posted
Everything old is new again; here is George Orwell on an amusement of his childhood:
quote:EXAMINING recently a copy of Old Moore’s Almanac, I was reminded of the fun I used to extract in my boyhood from answering advertisements. Increase your height, earn five pounds a week in your spare time, drink habit conquered in three days, electric belts, bust-developers and cures for obesity, insomnia, bunions, backache, red noses, stammering, blushing, piles, bad legs, flat feet and baldness—all the old favourites were there or nearly all. Some of these advertisements have remained totally unchanged for at least thirty years.
You cannot, I imagine, get much benefit from any of these nostrums, but you can have a lot of fun by answering the advertisements and then, when you have drawn them out and made them waste a lot of stamps in sending successive wads of testimonials, suddenly leaving them cold.
Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Indeed. Eh-hem. Hrrumph. Sniff-sniff. What is perhaps...newer...is the nature shape and destiny of our purported interlocutors. Far be it for me to speak for the ACME automatic, ether-powered, bedwetter or Colonel "Contiki" Sndemboontoo (Nigerian helicopter gunship salesperson) or even Orson Scott Card; but, George Orwell, at least, was dead by the time he left us all cold--and I, on the other hand (over here, the one waving in the mirror! Yes! That's me! No? Why? Well, I was born like that...Yes. Like a watermelon I've been told), from this very licked fingertip, send you another godforsaken greenhouse-forced dull-pinkish blooming Begonia!
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
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