A while back I found a book tucked in with some old atlases and maps on one of the many bookshelves that adorn the walls of the remote fortified family compound known as Tildebunkport…

A post-it note on the book said “Found with Gramma’s things” but I knew immediately that the book had to have come to us by way of one of the hub’s flea market expeditions. None of us ever called our grandmas “Gramma”, for one thing.

Grandma Dallelie was a registered nurse and Grandma Tild, while never formally trained in nursing, worked with the Red Cross for decades, and was a temperance activist to boot. Both women also had highly developed bullshit detectors, so I’m certain neither one of them would ever have allowed a book filled with such seductively pernicious claptrap in the house, much less kept it with her personal effects.

“What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book (no copyright date, but probably published circa 1900)

About the book

About Dr. R.V. Pierce (from the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health)

excerpt from Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States

More about Dr. Pierce, elected to the House of Representatives

More about Dr. Pierce, plus more about misdiagnosis and malpractice 

A sampling of pages from “What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book:

Diseases of Women, page 1

Diseases of Women, page 2

Oh! My! Such Pain!

How To Tell Unhealthy Urine By Its Appearance

A Healthy Woman Is Always Beautiful

Watch Your Daughter!

Healthy Mothers Have Healthy Children

UPDATE:  Wondering what was in ”Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”? 

Although The Ladies’ Home Journal was not involved in the investigation of adulterated food, its muckraking into another issue helped bring about the same legislation–the Pure Food and Drug Act.  The Journal’s campaign against the “patent medicine curse” was the best known of the muckraking in any of the woman’s magazines.[45]  However, the Journal was not alone in its niche in uncovering the “evils” of the patent
medicine nostrums.  Good Housekeeping also carried stories about the content of patent medicines.[46]  However, this campaign took a secondary position to food adulteration.   Both magazines extensively covered the problem from 1904 to 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed.[47]

Both had the freedom to do so because neither accepted patent medicine advertising.  The Journal carried the greater number of stories and devoted the more editorial space of the two to uncovering the abuses of the patent medicine industry.  Editor Edward Bok wrote most of the stories; and while clearly he was reporting facts, the largest number of these articles appeared on the Journal’s editorial page.  One of the first stories on the issue appeared in the May 1904 in an editorial, “The ‘Patent Medicine’ Curse,” and accompanying sidebar on the alcohol content of various brands of patent medicine.  The results were startling.  Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent.  Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little–20.6 percent.[48]

Bok saw a real problem.  Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums.  Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness.  Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”,  which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent). [49].
 

 

Why Women Should Confide in Dr. Pierce

Oh, and men: lest you laugh too hard, thinking that Dr. Pierce spared your gender from scrutiny, consider…

“Spermatorrhea”
or the emission of semen without intercourse, including 1: wrecked manhood, wanton waste

..a selection from Dr. Pierce’s bestseller “The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser; or, Medicine Explained” (63rd edition, 1895)

Well, enough hilarity. Funny; I think what I could really use right now is a drink.

~

Posted: October 25th, 2007 under Being Female, Books, Patent Medicine, R.V. Pierce, Women's Health.
Comments: 1

I’m a little late writing about this, but remember: I’m old, and my time needed to recover from a bout of vigorous frivolity keeps getting longer and longer. 

It was a lot of fun hosting the baby shower for Powerliberals Robin and Steve last Thursday night.  The shower was held at the 331 Club in conjunction with the usual Drinking Liberally festivities, and I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it went pretty well, despite– or maybe because of the copious  amounts of Butt Paste amongst the many lovely gifts. 

I had promised a maximum of 3 “Stupid Shower Games” complete with “Wacky Prizes” for the winners, but initially had a difficult time finding prizes with sufficient wackiness.  Then I noticed a particular item on the expectant parents’ list of needed and desired baby supplies :  

Butt Paste!  What is it?  Well, besides being the hip, happening diaper rash ointment/skin protectant du jour,  the name “Butt Paste” itself, especially in combination with an actual physical product with that name,  that is actually for sale and can be purchased practically anywhere,  has a high level of inherent wackiness, therefore making this  wonder item both a shower present AND a wacky prize, doing double duty as it were.   Excuse me, I mean ‘doody’.  In  baby shower discussions the word ‘duty’ must ALWAYS be replaced with the prescribed, hilarious kiddie term ‘doody’.  It’s some kind of law, I think.

The women in attendance had all been to more than enough baby showers to know the routine by heart, but I was a bit surprised at how many of the guys came up to me afterwards to say “Thanks for doing this. You know, I’ve never been to a baby shower before.”

Oh my poor dears, what you’ve missed! 

There are  lots of online resources for planning baby showers, including the most important part of any baby shower:  the games.   After going through pages after pages of game ideas, I ultimately settled on 3 games that were not only stupid, and baby shower classics,  but also hopefully would lend themselves to being played successfully by a (cosmopolitan, argumentative, and somewhere between tipsy and hammered) Drinking Liberally crowd,  in a bar.   The results? =   hi-larious baby shower hijinx!  

If you thought those 3 games were stupid, folks –  trust me, I could have chosen some that are much, MUCH stupider. 

The wacky prizes ended up being three “weekend-getaway” gift packages:

(and many thanks to EB and prize-winner Mrs. EB for posting an illustrative photo)
 
First we had the Dick Cheney Weekender, complete with a Halliburton coffee mug,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.  

Next was the Bill O’Reilly Weekender, including a high-end super premium loofah,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.

Finally there was the Katherine Kersten Weekender, with everything you need to have a great weekend the KK way:  a game of Bible Bingo,  assorted fun S&M  accessories- cum- office supplies,  butt paste,  stain removers and bandaids.

Congrats to all of the lucky winners!

Most of all, I add my voice to Robin and Steve’s to say a big Thank You to everyone for bringing your good wishes and good cheer in celebration of the impending Powerliberal parenthood. 

  
And next time I think I might include a hangover remedy along with the other party favors.

 

~

 

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under Gift Ideas, I only drink Liberally, Local characters.
Comments: 1

~~~ 

Weekend Brunch Eggbake

Spray inside bottom and sides of an 11×7 glass baking dish with cooking oil spray.

Put in 1 and 1/2 cups salad croutons or toasted breadcubes.
Add 1 can of cut asparagus spears, drained.
Add 1 and 1/2 cups shredded monterey jack or colby-jack cheese.
In a medium size bowl, beat 6 eggs.
Add 1 and 1/2 cups milk to the beaten eggs.
Whisk together eggs and milk.
Pour egg mixture over the croutons, asparagus and cheese. 
Slice 3-4 roma tomatoes and arrange slices in a layer on top of egg mixture.

Bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes, or until eggbake is puffed up and golden brown on top.
Serves 6 fairly hungry people.
Serves 4 fairly hungry people if 2 of them are teenaged boys. 

~~~

 

Posted: October 15th, 2007 under Chez Tild, General, the Tild Test Kitchen.
Comments: 5

The things one finds out while surfing the intertubes….

F’rinstance, I learned that in 2006 there was a nifty art exhibit at Aidan Gallery in Moscow titled “Capitalist Realism” by the artist Konstantin Latyshev.

I also learned that there are people who go through art galleries with cameras, just like there are people who sit in movie theaters with camcorders. Results of this behavior sometimes include ‘pirated’ art exhibits, which I’m sure must be bad for a variety of reasons, but right now I’m damned if I can think of any.

So without further ado I present a selection of works from Konstantin Latyshev’s “Capitalist Realism” series. Translations of Russian text courtesy of me and my 35 year old Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian Language and Culture. Visuals courtesy of some guy in Moscow with an Instamatic.

The joy of consumption

[click on the thumbnails to see the full size images]

Democrats catch a communist in the forest outside of Smolensk

The world is not without good people

It’s difficult being an ascetic in the midst of such an endless variety of choices, isn’t it?

The youth of an oligarch

Wild capitalist

Subsistence dumpster-diving with Professor M.G. Rodumtsev

Her first Tiffany

Former library

Censor Vitaly Nikanorovich Perdikin has lost his job

Don’t you want spiritual food?

Interrogation of an anti-globalist

Posted: October 9th, 2007 under Art, Capitalist Realism, po russki.
Comments: none

Anybody out there still falling for that hoary old chestnut that “Republican” = “conservative”?

(And yeah, I guess I am talking to you,  Mr. or Ms. reader in the rapidly-trending-Blue southwest metro,  who may have wandered over here from the link in the Eden Prairie News blogroll)

If you still believe that George W Bush and the Republican party  are “conservatives” in anything except the modern Movement Conservatism sense, then maybe what you need right now is a good slap in the face. 

A bucket of cold water dumped over your head. 

A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.   

No! No!   Tempting, it’s true, but actually what you need on this rainy bleak Monday is to read Paul Krugman’s latest column: 

SAME OLD PARTY

by Paul Krugman

Published:  October 8, 2007

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

Well, I don’t know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism - and Mr. Bush hasn’t strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he’s the very model of a modern movement conservative.

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s:
He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority - so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds - demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

People claim to be shocked that the Bush Justice Department, making a mockery of the Constitution, issued a secret opinion authorizing torture despite instructions by Congress and the courts that the practice should stop. But remember Iran-Contra? The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, violating a legal embargo, and used the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras, defying an explicit Congressional ban on such support.

Oh, and if you think Iran-Contra was a rogue operation, rather than something done with the full knowledge and approval of people at the top - who were then protected by a careful cover-up, including convenient presidential pardons - I’ve got a letter from Niger you might want to buy.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud. But Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as “humiliating to the South.”

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts - which, for a time, were all too successful - to intimidate the press. But this administration’s media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh’s apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media adviser.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater - who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life - staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.

Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,” and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after “consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” - presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States.

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

Paul Krugman, New York Times

~~~

Thanks as always to Norwegianity for bringing the latest Krugman column to our attention.   The Wege adds his own pungent commentary of course:

The plain fact is that modern “movement” conservatives aren’t conservatives at all. Not unless your definition of conservative is someone who rushes to war then cowers beneath their urine-soaked bed, only emerging to attack others who disagree with them.

Demagoguery is reviled because demagogues are philosophically inconsistent, seizing upon hot button issues without regard to whether they’re consistent with their previous positions. That’s why Bush yammers about fiscal responsibility but then runs up massive deficits, just like Ronald Reagan did.

Contrast this with our piss poor media who call John Edwards a demagogue because he wants to give money to the poor despite the fact that he’s personally rich. That’s not demagoguery. Not unless Edwards proves to be a stealth movement conservative who’s lying on the campaign trail. I don’t think he is, and I don’t think there’s any proof to suggest that.

But there is ample proof that what Bush says today will not affect his actions tomorrow, and tomorrow’s actions will be forgotten by the time Bush again opens his mouth.

Congress needs to make this mouth-action disconnect permanent by taking away Bush’s powers. It’s called impeachment, and we’re well past the point where such action is justified.

Remove this son of a bitch now, before he starts a war with Iran.
 

Well said, Wege. 

~

Posted: October 8th, 2007 under George W Bush, Paul Krugman, Republicans.
Comments: 2

You may have seen this already, but in case you haven’t, or just to refresh your memory, this is the official logo of the Republican National Convention, to be held in Minneapolis next year:

Need I add that the fun has already begun?

And yes, this is real, not an extremely clever photoshop job, and truly encapsulates what the Republican Party is all about.

Wide stance? Check.

In Minneapolis? Check.

Prison stripe-wearing? Check.

Starry eyed? Check.

As for the elephant humping the “2008″…

Are they going for a “Still screwing the country in 2008″ theme, or is it a reference to hypocritical adulterers like David Vitter and just about the entire Republican presidential field?

All of the above? Check!

Apparently they ran out of space for a collapsing bridge.

Well here, let me take care of that little missing detail…

And just think: we’ve got nearly a whole year still to go. Woo hoo!

UPDATE:

Welcome, DailyKos visitors!

Duke S is collecting links to the many new logo ‘adaptations’…

RNC 2008 Wide Stance Logo Is Propagating In The Tubes

Heh! Indeedy! ~

Posted: October 7th, 2007 under 2008 Republican National Convention, I-35W Bridge Collapse, Republicans.
Comments: 2

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge: Volume 2: Minnesota
by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

 

When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling that a decades-long labor of love was about to begin. 

Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s fascination with the Mississippi River and especially its hundreds of bridges continued after her fifth graders’ study unit ended.   A few years later when she took early retirement, Costello gathered up her sketchbooks and art supplies and a camera and embarked on a quest:  to sketch every bridge across the Mississippi River, from the Louisiana delta all the way north to the headwaters in Lake Itasca.

During the course of her many trips  south and north from her Iowa home, Costello not only sketched the bridges but also collected as much information about them as she could. She spoke to engineers, DOT personnel, bridge designers, construction workers, railroad administrators, bridge-tenders, historians, and citizens who lived along the river.  She wrote down bridge histories from newspaper articles, railroad companies, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1995, nearly twenty years after Costello set out on her expedition of discovery, the first of two volumes of her artwork was published:

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge, Volume 1(from Louisiana to Minnesota)

Seven years later, in 2002 Volume 2 was published, containing sketches of all 135 of Minnesota’s Mississippi River bridges. 

By coincidence, Mister Tild checked out Volume 2 from the Eden Prairie Library about a week before the I-35W bridge collapsed.    In the weeks after the collapse,  when it came time to either return the book to the library or renew it, we finally realized what we had in Costello’s comprehensive compendium of bridge information. We turned to the entry for ”Bridge 39″,  ie: Minnesota’s 39th bridge across the Mississippi as you travel north from the Iowa border:

For each of the 135 bridges in Volume 2, Costello has included a paragraph or two of background information.  It’s impossible to miss the irony in the last lines about Bridge 39:

  

Oddly, in the aftermath of the bridge collapse there’s been no sudden spike of interest in these books.  When I looked in the Hennepin County Library catalog last week, most of the 14 copies of Volume 2 that are in the system were checked in.  

The fruits of Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s labor of love have been widely praised by historians, bridge designers and engineers.  Both volumes of Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge are cited often in Wikipedia entries and other reference works.  Complete with a glossary of bridge terms, descriptions  and diagrams of different types of bridges, these volumes are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about our bridges’ past, present, and possible futures.

~

  

Posted: October 1st, 2007 under Books, I-35W Bridge Collapse, Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello, the Reading Room.
Comments: none