one final pesticide note from memory
When you come into Yakima, WA off of Highway 97 on Yakima Avenue, to the left is Weaver Exterminating (singing: “Don’t tolerate, exterminate — just call Weaver!”) which used to have some advertising painted on the side of their brick building, age uncertain but was still visible into the 1980s. In big letters it announced the brand name of one of their products was Kemi-Kil, it’s a rodent poison, which I thought was a really awesome name. I don’ t have a photo and that signage has been worn off or covered for several years.
Insecticides, Flower Grower magazine, March 1946 (2 of 2)
Pratt’s D-X Spray took no prisoners — it contained rotenone from jicama, pyrethrum from chrysanthemums, and DDT from petroleum distillates. If this product was still around, they would have had to take out DDT back out in the early 1970s due to the environmental damage it was found to cause to birds.
Ever Green Garden Spray doesn’t make it clear what the active ingredient is, but since the label says it’s nontoxic to higher life forms it’s either rotenone or pyrethrum. Pyrethrum is still very popular today, even moreso now with the push toward organic gardening and using fewer harsh chemicals on our food; it’s only effective when wet, thus can be used on food products up until the day before harvest (or on lettuce until the day of harvest in California, according to the label on one popular houseplant spray).
Niagara Pomo-Green (with nicotine) — the product’s full name — used nicotine from tobacco as its agent. Nicotine has lost favor because it’s not a safe chemical to handle; a book on revenge tactics from the early 1980s said that if you want to create a panic at a supermarket that did you wrong, just call in anonymously claiming you put nicotine powder such as this on the handles of the shopping carts. (I don’t advocate this since there’s no such thing as an anonymous phone call anymore and pack-a-day smokers would already be immune/nerve damaged.)
Insecticides, Flower Grower magazine, March 1946 (1 of 2)
Black Leaf and its ‘Officer 40’ mascot contained nicotine derived from tobacco as its agent, which is still used as an insecticide but on a smaller scale due to the fact that nicotine is a nerve poison in humans. (And yet people still smoke.) I recall my grandparents having a Black Leaf pump sprayer, a device which became better known as a “Flit gun” courtesy of Black Leaf’s competition, in their garage. Tangental thought: I’m a little sad this magazine did not contain any ads for Flit, which were illustrated by Dr. Seuss.
Bug-a-boo, an awesome name for a product, and its frightened bee with gloves (a species you don’t actually want to get rid of) contained rotenone derived from jicama as its agent, which still gets used in controlling fish population. This was produced by Socony-Vacuum, the name at the time for Standard Oil which is now part of Exxon-Mobile, and their logo was the now-familiar Pegasus.
Dandykill — this one’s an herbicide, sorry — and its sad-to-be-dying Taraxicum contained 2,4D as its agent, which is still very popular as a broad spectrum weed killer. Below that is an inch of copy about Protexall, which contained DDT (banned in most places in the 1970s) and rotenone.
Super Mario All-Stars for the Super Nintendo, 1993.
The fun of Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2, Super Mario Bros 3, and Super Mario: Lost Levels all in one game cartridge… and in better resolution than the Nintendo Entertainment System that three of those titles were originally written for.
Quick, Robin… the Duck-Phone.
I found the eBay listing for Wizardsaurus’s phone purely by accident when trying to find more info on the phone. He wants $149 for this and makes references to this phone being shown on Jersey Shore… I guess that’s a selling point for some. Here’s a YouTube video of it ringing/quacking. According to an antiques & collectables sales site which sold one for $9.99, the maker and model name is unknown.
Wizardsaurus on Photobucket has a huge collection of Famicom, NES, Super NES, and Sega Genesis games, plus other game things I haven’t gotten to seeing yet. You’ll see a select few posted here soon.
Dragon Warrior a.k.a. Dragon Quest is a series of RPG games started in 1986, currently out to its nineth volume; each Dragon Quest video game soundtrack is arranged into an orchestral piece and the video game series was the first to have live-action ballet adaptations. The basic premise of most Dragon Quest titles is to play a hero who is out to save the land from peril at the hands of a powerful evil enemy, with the hero usually accompanied by a group of party members. A great deal of care was taken to make the gameplay intuitive so that players could easily start to play the game. One note about the titles shown above from Wikipedia: “The series features a number of religious overtones which were heavily censored in the NES versions.”
James Caan and I believe an Underwood typewriter, in The Godfather, 1972.
Halley’s Comet was last seen passing by the Earth around February 9, 1986; its next visit will be around July 28, 2061 so many of you will be seeing that appearance. This holographic sticker was sold at a national monument gift shop, I think, and was in anticipation of the 1986 appearance. This actually turned out to be the closest most people ever got to witnessing the comet; the majority of people who were present for the passing didn’t see it at all. Wikipedia’s account says:
Halley’s 1986 apparition was the least favorable on record. The comet and the Earth were on opposite sides of the Sun in February 1986, creating the worst viewing circumstances for Earth observers for the last 2,000 years. Halley’s closest approach was 0.42 AU. Additionally, with increased light pollution from urbanization, many people never saw the comet at all. Somehow was possible to observe it in the southern hemisphere in areas outside of cities with the help of binoculars. Further, the comet appeared brightest when it was almost invisible from the northern hemisphere in March and April.
