Big Rock Candy Mountain

After a weekend spent gutting the basement/nasally ingesting an amount of mold that would mummify a lesser man, I'm reminded that I've been neglecting one of my serious obsessions: old things. This general category includes remnants of a 5-foot tall styrofoam T-rex, vinyl album art, other people's grandmas and, most importantly, old advertisements/posters/photographs (I'm ghoulishly excited about the day I inherit my grandmother's collection of turn-of-the-century 4x6 photographic slides).
In celebration of this (and my impending certification as a professional snippet writer and word associator), I'm going to start posting ads I scavenged from issues of National Geographic circa 1955 - 1963. Here's one that will hopefully ring in an era of compelling and boisterous ad copy on my part:

Allow me to enlarge some select lines (why oh why is Blogger's "very large" setting for images this small?):

"Out of the mountains they came with hunting knives, Kentucky rifles and freedom blazing white-hot in their eyes [emphasis in the actual ad]."

WOW! I will melt some internet faces if I can harness that kind of rhetoric. Let's see more:

"And you can muse for a moment on the unlettered backwoodsmen who wrote a shining page in freedom's book. The handwriting might be crude -- but the message was unmistakably clear...no mountain is too high for men to scale when freedom waits at the top."

Holy smokes that is over the top. And what's better than advertising that has absolutely no concept of its place in the world?

There are so many things I have to write about, but the new work schedule doesn't allow for a lot of time once I get home (and 8+ hours in front of a computer screen is enough at the end of the day). But I am going to go Weekend Warrior on this blog -- obviously more fun than spending my birthday discussing minor drinking problems with Nicolai Dunger like last year -- and catch up on what hasn't been posted this week. Right now, enjoy the creepiest level of Batman exploitation since George Clooney (and my evidence in support of fast-tracking Adam West to sainthood, or at least Nessie mythic status):