Found 6,620 posts tagged ‘headline’ |
|
|
 |
|
|
"Modern flying carpet visits city of Bagdad" (1932). Turns out that the flying carpet is just an airplane, but here's the crucial question: why call an airplane a flying carpet? Why, as vintage Popular Mechanics did in every issue, refer to scientists as "wizards" and their work as "magical"? The answer is simple: they co-opt mythology and magical lore so as to demystify the world into a very cold place, devoid of metaphor. Sad, colorless, and shallow.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Feather-covered dirigibles predicted for the future." From Popular Mechanics, 1930. Big Science back then (as now) can't see the forest for the trees. The naiveté would almost be charming, if not for the smugness behind everything in vintage Popular Mechanics. (We daren't look at more modern issues. The white-coat New Inquisition, as Robert Anton Wilson called them, terrifies us.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
While it's true that "flowers [are] able to tell time," instead of saying, for example, "It's 4:45," they'll say, "It's a quarter till." And you'll be like, "Till what?" And they'll be like, "till the ground and muse along the odoriferous furrows of our lowlands." And you'll be like, "I don't know the allusion because I've never read J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer," and they'll have some comeback or other; they always do. The headline is from Popular Mechanics, 1930.
|
Page 328 of 331
> Older Entries...
Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
|
