JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

December 1972. You're producing a weekly show about finance for PBS . The final episode of the calendar year is upon you. How can you spice things up to mark the upcoming new year?  Throw a party on-air of course! Pop a few corks, encourage your guests to wear their snazziest socializing threads, and encourage the host to go into full lounge lizard mode. Because, when you cross the financial markets in New York with Playboy After Dark , how can you lose? (Though, sadly, you aren't able to hire any groovy rock bands.) Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985. Wall Street Week was one of those shows whose opening credits fascinated me as a kid. Something about the energetic music and (even by the early 1980s) retro graphics, coupled with a few moments of Louis Rukeyser's soothing voice. Never mind that I no idea how financial markets worked, or that I'd flip the channel within a few minutes.  Financial Post, May 13, 1978. A piece on a Wall Street Week taping in Toronto, profiling ...

 Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. Click on image for larger version. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the 1909 version of a holiday-themed zombie movie, where Santa is under siege from children transformed into the living dead who think jolly old St. Nick would make a good Christmas dinner. The expression on Santa's face suggests his effort to fend them off may be doomed.  Do you think that in their efforts to diversify their Christmas movies, Hallmark would consider a heartwarming holiday zom-com? This odd drawing, combined with last post's odd Inuit stories , lead us into an odd mixture of holiday items presented by the Hamilton Times, a Liberal-leaning paper which published from 1859 to 1920. Canadiana has a sampling of issues, primarily from 1907 to 1909 .  Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. When a man is in pain and misery, you don't leave him (literally) hanging from wires just so you can run and grab a disbeliever.  Half-an-hour passed before Tommy return...

Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. In 1909, the Arctic was the exciting frontier of North America, thanks to Robert Peary's still-contested claim of having reached the geographic North Pole. The Inuit living in the region were treated as an exotic species, to the point that, in the 1890s, New York's Museum of Natural History asked Peary to bring back "specimens" for study .  By this point, the myth of Santa Claus residing in the North Pole was established, which led to an obvious question: how did people in the far north actually celebrate Christmas? The answer: not in any way which pleased close-minded people to the south. The questions "disturbing young citizens" might not be the same ones which would disturb them today. This piece feels like a Christian missionary's wet dream. Look at these poor creatures who don't know the happiness everyone else experiences on December 25! It's cold! All they do is sit around joylessly on blocks of ice as ...

Buffalo Enquirer, December 24, 1920. A few questions: 1) Why is the "prominent physician" unnamed? 2) Are these "fruited" cereals, which contain figs, dates, raisins, and either whole wheat or oats, an early American adaptation of muesli?  3) Is this man suffering the shakes because he ate too much system-clogging meat, or is he suffering not from auto-intoxication ( a discredited 19th century theory on gut health ) but intoxication stemming from drinking some bad bathtub gin during the early days of prohibition in the United States? Despite the promise of better health from a cheap bowl of cereal, United Cereal Mills went out of business within a year of this ad's publication.  Link to more Fruited Wheat/Fruited Oats ads .

  Parade, December 24, 1950. Which of the eight types listed here are you? How often have you emerged from your stroll across the street with lumps or found yourself strapped to a hospital bed? How many times do you think the uncredited writer of this piece cursing at any of these pedestrians while behind the wheel of their post-Second World War American city? Launched in 1941, Parade is one of the last surviving nationally syndicated Sunday newspaper supplements in the United States. Why it still exists is a good question: the last time I saw a physical copy a few years ago, it was a sad little publication - unexciting celebrity and lifestyle content buried amid weak advertisers, combined into a 16-page package. Its website doesn't scream "read me!" thanks to a layout that is unfortunately evocative of those "around the web" clickbait sections.