Okay, it's really Sunday afternoon, but I worked all night and went to bed at 8 a.m. this morning. This Farberware model 206 was a recent find, although I have several in this identical or near identical design. I couldn't find the exact manufacture date of this percolator; the references I could find online place it in the 1940's although that's a little late for a non-automatic percolator, but I guess it's possible. The patent number dates to 1932. Of course, patent dates only mean the item was manufactured some time after that, potentially years.  The patent actually refers to the ..read more

There's something poetic about this slide.  Something about the beauty of peacetime after the horrors of war.  Anyway, we've gone from squatting in the latrine to squatting in some flowers ..read more

This slide was simply titled "Latrine".  Talk about closeness.  I'm not sure that canvas wrap is really providing much privacy.  I have nightmares about this (not this particular slide, mind you, just this situation).  This is from the same set of slides as the previous post.  Talk about occupied in Japan. I presume our subject is taking the photo, which is a whole other level of weird.  I guess he wanted to let someone at home know about the arrangements ..read more

I acquired a collection of family slides at an estate sale this past weekend.  Many are "red border" Kodachrome 35mm slides which puts them at pre-1960.  As it turns out, many were from the late 1940's when the original owner was stationed in Occupied Japan at Camp McNair around 1947.  I'll be posting some select picks (and pics) in the following weeks. First up is this photo of a bountiful feast.  The color and composition of this was striking to me. The original owner of the slides, Milton Gast,  is center. The feast includes some home canned peaches along with Ritz ..read more

This week's TV Guide is yet another example of that bothersome mailing label.  Sorry, Pamela Sue Martin.  "'Humbug!' she yelled at the mayor of Los Angeles" and she still didn't get the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge in the city's production of "A Christmas Carol". PlayCable was a subscriber videogame service introduced by Mattel in 1980 to market their games over cable.  While it was moderately successful, it ultimately died as a result of the videogame crash of 1983. At first I thought it meant one series with Farrah Fawcett, Suzanne Somers and Valerie Harper ..read more

You may have noticed a slight deluge of posts lately.  Okay, maybe "deluge" is a bit strong.  Let's say a slight swelling of posts.  The reason is, I've been going through my blog drafts; those posts I began writing and abandoned for one reason or another, usually because after I began writing them, I deemed them not interesting enough to post.  And hey, here's one of them!  By the way, I have no idea what that title means.  I wrote it way back in 2020 and probably just liked the way it sounded and the wordplay on "Pirates of the Caribbean". I'm not changing it ..read more

Pardon me if my age shows while I switch into "kids these days" mode.  It seems the sole source of entertainment for kids these days (see, I told you) are video games.  Sure, they come in a variety of platforms, but they're still video games.  Pre-Atari, I didn't have much exposure to video games.  But there were variety of options for game play I could choose; board games, cards, outdoor physical *gasp* games, and early electronic games.  And for a brief time in the late 1970's mixed among those other choices was a line of mechanical pocket games made by Tomy and othe ..read more

 I've written before of my fond memories of Scholastic Books and the two magical days in school: when the Scholastic Book Club order form would arrive and the day the books you ordered arrived. I recently found a few more of these flyers. Arrow Book Clubs was a division of Scholastic Books. These books were aimed at 4th through 6th graders.  There was also the T.A.B. Book Club (Teen-age Books) that were aimed at older students. Not only did I order books from Scholastic, I had had many of the older books from my siblings.  I've also picked up quite a few over the years at sales ..read more

I hope everyone's wearing their neck brace, because we're going from Halloween to a head-snapping Valentine's Day post.  Somehow, Thanksgiving and Christmas was lost in the shuffle.   Truth is, I'm always burned out after 31 days of Halloween posting.  So I'll try to kick-start things with this post of Valentine's I found in the past year. The majority of these came from a garage sale where I waited patiently as another person ahead of me cherry-picked the best of the lot.  After going for seconds, I saw the first person return and put back the Valentine's they had c ..read more

While my decorations don't change drastically from year to year, I like to swap things around and add things here and there.  This year's mantel.  I added some vintage cabinet photographs from a collection I bought at an estate sale this year.  All the photos are from the same family.  Hopefully no one considers this too disrespectful. I did verify with the estate sale company that the family didn't want the photographs. The skull mask is a new addition this year. I'm undecided on the age. It's made of pulp, but someone I showed it too felt it was a re ..read more