New York News Blog

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power. ​

Creating With Macrame

Author: Suzanne Stiles
Date: 1971
Publisher: American Handcrafts
The Cover Promises: Wookie-hair jellyfish!

Representative Quote:
"Macrame is the ONLY craft and art form that has been practiced in EVERY civilization throughout history."

Your Crap Archivist has nothing against most of the hobbies his mother has taken up over the years: scrap books, shadow-boxes, the contemplation of Oprah's favorite things. But I always found her macrame abominable. That thready wheat Chex of a purse! Those coarse plant hangers braided of twine and whiskers, still the most effective pet-hair accumulators known to science!

Still, when I somehow forced my eyes to look upon Suzanne Stiles' Creating With Macrame, mom's handiwork leapt in my esteem. Turns out, she hadn't botched those projects. No, even in the early 70s -- an era that was to the square-knotting of fuzzy thread what the late '50s were to stealing the black man's music -- macrame tended toward the hideous.

Take this Silly String tribute to the nervous system.

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Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Keep on the Sunny Side of Life: A New Way of Living

Date: 1933

Publisher: Kellogg, Battle Creek, Michigan

Discovered at: Antique mall

Representative Quote:
"Health itself is the source of sparkling eyes, of a smooth, lovely skin and an engaging personality. Bran helps." (page 18).

Take a look at that cover. Savor the sunniness, the cheeks flushed with happiness, the way the whole family has put its best foot forward to step into the grandest of futures -- and, apparently, a tap number worked. What could lead anyone to feel such joy, especially in the depths of the worst depression this country ever faced?

The first chapter, "Public Enemy Number 1," explains:

"Are you acquainted with that prevalent enemy of health and well-being, constipation?"

A page later:

"Constipation may undermine beauty and youthfulness. Complexions may take on a sallow, lifeless hue. Eyes may lost their sparkle, become dull and uninteresting."

In short, for 32 pages, Kellogg's touts its "New Way of Living": eat All-Bran and your family will poop sunshine, thereby ending the Depression.

Again, consider that cover. Note the miserable blue streaking out behind the puppy, the only family member not Branned to bursting. Note, also, the faces of the damned suffering behind him. It takes more than moral fiber to live the American dream.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

The Defender Magazine

Date: Issues from January, February and September, 1955

Publisher: Defenders of the Christian Faith, Wichita, Kansas

The Cover Promises: In the great devolution of lunatic Kansas preachers, the missing link between William Jennings Bryan and Fred Phelps.

Representative Quotes:

• "History will give [Senator McCarthy] a rightful place above all inferiors." (February, page 2).

• "[The American Medical Association] hopes to have a blitzkrieg going - the objective being to exterminate all of the minority healing professions by 1958." (September, page 2)

Liberty weeps. In 1955, when the United States senate dared to censure its anti-communist inquisitionist Joe McCarthy, few Americans heard the spirited nonsense roared by Wichita evangelist Gerald B. Winrod in The Defender, his monthly journal of sermons and horseshit. Only Winrod dared call the censure "crucifixion."

That means that some of Winrod's predictions turned out to be wrong, such as when he claims that McCarthy's speech in response to the censure "will be studied as a political and literary masterpiece in high school and college textbooks of the future," which just goes to show you that even time itself has a liberal bias. Hazarding why even Eisenhower turned red, Winrod speculates on powers greater even than presidents:

"It is now known that during all the months that the White House was maneuvering things against Senator McCarthy, the Time and Life publishing outfits had one of their key men stationed at the President's elbow."

It makes sense, I guess. Time-Life has always been aligned with forces beyond our comprehension.



Examine The Necronomicon free for ten days!

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Paint Me the Story of Frankenstein

Authors: Dennis Green (text) and Derek Fox (art)

Date: 1976

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlop

The Cover Promises: "A book to scare you out of your wits! And who paints the pictures? YOU!"

Or: Oddly bossy kids-book fun in the tradition of "Dance Me the Tale of Paul Bunyan" and "Pee Me in the Snow the Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

Discovered at: Used book store

Either a dream-along treat for imaginative kids or some cynical feat of art-job outsourcing, Dennis Green and Derek Fox's Paint Me the Story of Frankenstein insists that readers participate in a mad scientist's act of unholy creation. The book's shoddiness notwithstanding, that's kind of cool, and your Crap Archivist supports the authors' decision to force kids' imaginative participation in Mary Shelley's story through painting rather than corpse-exhuming.

Green and Fox hew closely to Shelley's original. As always, Dr. Frankenstein quickly learns the first lesson of R&D: When crafting an abomination before God, manage expectations, even in the prototype stage.

​ NOTE: this scene takes place not long after Dr. Frankenstein quit The Guess Who.

Each Thursday (Friday, this week -- damn lazy editor!), your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

You Would If You Loved Me

Author: Sol Gordon, Ph.D
Date: 1978
Publisher: Bantam Books

Discovered at: Thrift store

The Cover Promises: "Sex Lines! You've heard them. You've tried them. Here's What you can do about them."

In short, snappy answers to stupid come-ons!

Representative Quotes:

• "Don't worry. You'll only bleed a little." (page 69).

• "Male: I just oiled my machine. Want to see how it works?
  Female: Why don't you give it a cold shower and see if it rusts?" (page 15)

Americans have never found it easy to sit their children down and not have the big talk about sex, so it's only natural that, eventually, we have left such awkward non-discussions to the schools, where not explaining condoms, pregnancies, or the ins-and-outs of ins-and-outs has in many districts been official curriculum for over a decade. The small price to pay for this convenience? Record outbreaks of chlamydia.

Thirty years back, parents had fewer options. To help out, Sol Gordon, PhD, has stuffed a paperback with hundreds of the "lines" young men have purportedly used to talk young women into bed. Unlike sex-ed, he covers all the bases, from the evergreen "Let's make tonight something to remember," to the boastful "The hookers usually pay me afterwards," to the educational "It is said that having sex on the Jewish sabbath is a double mitzvah -which means 'good deed.'"

Also: "Are you a dyke or something?"

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

Scientific American

Date: August 23, 1913

Discovered at: Antique shop

Representative Quotes:

• "Probably the first whole-hearted aerial attack in modern warfare will be delivered from a very large and safe dirigible, a craft that can at least boast of a practical firing platform, notwithstanding the danger of conflagration." (page 142).

• "Pedagogy in this alleged twentieth century is about in the same position as was astronomy in the age of Galileo." (page 141).

For all its grand talk of battling airships, and its many photographs of resplendently whiskered men wired to apparatuses right out of a steampunk "Mouse Trap" game, this crumbling old Scientific American reveals at least two truths of American life that have only grown truer as the decades have passed: our faith in new technology and our corresponding habit of only worrying about the safety of that new technology after the inevitable disasters.

Just as newspapers of late 2001 burst with advice for preventing future attacks identical in every particular to the one we had just endured, this 1913 broadsheet concerns itself with potential Titanics. (The original sank in April, 1912.) The editors endorse two solutions. First, build larger, hulled lifeboats equipped with engines.

Second-- HA! There is no second, because lifeboats = FAIL!

"A safe ship needs no lifeboat, and the long line of these craft, lining for hundreds of feet the upper deck of our great passenger steamers, is in itself a confession of failure . . . Theoretically, thoroughly subdivided and carefully navigated ships need no multiplicity of lifeboats."

By this logic, the vulcanized "skins" a bloke might slip into for consorting with a dollymop are a confession of his shameful inability to stiff upper-lip his way through a touch of the syph.

The editors express no safety concerns about the zeppelins and air-ships that parade through the "Aeronautics" round-up, even though the dangers of such are plain to anyone who has ever witnessed parade workers trying to wrangle a helium Garfield.

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

​ The Choices of Men: A Novel of Male Power and Sexuality in a Feminist Age

Author: T.S. Tyrone
Date: 2001
Publisher: 1st Books Library

The Cover Promises:"For too long, we've been hearing a monologue and women have been doing the talking. Choices gives men a voice, too."

Representative Quotes:

• "'If I stay home and let my hormones loose on my disinterested wife, at her whim with a simple 911 call, I can be charged with marital rape and carted off to jail where the odds are greatly in the other guy's favor that I will be the one who actually gets raped while my wife gabs to her friends all night on the cordless about my despicable behavior!'" (page 56).

• "The reason this book is first being published electronically is that fiction print publishers are dominated by female editors who know that primarily female readers buy fiction." (page 157)

By 2001, the long-oppressed straight American man had had enough. He'd let women get jobs. He'd let them net two-thirds of his income. He'd even adopted the use of "they" as a singular pronoun in cases where he felt uncertain of the antecedent's gender. But wouldn't you know it, some of these uppity gals still don't put out on demand, even to their husbands!

Such is the dilemma faced by Guy, the hero of The Choices of Men, T.S. Tyrone's self-published novel about men reclaiming control of their family lives . . . and their wives' points of entry. Imagine the Promise Keepers, but horny.

Here' the situation. Guy's wife Jill won't sleep with him, even though Guy pays the bills. This spurs Guy to contemplate the economic realities of their relationship.

"She can't have it both ways. Either she earns the right to a regulated monopoly by providing service to the customer or I damn well am entitled to go out into the free market to get my needs met."

Maybe he should spend some time with that free market's invisible hand.

​ Your Crap Archivist appreciates the role that crazy preachers have played in the grand pageant of our nation's history.

As purely American a development as baseball or individually wrapped slices of cheese, these holy hell-raisers have deserve applause for their great contribution to the national character: our tendency to blame complex social problems on the unrelated and newfangled.

For the first Studies in Crap Crazy Preacher Invitational, your Crap Archivist has lined up impassioned tracts on a common theme: how everyone who ever so much as hully-gullied will boil for eternity in a pit of fire. (See ya, Tom DeLay!)

In one corner, we have Dan Gilbert, whose angry 1942 pamphlet Hell Over Hollywood dared to expose secret Jewry in the movie business! In the other, we have the Billy-Graham hating evangelist John R. Rice, who honored his Prince of Peace by naming his publishing company "Sword of the Lord"!

Gentlemen, start your batshittery!

​ Dan Gilbert's The Heritage of Hell vs. John R. Rice's What's Wrong With the Dance?

Representative Quotes:
Gilbert: "Conceived in hell and brought forth by the brothel, the dance has established its immoral dominion over the life and destiny of the larger element of American youth." (page 39).

Rice: "Listen to me, sisters, you bunch of hens. You who have been carrying on these dances in your homes, don't open your chops. You have paved the way for lewdness, trained boys and girls for it." (page 24)

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

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A school year's worth of My Weekly Readers


Date: 1936 - 1937

Publisher: American Education Press

Discovered at: Estate sale


The Cover Promises:In the Depression, Americans couldn't even afford news.


Representative Quotes:

• 
  "The dog in the picture has a letter to mail. The dog puts the letter into the mailbox." (Cover story, December 14 - 18, 1936.)
  

• "Children play with the chickens. Little chickens are not toys." (Above-the-fold headline, March 22 - 26, 1937.)
  

Between the fall of 1936 and the following spring, the world boiled in changes. Civil war broke out in Spain. Prince Albert ascended to the British throne. In Flint, Michigan, workers seized control of a GM plant, ushering in the era of the UAW; meanwhile, on an island somewhere in the south Pacific, archaeologist Indiana Jones settled for all time the question of God's existence: "Yes He does, and just close your eyes when He gets in one of His face-melting moods."

Of course, none of this made My Weekly Reader: Edition Number One, the newspaper for the most wee of kids. Even in the thick of the FDR/Landon election, young America was fed "news" like "A big duck lives with the pig" and "Children like to look at squirrels."


While this may seem innocent, good Americans even then had to monitor the schools for leftist indoctrination.


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Liberal sex-freaks!

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.​

John Lennon in Heaven: Crossing the Borderlines of Being

Author:Linda Keen
Date: 1994
Publisher: Pan Publishing, Oregon
Discovered at: Thrift store

The Cover Promises: Pink-clouded adventures in heaven with the guy who sang "Imagine there's no heaven."

Representative Quotes:

• "'I thought when I died, I would finally get some rest from fans - but shit no! I didn't become "free" until I could find me way out of those bloody clouds.'" (page 36)

• "'Take this and bear it honorably,' says the man in white, presenting John with an exquisite, gleaming sword which materializes out of the Light.'" (page 214)

Author Linda Keen claims to gad barefoot through the dandelions with dead John Lennon. He's her afterlife BFF, her "personal spirit guide," and he can't stop telling her how she's very much like him, death and genius notwithstanding.

They'll talk on and on about how tragedies on earth are no big thing since our souls learn from them, and then he'll look at her with a Beatley twinkle and say "Well, dearie, you and I have a hell of a lot in common."

Or: "I haven't had a conversation like this since Huey Newton."

Together, they amble through meadows and past Mystic Oceans, having adventures, dishing the secrets of creation and Beatledom. John complains that Yoko keeps throwing memorials for him, boasts about his past lives in Arthurian times, and then, after some 200 pages of tedious bullshit, passes bravely through an underground chamber in which their own corpses lay decaying in coffins.

There John Lennon meets an ancient man in white named Pendragon -- as in "King Arthur" Pendragon.

Pendragon is so impressed by John and Linda's moxie that he bestows upon the peace-loving Beatle an invisible sword made of light and I guess also advances him to level 8 and the Goblet of Fire.