Retro Thing

Revealing The Mysteries Of The Magic 8 Ball

It's an object filled with mystery, murky black ink, and an opinionated icosahedron. Am I talking about the Magic 8 Ball? Signs point to yes.

The Magic 8 Ball is a popular novelty fortune teller, that seems to have inspired more than its share of cautious dread. Bring up the Magic 8 Ball, and there will always be a couple of adults who will tell you it spooked them in their childhood. Coincidentally, the Magic 8 Ball's origins are fittingly otherworldly. Inventor Albert C. Carter was inspired in the mid 40s to create the novelty based on a "spirit writing" device used by his mother, a self-avowed clairvoyant. That's some provenance. Carter's 1944 patent for the device called it the Syco-Seer, first stuffing the die mechanism in a decorated cardboard tube, later styling it after a crystal ball. This was unsuccessful in stores, but it did catch the eye of Brunswick Billiards here in Chicago. They commissioned a new version that looked like an 8 ball, and somehow this captured the imagination of toy-aisle occultists.

Each side of the twenty sided die within the Magic 8 Ball has a simple answer to your yes-no questions. After querying the ball, you simply turn it over. For some reason some people insist on shaking the ball first, which creates bubbles that rather spoils the spooky effect of the die rising through the gloomy goo. The d20 (hello D&D fans!) offers one of 10 positive answers, 5 negative, and 5 milquetoast. Ever wonder what all of the possible answers are?

-SPOILER ALERT!-

    ● It is certain
    ● It is decidedly so
    ● Without a doubt
    ● Yes definitely
    ● You may rely on it
    ● As I see it yes
    ● Most likely
    ● Outlook good
    ● Yes
    ● Signs point to yes

    ● Reply hazy try again
    ● Ask again later
    ● Better not tell you now
    ● Cannot predict now
    ● Concentrate and ask again

    ● Don't count on it
    ● My reply is no
    ● My sources say no
    ● Outlook not so good
    ● Very doubtful

Before this turns into a story problem for you mathematicians, it takes an average of 72 "throws" for all 20 answers to each come up at least once. The Magic 8 Ball has become a classic toy, available today in bewildering variations. There's a USB powered one (no surprise), one full of memes for the A.D.D. txt'ing generation, and my favorite - one that curses you out. Will the Magic 8 Ball prognosticate over our problems for generations to come? You may rely on it.

I read recently that the iPhone's Siri gets one out of ever three searches wrong. With those kinds of odds, I'll just stick with carrying around a Magic 8 Ball instead.

link:

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Your Future Wife #2

We're all looking for love, that mysterious and vexing connection between two people. When you don't know what you're looking for, maybe your best bet is to follow the guidance of a 1935 Exhibit Card vending machine. If the wife we predicted for you last time didn't pan out, how about this one?

"Your future wife will be an heiress, one of society's spoiled and pampered daughters and disgustingly rich. She will be the life of every party, but she knows nothing about darning your socks or sewing on buttons. Your toes will stick through the holes in your socks, and you will wear nails in your supporters to keep your trousers up, and she will make you love it. One little society socialite will grace your home."

©1935 Ex. Sup. Co. Chgo. made in U.S.A.

It looks like they had Paris Hiltons 80 years ago too, eh?

Convergence X: Fake Camcorder Does It All - Except Shoot Video

Flea markets aren't jst a lot of second had stuff. You'll also find lots of strange new products that come from far off lands (I'm trying to be nice here...). I've seen this Nokina camera countless times, usually priced at $30-50. It looks like just another castoff 90s camcorder, but why so cheap?

Looks like Nokina has learned that the cheapest way to make a camcorder is to leave out the camcorder part. This is a 35mm still camera. The fixed-focus lens has a filter thread, an what looks like auto-exposure electronics. You can line up your shot in two ways - neither of which actually work very well. Either use the hokey viewfinder which gives you some vague idea of where the camera is pointing, or fold out the hokey fake side "monitor" to get a misty and vague idea of framing via a mirrored (that's right... the image is backwards) upright finder.

Four AA batteries juice the camera's powered film advance and rewind (a surprise luxury in an oddball unit like this). So when you're buying film don't forget to pick up some batteries... and cassettes - audio cassettes. Yes, there's a built in tape player. A little door pops open on the side where a video cassette would typically go, but it's really a Walkman type mechanism. You can either listen to music via headphones, or built in crummy speaker. So I guess you can use music to soothe your subjects before you snap a pic.

So there you have it. A fake camcorder that is really a somewhat advanced 35mm point and shoot and walkman in one. The viewfinders are both so crummy and misaligned, that maybe they actually DO give you an accurate preview of the rotten photos you're likely to get with this thing. The Nokina has some heft though, so I was curious what sort of image processing power was weighing the thing down. Turns out to be a metal weight inside. Always the sign of a quality product.

So who in the heck is this for? I can only imagine that it's for duping people at flea markets, or duping your family that you splashed out for a new 90s camcorder? The Nokina is too expensive to be a novelty or a toy, and clearly a lot off work went into creating such a bad idea... so who is the market for this?

1960s Ray Gun Made Of Space-Age Cardboard

Before space patrol issues you a real ray pistol, they may have you practice your "pew pew" gun skills with this cardboard replica. It's got a deadly looking ("deadly" in that it looks like it might not be well insulated against all of that killer voltage") gun printed on both sides as well as a folded over hinge along the top.

The surprise comes if you hold the gun slightly open and bring it down quickly. A pocket of paper flaps out quickly with a loud crack. My gun is a little out of comission because it is quite old (clearly my weapon fell through some fissure in time connecting the 50th century and the 1960s), but an intact gun will issue a loud report.

While scarcely a replacement for a classic plastic or tinplate ray gun, but as a freebie with a business name printed on it... not too bad. Though labeling it "all mechanical" is a little optimistic.

Cool thing for you, dear reader, is that I found an eBay seller who has some new old stock for just a few bucks, so you can have the real thing that's intact enough to actually have fun with. You can also fold your own popper by following the link below. It won't look as cool as the paper ray gun, but it's loud enough to get you kicked out of a Junior High School lunchroom as I recall...

links:

New old stock of cardboard ray guns
Loud origami popper instructions

Your Future Wife

"Your future wife will be a stenographer, blonde, beautiful, and just dumb enough to fall in love with you, but smart enough to keep two jumps ahead of you. She is used to dictation - but not from you. She will willingly exchange her notebook for your bankbook. As she doesn't like changing and also doesn't know anything about washing, you will be kept busy hanging up towels, and changing your four little carbon copies."

related: Toast your new wife with wine drunk from a Hefty cup

1950's Proto-LOLcats

Even if you don't hang around on chat boards or other dark corners of the internet, you've probably seen a "LOLcat" or two. The "LOL" is parlance for "laugh out loud", of course, and "cat" is for... um... "cat". Over the past few years, it's been terribly popular to take pictures of kittens, walruses, or other animals and caption their thoughts ignoring all manner of grammar and syntax. Like other classic one-panel comics, LOLcats can be hysterical or deeply obscure. They are also insanely popular. It is with a somewhat envious finger I point you toward the traffic that sites like icanhazcheeseburger.com get these days, but LOLcats aren't really a new phenomenon at all.

I found a postcard from the 1950's that also puts words in kittens' mouths. In this case, there are no odd misspellings, nor does the viewer need to have any foreknowledge of World of Warcraft or sea lion buckets. We can travel back in time even further that that. How about an old sepia toned postcard from 1905 featuring a dressed up (also hungry) kitten? When you think about it, this whole LOLcat thing is just a new name for an idea that's been around for a long time. Before someone brings it up in the comments section, I think that it's debatable whether the "Hang in there!" suspended kitty poster would count as a LOLcat since the caption isn't an internal dialog.

It's safe to say that a lot of us speak to our pets, and they may sometimes "talk" back to us... c'mon, don't be ashamed - we all do it! My ferret speaks to me in a Russian accent about wanting more pizza sauce, and I know I'm not the only one. With the ubiquity of digital cameras, the ease of uploading modified pictures onto the internet, and the irresistible urge to try to figure out what our pets are thinking, it's easy to see why this LOLcat thing is so popular. After all, they've been around for more than a century.

related:

Tomy robotic pets
Classic Pet Rock

Upgrade Your Sea-Monkeys To A Sportier Model

I remember staring in wonder at the back page of a Richie Rich comic book (or something equally unfunny) with my best friend. A wildly colorful ad offered Sea-Monkeys; mysterious and miraculous pets that you bring to life by simply adding magic powder to water. Sort of like Tang. The ad claimed that you could train the Sea-Monkeys to do tricks, which sounded really cool. We sent away for a kit, but were concerned that they'd resemble the art in the ad; genitalia-free nudie pink aliens beings, the ladies modestly clad in only a single large bow in her antenna.

We needn't have worried. The result was more like the stuff we fed the goldfish. The fine print of the ad does actually say "Caricature not meant to depict Artemia Salina". I felt a little gypped, but I guess kids wouldn't buy Sea-Monkeys if they knew they weren't that much cuter than having pet silverfish.

Once hatched, the little brine shrimp could be trained to perform a couple of "tricks" - mostly since brine shrimp naturally steer toward light. So you could basically puppeteer them with a flashlight. We never got them to do anything impressive, but maybe that's because we lacked impressive training facilities. 

These 1970's commercials show the "ski trials", "cycle race" as well as a more upper crust "fox hunt" for those Sea-Monkeys of better breeding. These elaborate race courses exploit another natural quality of brine shrimp, that they swim against the current. So you and a partner stir up the watery course with special syringes in what may be one of the oddest races ever. More evidence that the people who brought us Sea-Monkeys sure thought up a lot of ways to have fun with pets that are little more than bait. Then again, it beats getting a Pet Rock.

Support Retro Thing when you order Sea-Monkeys supplies on Amazon

Mix Tape Memory Stick

Mix tapes seem to carry a weight of almost archaeological significance. They are tiny time machines, placing you right back into the most important periods of your life. If you ever made a mix tape for someone else, you know how painstaking the song selection process was. Each one had to be precise and meaningful. I remember my friends taping songs from old records, using my dual cassette deck to record tracks off my other tapes, or - this is my favorite - taping the radio when I knew a certain song was coming on. It was a labor of love to be sure.

The Mix Tape 64 MB Memory Stick plays off the idea, but this time, you simply use your computer to save songs directly to the memory stick. Then, you can place your creation in that familiar mix tape packaging and bestow it upon the lucky listener. Maybe now the painstaking part is finding that rare track to download.

Having held onto my own priceless mix tapes for years, I think it is nice that they paid homage to a classic.

Buy the Mix Tape Memory Stick at Amazon
Urban Retro Lifestyle Cassette Culture
Mixwit: Swap Mixes Online
Silly Mix Tape Generator

Novelty Necktie With A Saucy Secret

I mostly work at home, so I'm not part of the necktie and starched collar set.  A few weeks ago I had a formal job interview, and I realized that very few of my ties are "legit".  My dresser drawer is choked with novelty neckwear that would do little indeed to boost my professional image.

The worst one is this aggressively polyester 70's number.  Let's put aside that it's the size of a sleeve, has a plasticky sheen, and that it sports a "Rockford Files hired goon" pattern.  Flip it over and you can spot the tie's secret.  There's a nude lady with a drawn sword living in my tie, and I can't tell if she's happy about it or not.

I should really stop being surprised at the odd places that naked ladies show up.  I just don't know whom this tie is really intended for.  Guys who work at the nudie Fotolab?  Hard journalists (heh) who write for Penthouse Letters?  I suppose it's exciting to walk around the office knowing that a nude woman is hanging from your neck, but the risk of getting a note from HR seems enormous.

So here's what I learned; once you're on the job by all means bust out the kooky cravats.  Just make sure you have enough "grown-up" ties so you can make it through the interview in the first place.

related:

nudie cutie barware
Beefcake glasses from the Sugar Shack
Manneken Pis drink decanter with a surprise

A Turntable That Fits On Your Ring Finger

If you ever get to see a real turntablist ply his trade, keep your eye on his fingers.  Not only can you cop some sweet moves for your next turn behind the wheels of steel, but DJ's have a knack of finding some pretty nice digital adornments.  Here's a handmade ring with a mini turntable on it, along with a tiny disc of real vinyl.  It doesn't play any music, but it looks like just the thing to wear next time you are.

The ring is available in a few different styles, and is going to set you back something over $300 US, which doesn't seem unreasonable for a limited edition and uniquely handcrafted piece of jewelry.  I think that I'll pass though. As much as I like it, I'm such a granny that all I can think of is how I'd constantly get the tiny tonerm caught in my best DJ-ing sweater.

Turntable Ring by Darkcloud Silver [via Red Ferret]

Tinplate Budget Bank - Split Your Money Six Ways From Sunday

The Tudor Budget Bank may have the aesthetic sense of a fusebox, but it's sturdy looks house the method to finally organize all of your household finance. Okay, that's probably an exaggeration. Basically you're looking at six piggy banks in one - unlocking the box reveals the separate tins fitted inside. It even has circular openings for rolled up bills. So from now on instead of desperately fishing around in your change jar when the tax man is at the door, you can neatly sort your change and bills into a half-dozen categories every night when you empty your pockets.

Elmer Sas invented and patented the Budget Bank in 1929, and it was a huge success in Depression-era America. The bank originally came with suggested labels for the half-dozen slots, including setting aside some of your coinage for charities like the Red Cross. On the strength of this product, Sas founded Tudor Metal Products and in the 40's went on to create his most famous invention - Electric Football; that rattling metallic gridiron that you can still get today.

The Budget Bank remains a good idea. I'm always surprised at how much spare change I accumulate over a few months, so maybe if I keep it nicely sorted with the Tudor I'll be able do something meaningful with my legal tender... though one of my slots is definitely going toward my "Hot Doug's Hot Dog Emporium" fund.

Budget Banks on Ebay

Related:
Mini steel safes
TV shaped coin bank
Arcade console or piggy bank?

Teaching An Old Rock New Tricks

Pets are messy. They gnaw on your shoes, claw furniture and barf hairballs all over the carpet. Thus concluded a group of friends in a California bar one evening in April 1975. One of them, Gary Dahl, grinned and announced, "I have a pet rock!" and the pals spent the evening dreaming up reasons that a rock would make the perfect pet.

Dahl had a background in advertising and knew a good idea when he heard one. He spent the next few days writing a tongue-in-cheek guide entitles "The care and feeding of your pet rock" and got a graphic designer to create a suitable cardboard carrying crate. The prototype smooth round pet was purchased from a nearby hardware store, and legend has it that Dahl eventually sold three tons of pebbles from Rosarito Beach in Baja, California.

Dahl unveiled his $3.95 creation at a San Francisco gift show, and Neiman Marcus was the first major retailer to jump on board. A flurry of press followed, and Dahl was selling 10,000 pet rocks a day by the end of October 1975. It was the perfect affordable Christmas present for almost anyone, and Dahl shipped 1.3 million pet rocks over the course of the holiday season. However, it didn't take long for dozens of competitors to jump in by adding googly eyes, painted mouths and all manner of gimmicks. The fad was pretty well dead by the end of the year.

Dahl lost a few friends after becoming an instant millionaire, as several of his friends at the bar accused him of selling out their idea. He was unable to rekindle the spark that made the Pet Rock such a runaway hit, but the pet rock has gone down in history books as a classic example of brilliant opportunistic marketing. These days, Dahl lives in a sprawling house in the Los Gatos hills. He still manages a few advertising accounts and recently penned "Advertising For Dummies."

80's Shutter Shades Are Back

Here's a photo from an 80's party I went to a while back.  I didn't have much time to get ready, so I simply dug out a Tom Selleck wig and mustache kit (I wish I were kidding...), and a pair of shutter sunglasses that I still had from the 80's.  I guess Kanye West saw how good these specs looked on me, and so has adopted them for his "Glow in the Dark" tour.  I'm a fashion maven... it happens.

Men's fashion is usually pretty samey from year to year, and I've said before that I miss the part of the 80's where guys were trying to look like spacemen.  Apparently the futuristic look is back for the boys with shiny fabrics, crazy neon colored patterns, and impractical eyewear like these shutter specs (when is someone going to finally make my 20+ year dream come true, and create a set of these that actually open and close like window shades?).

If you don't want all of us futurists leaving you behind, you can pick up a pair of aviator-style shutter glasses at Urban Outfitters, or click below to find your own set on Ebay.  Just don't be too mad if some giant R&B stars spies you at a party and then totally cops your look.

Find your own Shutter Glasses on Ebay

Convergence IX: Phony Fireplace/8 Track/Turntable

I don't know if Retro Thing reader Glen Feibich was scanning Craigslist for a fireplace or an 8 track player - but he found both in a unique all-in-on-solution. Airline was a house brand for department store Montgomery Ward, and I've seen countless old turntables & reel to reel recorders released under that flag, but never anything remotely like this!

The fireplace contains prop logs and an animated light effect that resembles glowing embers, but gives off no heat.  That's probably a good thing because it would melt all the records that you spin on the turntable hidden beneath the mantle.  You'll also find an AM/FM tuner as well as 8 track tape player secreted away.

It's interesting to see just how many bad ideas are in this single piece of furniture.  It eats up a lot of floorspace, doesn't actually heat the room, you can't display anything on the mantle and still have access to the hi-fi inside, the list goes on and on...

Thinking about it more though, it would be the ideal thing to build into your wall to hide a secret passageway where you keep your best records - and then mod the main unit so that the glowing fake embers are actually the volume knobs and tweaking the fireplace poker goes to the next record on the changer.  Hmmm....

Anyone want to road trip up to Minneapolis with me?

Thanks for the tip, Glen!

Craiglist listing for the all-in-one fireplace.

Related:

Airline Mini Reel To Reel
ConvergenceV: flip-open radio/turntable
Lloyd's 8 Track - iPod version 1?
2-XL toy robot that uses 8 track tapes

Binoculars With 100 Proof Magnification

I'm not much of a drinker, but I've always been supportive of folks having a snort every once in a while.  I'll admit that I've been on film shoots in below-zero weather with a flask of rum in my pocket (for medicinal purposes, of course), but there are times when you just can't bust out the booze and take a pull.

There is a whole industry devoted to secreting alcohol on your person, and this type has long been one of my favorites.  Here we have a good looking set of binoculars.  Hold them up to your face, and you're not going to see any too well (you're probably not going to see all that well in a minute, anyway...).  Check to your left and right that the bleacher police aren't looking your way, unscrew the eyepiece and you've revealed the secret vessel that holds your boozy reward.

Each eyepiece is the screwtop to 8 ounces of drinkables hidden in your field glasses.  If you load it up with two kinds of hooch, you can even adlib some mixed drinks for your next impromptu party.  What a sneaky way to boost a boring match at your kid's soccer game, or perhaps this could renew interest in birdwatching?

Kind of puts a whole new spin on the expression "beer goggles", doesn't it?

Get a pair of your own on Amazon

Here are an even classier pair!