Bad Ideas Department: Pool Vodka and Cigarette Wallpaper 1947-1953

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1153

I just can't leave this week's string of five posts on stuff that I found in Life magazine without adding a little to the Bad Ideas category.  Generally this is the place  to collect the really odd, little material that I stumble upon that is noteworthy but not necessarily a good  fit for a general, stand-alone post.  So comes this installment to Bad Ideas--Things We Don't Need.

For example I just couldn't wrap any sort of integrating or creative bow around this image (left) to present it as anything more than what it is.

I could think of almost no other thing that I'd rather drink after a swimming workout than a glass of vodka with no ice. 
I mean, really--it gives me a headache to just think about popping out of a cold pool, a little out-of-breath, and grabbing four fingers of room-temperature Smirnoff. I get that it is a "dry" juxtaposition, but all this looks like to me is a man with a pretty big problem.

And then the next picture--there's simply  no good need to be posing in your underwear with a small boy in his underwear while grooming a French poodle.  There's just no conceivable need to do it, period, especially with such oddly satisfied smiles.

And then  there's this ad that is utterly demeaning to almost everyone--a wall of Old Gold unfiltered ciggies that are about life-sized with a vague suggestion that you smoke them for fun rather than some sort of medical benefit (?)  With a little editing you could construct a wallpaper out of this photo--and I mean a wallpaper for a room rather than a computer, a wallpaper composed of cigarette butt ends..  Just for the record, I figure that a 1.5 pack a day smoker would smoke the equivalent of this image spread over the four walls of an average-size bedroom in about four years.  Its conceivable that you could paper a decent-sized house with the wallpapered equivalent of every cigarette smoked by the smoker in a lifetime, or for as long as the cancer could be tricked to stay away.

And so this is the beginning of this category--I hope it will be entertaining.

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

Old Gold filterless! John, that's what I used to buy for my Mom at Benny's. She quit when I was ten, so it was before then. Buying cigs in grade school. The good old days. I didn't care about the cigarettes, but on the way home I would nibble the end of the loaf of Italian bread sticking out of the bag. Mom switched to Raleigh when we wanted to start saving the coupons. The sequence of the pics above makes a disturbing story, but I'm sure it's an accidental arrangement.