That’s cool info, thanks! I had no idea. I love those weird crossovers where someone shows up in a totally different context.

Beautiful

Yeah. The color palette is working for me.

That would be hilarious. I’m in. :)

Indeed. It has a little bit of early cell phone vibe, except before those were a thing.

If anyone wants more Bibendums…

Agreed with kahjtheundedicated@lemmy.world, their bike tires are still excellent.

YW!

I can never predict how interesting things will be to anyone else, since it seems like the subjects I find most fascinating or historically significant often get the least interest. So… glad to hear somebody liked this one!

Agreed! I’m teeing up a post for tomorrow that has even more incredible poster art from before any of us were alive.

It strikes me that classifieds like this were largely unchanged for 100’s of years. Never mind the content, the form of this example would not be out of place in a newspaper 150 years later or 150 years earlier. This is one from Boston in 1704, and in London they go back much earlier still.

sure enough, there was a 10 inch hole in the floor

That’s in case you need to use Flintstone type propulsion…

Wikipedia or wikimedia, mostly. They have higher resolution versions available, but I didn’t want to spam up the thread with a bunch of really large pictures. edit -> the house photo is modern, and the bottom painting is a reproduction.

Not exact, but best my search turned up! “U.S. Model 1880 Infantry Officer’s Dress Helmet”

Curiously enough, it seems like you can get things like this on historical auction sites.

Yeah, hard to tell. It did promise a little glitz such as a periscope (just 2 mirrors and some cardboard, probably a few $?), a lit instrument panel (implies batteries and a bulb or three), and whatever “rockets that fire” meant. In the real photo there are two red rockets behind the crew compartment. Maybe those were spring loaded and could be released from inside?

I could see an imagination-driven kid having a certain amount of fun with this thing. Although I bet the novelty wore off fairly soon.

The whole guy has a touch of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs vibe to me. Not so much in facial structure, as in the grin that makes me want to back slowly away.

Oh, nicely found!

Not only did he give us pet rocks… according to wikipedia he entered, and won, a contest for writing bad purple prose, beating over 4000 other entrants, with the following gem,

The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.

Guy died in 2015 at 78.

so my memory may be fuzzy

Or even just different SKUs. They probably had a bazillion variations.

I wasn’t familiar with that but I gotta admit, it does look rather badass.

Sort of sad to see them go. I understand it’s probably not easily viable in an age of advanced home video games, where you need to pay rent on an entire building and pay salaries and everything to run a slot car venue.

Still kinda sad.

Looks like your memory is right. I don’t know if this one is the same scale, since there are multiple scales of them, but the ones I saw look all similar-ish, with two metal strips like this.

I’ve never seen one of these but it looks to me like you should be able to do some badass custom layouts too, with the same segments.

Ah yeah, that’s probably what they are.