The Vintage Reader

My comments got spammed at some point over the weekend, and Blogger's instructions for deleting them aren't working at all, so I've disabled comments.

Dear vintage readers,

I'm afraid that I've developed a bit of an aversion to the Internet recently. If it weren't for weather and horoscopes (oh, and work, of course) I probably wouldn't have even opened up Firefox in the last week or so. Instead, I've read two Barbara Michaels novels from the 60s, and I'm almost to the end of a dreadful Emilie Loring from 1931 that features horrible sentences such as "Could it be the same Philip Carr her grandmother had told her about, the New York playboy whose name had been linked with starlets and socialites, whose father had been her family’s legal counsel until that horrible fight with her father, when the elder Carr had stood up for what he believed was right even when her father wanted to cut his children out of his will in order to provide for his new wife, a Broadway showgirl half Pamela’s age? Oh, it was! It was the same Philip Carr!" (I don't have the book with me right now, so that's paraphrased)

I don't want to go to Bloglines, and the mere thought of last week's thrilling discovery, del.icio.us (yes, I know everybody else has been using it for a year, but I resisted), actually causes a physical revulsion akin to nausea. The aversion has spread to other media as well: I can only listen to NPR until I hear the words "death tax" and then I have to change over to something else (to be fair, this one actually started a few weeks ago, but then the phrases that were making me change the station were "brain-damaged woman", "87-year-old pontiff", and "retired slugger").

I'm not sure what's causing this, or how long it will last, but if posts are sparse for a while, that's why.

When I was a little kid, I checked out Ed Emberley's books from the library over and over, and never got tired of things like making animals out of letters of the alphabet. It never would have occurred to me that Ed Emberley would even still be alive, let alone have such a nifty web site.

While watching Red Hot Riding Hood on Cartoon Alley we wondered what Red was asking for when she crooned "Daddy, I want the B-19." A search yielded this gem of American slang and pop culture: The Warner Bros. Cartoon Companion. Everything from "A card" to "Planet X" and beyond is here, with references to the cartoons the phrases appear in. This is just an amazing resource.

(Oh, and the B-19, as suspected, was a bomber. Why any self-respecting showgirl would want one, I'm not quite sure, but then, I always get the feeling I'm missing stuff when I watch Tex Avery's cartoons)