June 15

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Back in the days when JFK ruled in Camelot and Dief was the Chief in Ottawa, the Bowler family summer vacations were spent on highways in the American West. On our way in a Detroit land yacht to Deadwood, Mount Rushmore, or some fabled snake farm, my brother and I misbehaved in the back seat. Having exhausted all possible car games, and tired of comic books, we came alive when our parents spotted red signs by the road ahead. We sprang to the windows to read the Burma-Shave signs as we sped by.

The Burma-Shave company erected thousands of examples of sequential advertisements from the 1920s to the early 1960s when they were discontinued on the advice of lawyers who feared suits for causing distracted driving.

A Man A Miss
A Car - A Curve
He Kissed The Miss
And Missed
The Curve
BURMA-SHAVE

Saw The Train And
Tried To Duck It
Kicked First The Gas
And Then The Bucket
BURMA-SHAVE

A Beard
That's Rough
And Overgrown
Is Better Than
A Chaperone
BURMA-SHAVE

Every shaver
Now can snore
Six more minutes
Than before
By using
BURMA-SHAVE

Shaving brushes
You'll soon see 'em
On the shelf
In some
Museum
BURMA-SHAVE

November 8

Home / Something Wise / November 8

Some quotes from the 20th century’s greatest English writer, P.G. Wodehouse.

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel. 

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

He looked haggard and care-worn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to put cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner gong due any minute.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

There has never been much difficulty in telling the difference between a Scotchman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor.