1950s & 60s Car Commercials, MAD MEN style

New Post over at Tiki Lounge Talk with videos and images of great old car ads from the golden days of advertising. THIS is the kind of stuff Don Draper would have been hawking back in the day. Check it out at TikiLoungeTalk.com.

Spilled Oil, and Oil Spills

Me (Chris P) with my 1940 LaSalle in 1981. I was 13.

When I was a kid back in the 1970s, my dad and I used to buy and sell vintage cars. By vintage I mean cars like a '29 Studebaker, a '31 Willies-Knight, a 1940 LaSalle and numerous Cadillacs and other tanks from the '50s and '60s. We changed a lot of oil in those cars, and a occasionally some transmission fluid. Back then, there were no "recycling" places to bring the used oil. So it either went into the trash, or in most cases, it went into a hole in the ground next to a tree at the back of our yard.

I'd say we probably dumped about 250 quarts of 10W-40 into the ground over the span of about 20 years. Nobody cared back then. Even the hippies didn't think anything of it. It's just what you did...after all, oil came from the ground, so Mother Earth would find a way to reclaim it.

Sometime in the mid 1980s we got a notice that they were shutting down several of the community wells that served out neighborhood. It so happens that once the EPA got the authority to start testing the quality of the drinking water, they found extremely high levels of contaminants, including mercury and lead, in the underground stream from which we got our water. They weren't sure how the contaminants got there, but mainly blamed it on fact that New Jersey was basically a toxic waste dump for years. They also said that some of the contaminants probably came from motor oil and anitfreeze seeping into the ground over the years.

So we stopped dumping oil into the ground. We collected it up in the old oil bottles and dropped it off at a gas station that had started recycling it. We stopped letting antifreeze drain off into the ground, and made sure no more transmission fluid leaked down. I've been doing that for almost 20 years now.

Then BP went and dumped a couple of bizillion gallons into the water. Dammit.

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And my swingin' Tiki & Retro Blounge (Web Lounge), http://www.Tikiloungetalk.com

The Hukilau 2010

We had a great swingin' time at the retro-fab, tikirific Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. See lots of pix, video and read all about it here at Tiki Lounge Talk: http://tikiloungetalk.com/2010/06/14/memories-from-hukilau-2010-fort-lauderdale/

Remember When...

Remember when the Internet was just the Internet, and there was no World Wide Web?

I still remember dialing up on AOL, getting that "You've Got Mail" message, and then getting the big giant button that said "ENTER THE WEB" or something like that. Then you'd click on and say, now what?

I also still remember the first website I ever saw. It was www.dunkindonuts.com. It was a single page, with a small clip-art of a pink glazed donut in the upper left corner, and two paragraphs on how wonderful their donuts and coffee were. Of course you couldn't order bags of coffee beans or anything on the site, but it did say to visit you local Dunkin' Donuts store to purchase some.

That was 1996. It took several minutes to load the page, and then the connection went down.

Two years later I bought my first collectible on eBay. It was something I'd looked for, for around 20 years. Found it on eBay in 15 minutes, paid for it with a money order and had it in ten days.

Jump to 2000. I buy a book on html. I never get passed page four. I download an mp3 for the first time. It takes twenty minutes.

2004: my 350 Ghz Mac G4 Tower can't handle the web fast enough to keep up with websites that have photos, buttons, ways to buy things, and some fancy-assed animations called Flash. I buy a 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac, and use the G4 as a doorstop.

2006: All of a sudden I'm getting angry because it's taking almost an entire minute to download a four minute video while I'm shopping for car parts for my 1953 Chevy and watching cartoons made entirely in Flash.

2008: The economy goes sour, but I don't care...I rarely go out anymore because all the time I spent socializing at bars and parties is taken up by commenting on MySpace, Facebook, and Weblogs.

2009: I have a light week at work so I decide to start a blog and build two websites, without having any idea what I'm doing. Technology has caught up to me, and they are set up in three weeks.

2010: Between writing for my two personal blogs, my work blog, four twitter accounts, two Facebook fan pages (or I guess now 'Like' pages), work fan page, myspace page (for nostalgic purposes), eight email accounts, and commenting on other blogs I have less than 30 hours a week to eat, sleep and work. I'm broke, so I'm still using my 2005 iMac which sounds like a lawnmower and crashes everytime I click on anything that remotely resembles movement. I haven't seen my wife in weeks, although we IM each other from different rooms in the house often. Something furry just walked by; I think it may have been a cat but without a word-bubble attached that says "lolz" I can't be sure.

2020: Now that computer chips are implanted in our heads, it's easier to work online. But I'm still getting emails from South African dictators telling me they have two million dollars waiting for me if I send them my bank info, and I still haven't seen a dime.

-CP

Murder on Tiki Island

My first full-length novel, Murder Behind the Closet Door has been selling well online! Now I'm working on my second book, Murder on Tiki Island. This story takes place in 1956 New York and Key West, with flashbacks to 1935. The action happens on a private island off the Florida Keys, Tiki island, where a Detective Bill Riggins once again finds himself in the middle of an unsolved murder case flanked with sultry women, bottles of booze and visitors from the afterlife.

Written in the old noir style of 50's pulp fiction, this story is turning out to be every bit as spooky, entertaining and fun to read as MBTCD.

I'll start posting some snippets on the official MBTCD fansite on Facebook as soon as they are ready.


http://www.facebook.com/pages/Murder-Behind-The-Closet-Door-Ghost-Lovers-Fan-Page/112744805423946

A jealous idiot from the past tries to irk me & fails, as usual

There exist many a-holes in the world, some of which are tolerable, others who just need to be tied in a sack and thrown in the river with a few cinderblocks.

One such moron, an ex-employee who got fired for being talentless, egotistical and arrogant (a bad combination) decided to take out his frustrations on his failed life by leaving a nasty (laughable!) little drunken comment on one of my blogs. Mind you, this imbecile asserted that he was a 'writer', but you wouldn't know it from his lack of grammar skills, amount of typos within, and all-around ineffectiveness of his post (and come to think of it, his work!)

I feel sorry for people like this. He's failed at his marriage, failed as a father, failed in his career and all-around failed in life. As he approaches 60, it must be hell for him to realize his lifetime was a complete waste. I supposed he believed it would make him feel better to attack me, randomly, well over a year since he got fired and I last reprimanded him, on my blog. I suppose he is mostly jealous that I, many years younger than him, have accomplished so much more. C'est La Vie.

(You may be thinking, "If he's writing about this, it must have gotten under his skin". Well, the only thing that got under my skin was that this jackass was way too chicken to ever say any of his rant to me in person; he chose to be sneaky (that is his way, always has been) and tried to humiliate me on a public forum, instead of man to man (or man to weasel, in his case). I guess he was too stupid to realize I was easily able to delete his rant and block him from commenting again.)

Tiki Culture in America

A lot of people have been asking me questions about Tiki Culture in America (As if I were some sort of expert on the subject, just because I'm the author of Tiki Lounge Talk). Well, I don't report to be an expert on anything, but I do know my way around a Mai Tai. So, my newest project is to add a page to TLT explaining what Tiki Culture is to those who've not yet been fortunate enough to live it.

I've done a decent amount of research on the subject, much of it being behind my Tiki Bar researching rums. It's not going to be a long history of Tiki, just the major points along the way, something about its heyday, and of course the resurgence and what it means today.

Look for the new page on Tiki Lounge Talk early next week.
-Tiki Chris, reporting from the Pirate's Cove Tiki Bar, Fort Lauderdale, Florida