the eighth habit of highly effective people is reading page after page of gibberish.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Author: Verne Ricketts
Publisher: Lieba Inc., Baltimore
Date: 1985
Discovered at: Used book store

Take a look at that cover.

Consider this candy castle's drooping gables, leaking roofs, and red-nippled towers.

Notice the resemblance between the wavy white shingles and cursive-writing homework second graders might have scribbled in the back of a bus jouncing across train tracks.

Study the severed doll's head festooned to the window, or the mop-haired poop warrior cemented onto a pedestal out in front.

Accept that the title is no promise of slow jams, and ask yourself: is droopy, runny chocolate truly a medium for representational -- even architectural -- art?

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Miss America Pageant Official Year Book

Date: 1952

Discovered at: Timeless Treasures Antique Mall, Kansas City, Mo.

The Cover Promises: When the night is at its darkest, the police commissioner of Atlantic City aims a beacon to the heavens to summon that great protector of the Jersey shore: Miss America!

 

With the pageant scene scandalized by nudie pix, breast-implants, and contestants who on occasion answer a question with honesty, Americans might find themselves longing for the glamorous beauty contests of the past, for a time when there was something innocent about competitions wherein judges awarded scholarships to women according to the ripeness with which they crammed themselves into swimsuits and evening gowns.

Judging by this week's extraordinary find, that time, I fear, never existed -- not even for the vaunted Miss America. 

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

You're Asking Me?

Author: Gay Head

Publisher: TAB Books

Date: 1958

Discovered at: Merriam garage sale

The Cover Promises: That even in 1958 there was something odd about teenagers seeking advice from Gay Head.

Representative Quotes:

"If you're thinking of inviting your girl friend's girl friend to the dance because you'd really like to go with her, and honestly believe that you can give her a good time, go ahead." (page 66).

"There are several deodorants, prepared especially for boys and men -- with a good, clean, outdoorsy smell, which isn't even remotely 'sissy.'" (page 95)

Way back in the third-ever Study in Crap, your Crap Archivist scored a cheap laugh with a scan the teen-advice column "Ask Gay Head," one of the many delights in 1955's World Week magazine. After reading a full book by Ms. Head, I now appreciate that I was wrong to present her work as something inadvertently hilarious.

That isn't to say I'm above presenting the innocent as filthy. Consider this 1938 cookbook.

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Pro-Sumer Power! How to Create Wealth by Spending Smarter, Not Cheaper

Author: Bill Quain, PhD

Publisher: INTI Publishing & Resource Books, Tampa, Florida

Date: 2000

Discovered at: 2^nd Chance Thrift, Wornall Road

The Cover Promises: Back before the tech bubble burst, all you had to do to get rich was just wave your Visa in front of a computer.

Representative Quote: "The word pro-sumer is a combination of the words producer and consumer. Producers make money. Consumers spend money. Pro-sumers make money while they spend." (page 9).

In all of Pro-Sumer Power!, the first book I've ever wanted to punch in the crotch, there is but one flicker of genuine inspiration, and that's right there in the title. Apparently, we're now free to swap prefixes and root-words as we please. After pro-suming, who's up for a ride on a circum-cycle with an para-hobo?

Other than that, this merely demonstrates how insulting the you-deserve-wealth-because-you're-special genre has come to be. More full of nothing than the deepest reaches of space, Pro-Sumer Power! disguises its emptiness behind asinine parables, laughable charts, self-help lies, a story about Lassie, a discussion of iMac commercials, and countless exclamations of the beauty of an idea it never gets around to defining.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Going Places: How America's Best and Brightest Got Started Down the Road of Life

Author: E.D. Hill, former host of Fox News' "I Have Nothing Else To Live For So I May As Well Watch This" Morning Show

Publisher: The Regan imprint of HarperCollins, the same people who brought you O.J. Simspon's If I Did It

Date: 2005

Discovered at: 2^nd Chance Thrift, 63^rd & Troost

The Cover Promises: Thin, airbrushed blonde, tanned liked a baked potato, showing plenty of chest in a cherry convertible? Is this the Playboy Channel?

Representative Quote: "I was six months pregnant with my fifth child when I first met Donald Rumsfeld. Maybe it was my hormones talking, but I'll confess I was shocked at my reaction. Yes, he's interesting, witty, wry, and confident, but he's also so incredibly handsome. Those blue eyes make your knees weak!"

Here's a surprise! Turns out that E.D. Hill, the former Fox & Friends host who left the network last year after suggesting that the Obamas bump fists like terrorists, was News Corp's answer to Studs Terkel. Instead of collecting the true, on-the-ground stories of American lives, Hill transcribes inspirational homilies about how the system rewards hard-working dreamers.

One of those hard-working dreamers is Steve Forbes. His secret?

Dangerous Dana

Author: Doris Miller

Publisher: Hill Publications, Queens, New York

Date: 1999

Discovered at: Half-Price Books, Westport

Representative Quotes:

"The crowd gathers around again and tries to stop Dana from beating Rose with the baseball bat, but it is hard! It is hard to stop Dana from beating Rose with with baseball bat, because Dana swings the baseball bat at anyone who tries to stop her or get in her way! Nobody wants to get hit with the baseball bat!" (page 54)

"Dana violently fights Mark using kick boxing and Hapkido! She punches Mark! She throws several straight blows to his face again! She elbows Mark! She kung fu's Mark! She knees Mark! She knees him real hard again and again in the groin area!" (page 227)

In Dangerous Dana, Doris Miller's astonishing novel of vengeance and exclamation points, styles collide with all the messy force of "Dangerous" Dana Brown's hammer cracking into the skull of the Hispanic plumber whose driving pissed her off.

Here's a revenge fantasy that is written with the just-the-facts tone of a police report, the obsessive repetition of a Dick and Jane primer, and the hopped-up ferocity of someone shouting on a bus.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Rave: The Magazine of Intimate Expose

Author: Gay-baiting, breast obsessed,  utterly degenerate/hilarious pretend moralist "Peter Hamilton"

Date: October, 1955

Discovered at: Brass Amradillo Antique Mall

The Cover Promises: That Gretta Garbo "loathes" America, the country that invented Russian Roulette.

Representative Quotes:

"When Marlon Brando taps on those Pearly gates and mumbles at St. Peter that he wants in, the reception he'll get will be about as warm as the one St. Pete recently gave the late Josef Vasily Stalin." (page 22).

"If we are wrong, there's no doubt about it: we'll have pulled the publishing goof of the decade. We repeat: DEBBIE AND EDDIE WILL NOT MARRY." (page 4)

Like the Fox News hosts who denounce spring break lasciviousness while filling the screen with looped images of wet T-shirt action, the scandal rag Rave enjoys nothing more than taking a good, long, hand-in-pants stare into the very vices it purports to oppose.

On one page, Rave is shocked that Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher would dare "mock" the institution of marriage. Not only does Rave suspect the romance was unconsummated and publicist-dictated, Rave suggests of Debbie, in bold, "maybe she was UNINTERESTED in boys." 

But just a few pages later, Rave sneers at buxom sexpot Jane Russell for insufficient sexiness, comparing her to "a painted female impersonator who stuck one too many pillows down the front."

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Doctor Morrison's Miracle Body Tune-Up for Rejuvenated Health

Author: Marsh Morrison, D.C., Ph.C, F.I.C.C.

Publisher: Parker Publishing, West Nyack, New York 

Date: 1973

Discovered at: 2nd Chance Thrift, 63rd & Troost

Representative Quotes:

"The Female Has A 'Little Penis' Also." (Section heading, page 117).

"Another way to build strength into the muscles of the vagina is to place a large coin between the buttocks and walk around gripping the coin between 'the cheeks of the posterior.' (page 129)

Staggering between holistic common sense and the most peculiar of rubbish, Doctor Morrison's Miracle Body Tune-Up for Rejuvenated Health concerns advice on the elimination of hunchbackedness, treating a prostate by sitting on a hot water bottle, and how "counter-gravitational drills" can improve any woman's "skinny flat-chested condition."

Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman

Author: Dr. David H. Keller, "America's most consulted sexologist"

Publisher: Cadillac Publishing Company, New York

Date: 1941

Discovered at: Collection of Nancy Hulston, Director of Archives at the University of Kansas Medical Center

The Cover Promises: "317 Instructive Pictures Explaining How Sex Functions in Human Beings"

Like any regrettable hook-up, Dr. Keller's Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman gets all its words out of the way early, merely offering justification for the hardcore action to follow. For Keller, that justification is helping Americans achieve "the highest happiness life holds for us humans: ideal married love."

To that end, he offers this guide to ladyparts:

You see, marital happiness depends upon men's understanding of the sexual potential of lungs, armpits, scar tissue and blisters! 

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

The Beanie Baby Handbook

Author: Les & Sue Fox

Publisher: Scholastic

Date: 1998

Discovered at: Maj-R Thrift, W. 47th Street

The Cover Promises: Your toys are commodities.

Representative Quotes:

"Basically, if you can afford to do this, simply putting away five or ten of each and every new Beanie Baby in super mint condition isn't a bad idea." (page 27).

"As seasoned McDonald's collectors, we had little doubt that $2 would be less than the future value of any Teenie Beanie. Unfortunately, we were only able to accumulate 500 or so Beanies during the mad rush." (page 190)

A heartless, mercenary endeavor that strips whatever innocence remains in childish hording, Les & Sue Fox's The Beanie Baby Handbook teaches kids that fun, imagination, and all of the other qualities we love in toys get in the way of profitability.

Instead, the Foxes encourage kids to become stuffed-animal speculators.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Coronet magazine

Date: September, 1947

 

Discovered at: North Kansas City estate sale

 

The Cover Promises: "The tragic failure of America's women. A shocking indictment by a noted woman physician."

 

ALSO: Ain't nothing wrong with America's boys, with their Archie hair-cuts, superhero socks and narcoleptic harmonica playing.

Representative Quotes:  "There is one type of woman rarely seen in a psychiatrist's office. That is the woman who is glad she is a woman." (page 4).

"Unhappy and neurotic, they may confess to breathlessness, heartburn, muscle twitching, spells of faintness, and continual fatigue. And the more they are involved with careers, the more they are idle, the more they are childless, the more they are fashionably dressed and elaborately made up, the longer is the list of their troubles." (page 3).

Despite the hysterics of the cover, this issue of the Readers' Digest-y Coronet offers much more than just Maryina F. Farnham's screed against post-war ladyhood -- a screed, incidentally, that charges career-minded mothers with nothing less than the breakdown of society:

"The spawning ground for most neuroses in our civilization is the home nursery. And the principal agent is rejecting, or otherwise emotionally disordered, mother. It is she who is largely responsible for most of our 750,000 confirmed alcoholics, for millions of other neurotics, for our increasing number of criminals and truants."