Archive: Sep 2009

Last week the New York Times featured an article and graphic (via) illustrating the way in which the increasing energy efficiency of electricity-drawing technologies correlates with an increase in overall use of energy nonetheless due to a rise in our consumption of those technologies.

But, “Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980”:

One culprit of the rising electricity use is video game consoles:

Noah Horowitz, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calculated that the nation’s gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the Sony PlayStation 3, now use about the same amount of electricity each year as San Diego, the ninth-largest city in country.

But an even bigger culprit are those giant plasma screen TVs:

The energy-efficiency of video game consoles and televisions are both unregulated, compared to the efficiency of those appliances showing increasing energy efficiency in the first figure (refrigerators, air conditioners, and clothes washers).

So, consumption, overall, is going up:

The corporations that build TVs, game consoles, and other unregulated appliances are, of course, resisting any federal laws regarding their efficiency.  According to the article, there was little will under the Bush administration.  We will have to wait and see what happens now.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

World War II was, among other things, an engine for the development of new technologies.  After the war, however, companies needed new markets for their products that would allow them to continue to reap profits.  We’ve posted below on this effort as related to food.  The 1948 ad below, for a scent-reducing and slimming camisole, is a great example of this in that the text makes it explicit (via):

Text:

During the war, The Springs Cotton Mills was called upon to develop a special fabric for camouflage.  It was used in the Pacific to conceal ammunition dumps and gun emplacements, but the Japanese learned to detect it because of its lack of jungle smells.  To overcome this, when the fabric was dyed, it was also impregnated with a permanent odor of hibiscus, hydrangea, and old rubber boots.  The deception was so effective that when Tokyo fell, the victorious invaders hung a piece of this fabric on a Japanese flagpole.

This process is top secret, and the fabric is now available to the false bottom and bust bucket business as SPRINGMAID PERKER made of combed yarns… the white with gardenia, the pink with camelia, the blush with jasmine, and the nude dusty.

If you want to avoid dancers’ diaphoresis* and the steatopygic stance, kill two birds with one stone by getting a camouflaged camisole with the SPRINGMAID label on the bottom of your trademark.

* Commonly known as Rhumba Aroma.

And also, a quick google search shows, “ballerina bouquet” and “skater’s steam.”

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Larry Harnisch, of the Daily Mirror, who spends a lot of time at his job going through the L.A. Times‘ archives, found this story from 1969:

Of course, most airlines had strict requirements for flight attendants’ physical appearance, including weight limits and guidelines for hair and makeup. But Renwick argued that her hair was much shorter than many White flight attendants’ hair. Many in the African American community felt she was being punished not for the length of her hair, but for wearing it in a natural style instead of straightening it.  United eventually paid her $5,000, “endors[ed] the Afro hairstyle,” and offered her her job back, and offer she did not accept.

Also check out our recent post on Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair.

In a completely unrelated post, I found this advertisement for the movie Staircase on Larry’s blog:

Text:

What makes a man live with another man? What makes them claw at each other…humiliate each other…yet never leave each other?

Under the title “Staircase” it says “the story of a marriage made in hell.” Larry says, “Rex Harrison and Richard Burton play two hairdressers who live together…”

Larry’s post also includes a review from September 26, 1969, that contains the following memorable phrases (the image is too small to read if I post it here, so click over to Larry’s post to see it):

…a pair of querulous old queans [sic]

They are bitchiness itself…

…two failed half-men…

…the boys’ ghastly mothers…

…what, with the deepest of ironies, is called the gay world.

That’s something else, eh?

Max shoes advertises its sturdy laces with sexualized and racialized violence in this Swiss ad:

NEW! Penny R. sent in these ads for Bisazza tiles.  They were banned in England, but she saw them in a waiting room in the U.S. in a magazine called Wallpaper:Both via Copyranter (here and here).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Behold “a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest [of the about 13,000] domestic McDonald’s” developed by Stephen Von Worley at Weather Sealed:

Von Worley writes:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid.  East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.  There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Suffer a Big Mac Attack out there, and you’re hurtin’ for certain!

Via a blog I’ve been borrowing a lot from lately, Chart Porn.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Alicja W. told me about this Barbie commercial from 1959 (which may be the first Barbie TV commercial, but I’m not positive about that) in which girls are encouraged to identify with, and aspire to, Barbie’s charm and beauty:

It’s not just that Barbie is fun to play with; she’s overtly presented here as a role model for girls, who can dream of someday being “exactly like” her–petite, popular (“at parties she will cast a spell”), and beautiful. And until they can actually become that person, they can “make believe” they’re Barbie. It’s a great example of how toys can be an important part of childhood socialization. In this case, it’s not just a set of behaviors girls were encouraged to mimic (caring for a doll, for instance); the toy is presented as something they should actually aspire to be.

The other day I snapped a photo of this lotion I saw for sale at the grocery store:

We’ve often posted on pointlessly gendered products. This, as far as I can tell, is a pointlessly pregnancy-related product. I couldn’t see a thing about it that was different than other versions of the same brand except that it says it’s for the life stage “pregnancy & motherhood.” If it at least said something about stretch marks that would make some sense, but it didn’t. On the back it just referred to dry skin and being formulated for a pregnant woman’s “special needs,” which were entirely unspecified, as was the way in which this bottle of lotion could address them.

I went to the Curél website to see what other life stages they identify. The website at least mentions stretch marks for the pregnancy/motherhood formula, so that’s an effort to pretend there’s a point to it. There were two more types: “first signs of aging” and “menopause and beyond.” A chart showing the effectiveness of the anti-aging lotion:

Of course, we have no idea what the baseline is, and while I presume the y-axis is %, it doesn’t actually say that. And apparently all women were going through a reverse-aging process that week, since even the untreated ones had a positive change.

So apparently women get to look forward to three stages, all of which have unique hydration needs: you have a baby, you notice signs of aging, and then you’re old. I have so much to look forward to.

Putting into stark contrast today’s push to look fashionable while pregnant (as well as the fact that pregnancy is in fashion), this vintage ad markets the ability of maternity wear to conceal your pregnancy:

Selected text:

Maternity clothes help to conceal your condition and keep you smart throughout your pregnancy. Adjust easily to your changing figure.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.