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What Is That Thing?

17 Jan

January 17, 2014

I recently had the chance to go back and read one of my old blogs, Imponderable #92: At the Carnival. This is the one where some idiot drops over $2,000 on a rigged carnival game in hopes of winning an Xbox and ends up with a stuffed banana. Reading my old blogs can be as painful for me as it can be for you, trust me, even more so, but this one just opened up a mystery for me, something I never noticed before. Here’s the picture I ran with the story.

carny_640

What’s the classy guy drinking? It is clearly a Pepsi but in a weird container, like a normal paper or wax paper cup but sealed like a milk carton on top. I went back to the original, uncropped picture and found that there was a second cup in the scene too.

carny soda crop

Dating the picture is hard. Looking at their high-class threads, this couple could be from anytime between 1969 and infinity. The prizes are a little more help. While it is hard to date the Spider-Man and Superman pictures, the Simpsons didn’t start airing until 1989 and the Dick Tracy movie came out in 1990, so I’m going to date this in the early 1990’s.

I went online to look for that odd soda container but couldn’t find anything even nearly close. The only thing in even the same realm was some even older civil defense containers of drinking water.

watercarton

Any of you ever see soda packaged that way? Because it is sealed it can’t just be something they sold empty and filled, it had to be produced by Pepsi and distributed that way. I have to admit, it does seem like a cool and cheap way to package soda, though I wonder if the soda would eventually eat through the paper, much like it is doing to our stomach linings right now.

January 15th in Time! (Not space, just time.)

15 Jan

January 15, 2014

In my continuing, failing effort to bring a sense of perspective to America, I present the historical events that shaped our country, all of which took place today, January 15th.

1- New Connecticut (Vermont) declares independence, 1777 Yup, how’d that work out for ya? Didn’t keep that “New Connecticut” name long, huh? That name needed a serious rethink. But I think it ended up OK. When I think of Vermont, I think of Maple syrup and the Green Mountain Boys. When I think of Connecticut I think of traffic around Hartford.

3-Molasses floods Boston streets, 1919 This is true and it is one of my favorite historical events. A gigantic vat of molasses collapsed and (slowly) flooded the town in sticky goo. Buildings were knocked down, people got trapped and drowned, and the smell lingered for ages. This really happened.

Molasses_Flood_Historical_Marker

2- Ford Foundation is born, 1936 And in 1952, she changed her name to Anna Smithson. Seriously, would you like to go through life named after a philanthropic organization? Poor girl was mercilessly teased in high school, with all the teenage guys trying to give her a “donation.”

4– First appearance of the Democratic donkey, 1870 That was the first, but definitely not the last, jackass the Democrats have run for election.

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