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 ​.

Author: Kansas City teen diarist Terri
Date: 1972
Discovered at: Unsorted box buried deep in a Westport estate-sale basement

The Cover Promises: "1/2 Frosh Year + Soph Summer"

Representative Quotes:

• Monday, Feburary 14: "Jeff B. told Kathy he loved her and then turned around and told the guys to pay him 50 cents because they bet him he wouldn't."

• Tuesday, February 29: "I got a B on my english test. of all the wierds grade I wood have to get a B."

Heartache romps at St. Teresa's!

Last month we met young Terri, teen diarist of 1972, and had a fine time invading her privacy despite her insistence that "No one if I can help it will never flip through the preceding pages."

In her day-by-day account of January 1972, she dished to us about Mark, that crush-tastic boy from another school who tells some friends that he "likes" Terri and others that he doesn't. She recounted an epic fight with Patti, the difficult friend who keeps "A list of all the queers" she knows. She described her bounty of Christmas gifts, her mother's surgery, and her friend Kathleen's unlikely love for a "dwarf named Jeff."

At January's end, all hope of working things out with Mark had seemed dashed. But then, on the month's last entry, there came a telephone-game hail Mary. Terri asked Michelle to ask "Hollerm" to ask Mark if Mark still likes Terri ... and, to everyone's dismay, Michelle replied that "Hollerm" replied that Mark replied that "he does but does not want anyone to know about it."

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.​

Dancing With Demons: The Music's Real Master

Author: Jeff Godwin
Date: 1988
Publisher: Chick Publications

Discovered at: Brookside estate sale

The Cover Promises: Best Burning Man ever!

Representative Quotes:

• "Homosexuality and Satanism are the two main reasons you should burn any Hall & Oates records and tapes you might own." (page 90)

• "Notice the lyrics from LL Cool J's song 'Dangerous.' The word 'hail' (come forth) is used. LL Cool J is calling for demons. Are demons the 'new concept' he's injecting 'into your ears?'" (page 132)
  

By the late 1980s, evangelicals had perfected an unlikely method of winning young people to Christ.

Step One. Loudly damn everything that young people might enjoy, ever.

Step Two: Watch the kids flock to you.

Of course, denouncing youth culture meant some dedicated evangelicals had to swallow hard and experience youth culture. Jeff Godwin dared to, and the Lord revealed horrors unto him, such as the obvious fact that LL Cool J cavorts with demons. (Lucifer must have a big ol' butt.)

Turns out, all of kids' musical heroes perform in the service of demons, devils, and "a Greek deity named Pan." Godwin proves this on the book's first page when he points out that Paul McCartney holds a panpipe on the sleeve of his Pipes of Peace record, a well-known favorite of cultists everywhere. As a cabarnet sauvignon is to fine steak, so is the light funk of "Say, Say, Say" to human sacrifice.

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.​

Cosmopolitan magazine

Date: April, 1960

Discovered at: River Market Antique Mall

The Cover Promises: Woman troubles might be out of style, but floral scrubs are perennial.

Representative Quote:

• "When menstrual pain is so clearly a mental problem, the reasons are usually closely associated with a woman's fear or resentment of being female." (page 34)

Bad news, America! It turns out that Cosmo is not infallible.

There's that time in '88 when it claimed than the missionary position prevented the transmission of HIV.

More recently, in June 2009, the cover promised "Gutsy New Tips Are Guaranteed To Give Him The Most Badass Orgasm Imaginable." That's impossible, as this world has already been shaken by the most badass orgasm imaginable, the one that conceived Evel Knievel.

And then one time, way back before Helen Gurley Brown began sharpening the one-time lit rag into the man-pleasing, hoo-ha judging destroyer of self-esteem we enjoy today, Cosmo insisted that menstrual cramps were an "imaginary ailment." Their only sufferers: hopeless neurotics and sneaky wives. From Evelyn Archer Adams' April, 1960 article "Are Woman Troubles Out of Style?"

"Men now make it easy to perpetuate the menstrual-cramp myth. One wife and mother illustrated this quite graphically, saying 'If you think I'm going to give up menstrual cramps, you're out of your mind. That one day a month is the only time my husband feeds the kids, does the dishes, and sees that Mommy gets her rest!'"

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 Live With a Bitch

Author: Legendary coot George Leonard Herter

Date: 1969

Publisher: Herter's, Inc., a Minnesota sporting goods outfitter now distributed through Cabela's.

Discovered at: Half Price Books, Westport

Representative Quotes:

• "Do not establish a nudist camp in your home but keep a natural body exposure around the house on a normal basis. Children, including boys, should see their mother nude wearing external menstrual pads." (page 3)

• "All facts show that many women have built-in traits to nag, bitch, insult, try to be cruel and try to be demanding. Such traits, of course, cause much divorce. Again a woman is not exactly like a Canadian goose, she does not intend, in the vast majority of cases, to mate for life." (page 59).

There's crap and then there's bullshit.

In the first 50 pages of this pioneering achievement in all-American jack-assery, George Leonard Herter decries the pill as "racial suicide," insists that logic tells us that the nine unmarried apostles had to be masturbators, claims that men are a fine wine but women a whiskey ("The more they age the worse they get"), and offers this explanation for why the bitches that men marry crab so much:

"Murder through continual stress situations is not difficult for some people. Watch out for this in selecting a mate."

Once I mopped my blown mind off the tarp I spread about my desk for such occasions, I put the book down and got to Googling. Come to find out, this cranky sumbitch is considered an American treasure.

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. ​

Is George Bush the Antichrist? A guide to Armageddon

Author: P. Stephen Hanchett
Date: 2004
Publisher: Self-published, obviously.

Representative Quote:
"Skull & Bones is widely believed to be the American branch of the original German Thule society. That makes Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush more-or-less fraternity brothers." (page 77).

Much like the puppet that dreamed of becoming a boy, or the Zima that ached to become a beverage for grown-ups, a Connecticut fancy boy once pretended to be from Texas. Real Texans found this so hilarious they made him governor.

Then, after watching Rudy, the Supreme Court teamed up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation to give that lunkhead dreamer America's biggest job!

Hilarity ensued, sometimes in books, the place where adults have long hidden important ideas from George W. Bush. This week, your Crap Archivist pits his two most cherished Bush-related tomes against each other. Only the crappiest will prevail!

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.​

Helping With Bike Safety

Author/Illustrator: Betsey Douglas MacDonald

Date: None given, presumably the '90s

Publisher: American Academy of Pediatrics

The Cover Promises: Bicycle fun with baby Ebert! Or is it Lil' Cynthia Ozick?

There are some topics pediatricians can be relied upon to know, like the best way to prick a kid with a needle or how to find a good deal on fluffy-cloud wallpaper. But one thing they must never again be trusted with is the production of coloring books about bike safety.

Take a look at that cover: young Michael Moore toodling along on his Huffy, decked out in some suspenders, loafers and khaki skort combo, looking for all the world like he's headed to an Oktoberfest party for employees of Blockbuster Video! And his helmet -- is that a rolled-up tube-sock?

That's not even mentioning the mystery of where his seat went.

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.​

Author: Teen diarist Terri, a student at St. Thomas Aquinas
Date: 1972
Discovered at: Unsorted box buried deep in a Westport estate-sale basement

The Cover Promises: "1/2 Frosh Year + Soph Summer"

Representative Quote:

• "Now I have $5.10, enough to buy a pair of earrings and Super Sheer. Well, this week has been cold and exciting because I wondered all week if I had a boyfriend or not." (January 18)

Your Crap Archivist admits that he has on occasion picked through the private journals of young girls. That said, my privacy-invading has never before sunk me as low as it did a couple weeks back when, on my knees in a mildewed basement, I found myself jimmying the lock of a Catholic school girl's diary. Turns out, Jimmying isn't my thing. The lock popped off, and this chilling message greeted me from inside the diary's cover:

"No one if I can help it will never flip through the preceding pages."

The author continues in this vein:

"I will never quote what is in the preceding pages to anyone NEVER."

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 Unhappy Gays​

Author: Tim LaHaye
Date: 1978
Publisher: Tyndale House

The Cover Promises: Gayness is a rusty, wormy chain.

Representative Quotes:

• "Homosexuals are regularly disinterested in gainful employment -- their interest is sex, not work. Besides, when a man overindulges his sex glands, he doesn't have much energy left." (page 35)

• "The lenient attitude of many college administrators is appalling. They often make no attempt to fire known homosexuals from their faculty." (page 198)

In the first pages of this moronic howl of a book, apocalypse profiteer and disdainer of lady-stink Tim LaHaye explains that "the homosexual epidemic" of the late 1970s is in some ways all his fault.

"Something strange is going on in America! My wife and I had been out of the country only nine months, holding family life seminars in forty-two countries around the world, but we noticed it immediately. Arriving in San Diego on a Sunday, I looked through my mail and found two letters from lesbians and four from homosexuals."

Yes, denied his masculine example, America went gay. That's from the first chapter, which LaHaye -- always eager to help your Crap Archivist out -- titles "The Homosexual Explosion."

Just a page later, he explains how his editor talked him into taking on a book like this: "Wendell Hawley of Tyndale House remarked, 'The Christian community needs a penetrating book on homosexuality.'"

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.​

St. Nicholas for Boys and Girls

Date: December, 1932

The Cover Promises: Exactly the kind of joyous, old-fashioned Christmas liberals elected Obama to destroy.

Representative Quote: "Fat people may wonder why they become so very popular at Christmas time. Especially Aunts. If they are wise, they suspect something when on Christmas Eve ... their nieces approach them sweetly and and say 'Aunt Maggie, would you very specially mind if I borrowed one of your stockings -- just for tonight?"

Here's a surprise. This New Yorker-dense dispatch from a purer American past is guaranteed to upset those of you who believe that the Best Buy cashier piping "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" somehow undoes all that is sacred about buying The Hangover on Blu-Ray. In all 132 pages, I only came across one reference to that "reason for the season": The Christ Child turns up in a review of Eric P. Kelly's The Christmas Nightingale and that's it.

Still, Baby Jesus has one up on that glory-hog Santa, who doesn't show up here at all. Instead, St. Nick offers adventure stories, a girl-detective serial, more book reviews than the Sunday Times, an extravagant eight-page, multi-thousand word feature celebrating 1932's newest toys, and strategies kids might employ to get as many presents as possible. St. Nick, it turns out, was as dedicated to moving product as Nintendo Power was.

Please join Bill O'Reilly and I in boycotting the Depression. Did Christmases like Kenny and Dolly's ever really exist?


Christmas isn't about presents! It's about disrobing in front of mannequins!

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 Improve Your Personality,
Plus the Formula for Being an Interesting Conversationalist

Author: George W. Crane, PhD, MD

Date: Not given, but its a-bomb fear and belief that psychology is magic suggests the early 1950s

The Cover Promises: You bore people.

Representative Quotes:

• "Praise a girl regarding her party dress or slender ankles, or kissable mouth, etc." (page 8)

• "You can develop all sorts of discussions ranging from whether or not women are as intelligent as men, or should smoke and drink whiskey, to the male opinion of red fingernails on girls, or their use of slang or profanity." (page 8).

One of dozens of similar titles once rush-mailed to America's most hapless souls, this twenty-cent guide to exploiting social situations so that you might take advantage of others marks a signal development in the history of the think-yourself-awesome industry pioneered by visionaries like Norman Vincent Peale and Professor Harold Hill, Dr. George W. Crane, PhD, MD, super-powered his self-help with science, which, fifty years ago, was still something that Americans liked.

That means this grubby rip-off describes the ego, recommends textbooks Dr. Crane has written, and distinguishes itself with that most important self-help book standby: reducing the endless complexities of personality into a quick, science-flavored list-ettes.

For example, Crane breaks down the self like Stereo Review evaluates speakers, proposing your personality is the result of how you rank in (1) Physical Appearance; (2) Tact or Social Intelligence; (3) Aggressiveness or Assurance; (4) Emotionality; (5) Morality.

Since Physical Appearance is number one, science itself compels Dr. Crane to spend a quarter of the pamphlet picking on your weight. "Remember, you can't feel like a sports roadster with the chassis of a truck," he writes. His best advice for "the corpulent person":

"Even the rings on a fat person's fingers accentuate obesity, so try to reduce your hand jewelry if you wish to shun those things that advertise your fatness. And eliminate B.O., as well as halitosis, dandruff and blackheads."

Fortunately, even a tubby stinkbug like you has a chance at love. This confounds the good doctor, who observes that anyone who hangs out at the marriage license window of the courthouse will notice "that many girls aren't even average in their physical beauty, yet they have won sweethearts and are soon to enter matrimony."

How could this be? Dr. Crane discovers his answer by harnessing the power of science.

"How did they attain their engagement rings? Well, because they had attractive personalities and had learned to too the other fellow's horn." 

Remember, ladies: if all you do with a horn is toot it, Jesus doesn't mind if you wear white.

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.
​
Sexual Physiology or Hidden Truths Revealed:
Purity, Heredity and Physical Manhood

Authors: Bishop Samuel Fallows and Dr. W. J. Truitt, both "heaven-appointed teachers of purity and truth."

Date: 1904
Publisher: Hertel, Jenkins & Co.
Discovered at: Sentimental Journey Antiques, Olathe

The Frontispiece Promises: "Celebrated Prescriptions for all diseases" and "Profusely illustrated"

Representative Quotes:

• "There is beauty in the helplessness of a woman. The clinging trust which searches for extraneous support is graceful and touching." (page 95).

• "In order that it may be beneficial, the bath should not be taken at a time when any of the important organs of the body are engaged in the performance of their functions." (page 78).

As any teen who has ever scissored up fashion magazines to assemble a collage on body issues can tell you, our current ideal of feminine beauty is something like the Microsoft Word paperclip with lips like a life preserver. But your Crap Archivist has good news for all those ladies out there who have ever eaten a sandwich: It wasn't always this way!

That's according to the authors of Sexual Physiology, my favorite turn-of-the-last-century guide to the human body and the unfathomable evil of its tingliest parts. According to Fallows and Pruitt, "Good health, proper diet, regular exercise, habits and dress all have more or less to do with beauty, but the main source is in the mind and heart." That sounds sweet, but the theory works both ways: If you're not beautiful something deeper must be wrong:

"Deformity of limb clearly shows a lack of vitality in that limb; a bad complexion indicates something wrong in the vital system; a malformation of the brain is a sure sign of want in the mental system."

​
But remember, beauty isn't all outside. Heed this "Caution to Young Women":

"It is well known that, at certain periods, women from fifteen to forty-five are, in the language of Mosaic law, 'unclean'; that is, at their monthly periods. Unless great care is taken, women may, and sometimes do, give off a very unpleasant odor."

They make no exception for the pure of heart, whose lady-parts, according to Fallows and Pruitt's theories of morality, should smell like Glade Plug-Ins.

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.​

Souvenir programs from assorted ice shows

Date: 1952-1985

Discovered at: Antique malls in Kansas City and Northampton, Massachusetts

The Cover Promises: Tragedy struck today when a young beauty was discovered lying dead in a uriney ice rink, dressed in two Hostess Sno-Balls and Shakespeare's neck-ruffle.

Once, long before threadbare touring companies and kiddie horrors like Disney on Ice, traveling ice shows aspired to grandeur. In the 1950s, Holiday on Ice trucks hauled around dozens of skaters, hundreds of costumes, thousands of spangles, and even its own ice-rinks, which at one point made sound financial sense.

People so loved the spectacle that the lavish souvenir programs turn up in almost every antique shop your Crap Archivist raids.

These days, the Disney ice show is such an afterthought that nobody even proofreads the Web site: "It one colossal party on ice!" the site boasts, just before smashing the tanks General Ross has sent after it.

Here's highlights from the glory days, culled from three vintage programs. We start with 1952's Holidays on Ice show, probably best know as the year of the south-of-the-border tribute to the nipple.

​
Your Crap Archivist's solemn promise: Deep in today's entry is the single greatest image in Studies in Crap history.

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. ​

Creating With Macrame

Author: Suzanne Stiles
Date: 1971
Publisher: American Handcrafts
The Cover Promises: Wookie-hair jellyfish!

Representative Quote:
"Macrame is the ONLY craft and art form that has been practiced in EVERY civilization throughout history."

Your Crap Archivist has nothing against most of the hobbies his mother has taken up over the years: scrap books, shadow-boxes, the contemplation of Oprah's favorite things. But I always found her macrame abominable. That thready wheat Chex of a purse! Those coarse plant hangers braided of twine and whiskers, still the most effective pet-hair accumulators known to science!

Still, when I somehow forced my eyes to look upon Suzanne Stiles' Creating With Macrame, mom's handiwork leapt in my esteem. Turns out, she hadn't botched those projects. No, even in the early '70s -- an era that was to the square-knotting of fuzzy thread what the late '50s were to stealing the black man's music -- macrame tended toward the hideous.

Take this Silly String tribute to the nervous system.

​

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.​

Keep on the Sunny Side of Life: A New Way of Living

Date: 1933

Publisher: Kellogg, Battle Creek, Michigan

Discovered at: Sentimental Journey Antiques, Olathe

Representative Quote:
"Health itself is the source of sparkling eyes, of a smooth, lovely skin and an engaging personality. Bran helps." (page 18).

Take a look at that cover. Savor the sunniness, the cheeks flushed with happiness, the way the whole family has put its best foot forward to step into the grandest of futures -- and, apparently, a tap number worked. What could lead anyone to feel such joy, especially in the depths of the worst depression this country ever faced?

The first chapter, "Public Enemy Number 1," explains:

"Are you acquainted with that prevalent enemy of health and well-being, constipation?"

A page later:

"Constipation may undermine beauty and youthfulness. Complexions may take on a sallow, lifeless hue. Eyes may lost their sparkle, become dull and uninteresting."

In short, for 32 pages, Kellogg's touts its "New Way of Living": eat All-Bran and your family will poop sunshine, thereby ending the Depression.

Again, consider that cover. Note the miserable blue streaking out behind the puppy, the only family member not Branned to bursting. Note, also, the faces of the damned suffering behind him. It takes more than moral fiber to live the American dream.

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 Defender Magazine

Date: Issues from January, February and September, 1955

Publisher: Defenders of the Christian Faith, Wichita, Kansas

The Cover Promises: In the great devolution of lunatic Kansas preachers, the missing link between William Jennings Bryan and Fred Phelps.

Representative Quotes:

• "History will give [Senator McCarthy] a rightful place above all inferiors." (February, page 2).

• "[The American Medical Association] hopes to have a blitzkrieg going -- the objective being to exterminate all of the minority healing professions by 1958." (September, page 2)

Liberty weeps. In 1955, when the United States senate dared to censure its anti-communist inquisitionist Joe McCarthy, few Americans heard the spirited nonsense roared by Wichita evangelist Gerald B. Winrod in The Defender, his monthly journal of sermons and horseshit. Only Winrod dared call the censure "crucifixion."

That means that some of Winrod's predictions turned out to be wrong, such as when he claims that McCarthy's speech in response to the censure "will be studied as a political and literary masterpiece in high school and college textbooks of the future," which just goes to show you that even time itself has a liberal bias. Hazarding why even Eisenhower turned red, Winrod speculates on powers greater even than presidents:

"It is now known that during all the months that the White House was maneuvering things against Senator McCarthy, the Time and Life publishing outfits had one of their key men stationed at the President's elbow."

It makes sense, I guess. Time-Life has always been aligned with forces beyond our comprehension.



Examine The Necronomicon free for ten days!

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