“The Cheerful Game of Porky the Pig,” first published by Parker Brothers in 1946, got a makeover in 1961.  The original ’40s graphics (here) were replaced by the more stylized design popular in the ’50s.  Here, for comparison, are the two Porkies as well.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Ullage Group presents its twelfth enjoyable event: The Ullage Group Film Festival, Volume One.  Attend, and you will see a selection of brief, rare, and unusual films.  We will project onto a screen some of the experimental films John Keel made in the ’60s.  We will show short subjects by Doug Skinner, Anthony Matt, Morgan Miller, and Russ Johnson.  Lisa Hirschfield and Mark Newgarden will air rarities from their collections.  And you can sit in the dark, nurse a drink, and pass judgment on it all.  It’s on Sunday, August 19, at 3 pm, at the Jalopy Theater, 351 Columbia St., Brooklyn.  It costs our usual pittance, $5.  Directions to Jalopy are here.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

If you leave the house without your pants, where will you put your keys?

golf without clubs

Salt is best enjoyed at room temperature.

The beauty of the little lamb
Is that it doesn’t give a damn.

Nobody ever lost money by finding money.

Science still can’t create an ineffective placebo.

a globe with Mercator projection

No true Scotsman will invoke “no true Scotsman.”

Rich people need the government, because it’s the government that issues the money.

Don’t drop the child; you’ll break its head.
Go throw it in the lake instead.

to halt to a different drummer

(Posted by Doug Skinner. The illustration is by R. B. Birch.)

The Peter Coddle games were early versions of “Mad Libs,” or of “Dr. Quack.”  One player read about Peter Coddle’s misadventures; other players drew cards to fill in spaces in the story.  The most popular version chronicles the rural Coddle’s trip to New York; another takes him to Chicago.  This one follows him to the 1939 World’s Fair.

You can play digital Coddle over here.

(Posted by Doug Skinner.)

I found these drawings at the flea market.  They’re all 4 3/4″ x 6 1/2″, done with ink and shading film on board, and unsigned.  Enjoy them.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This is an isolated card; I have no idea of its context.  But I do like the restrained patch of grass, the dog’s perky tail, the hunter’s coat, and the two color design.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

We return to that interesting character, Benjamin De Casseres.  There are only a few pictures of him online: a caricature, for example, and a photo of him celebrating the 21st Amendment.  So, here’s a portrait of De Casseres with his wife Bio.

The picture is taken from his 1931 book, Love Letters of a Living Poet.  Like many of his books, it’s intense, original, and somewhat embarrassing.

Apparently, in November, 1902, De Casseres met a “beautiful, very dark woman” in his Manhattan boarding house; they exchanged some meaningful glances, and read some Byron together.  They met briefly three more times; and she then left town, in March, 1903.  Her name was Mary Adele Terrill Jones, she was married, and she lived in California.  She preferred the name Bio, which she said was her Indian name.

Ben and Bio wrote increasingly passionate and elaborate letters to each other; but didn’t meet again until 1919, at which point Mrs. Jones divorced Mr. Jones, and married her penpal.  De Casseres was, perhaps, not the ideal suitor, since his letters often dwelled on his poverty, suicidal impulses, and massive consumption of alcohol.

In 1931, De Casseres published a selection of his letters to her, as well as a few of hers to him.  Here’s an extract from a long letter, expressing one of the oddest romantic fantasies I’ve seen.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

“Flora” is another edition of the popular German game “Quartett,” in which players collect four of a kind.  In this case, it’s flowers.  There’s no date or publisher listed on this, but it was a while ago.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Ray Palmer is one of my favorite editors.  He took over the early science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in the ’30s; and turned it into an extremely unusual magazine in the ’40s, when he published the hallucinatory output of Richard Shaver.  (We’ve featured Shaver ourselves here many times, as a search will reveal.)  Readers balked at the “Shaver Mystery”; so Palmer left to pursue other projects, including Fate, Mystic, Search, Flying Saucers, and other magazines devoted to the paranormal and anomalistic.

Amazing Stories had a sister magazine, Fantastic Adventures.  It was devoted to “fantasy,” which Palmer defined rather broadly.  The issue depicted above, for example (August 1943), carried stories on: a Greek woman who invokes Apollo and Pegasus to fight the Nazis; a man whose life is taken over by three doppelgangers from the past; a man who inherits his uncle’s pet dinosaur; and a man who travels into the future with a yellow skeleton dispensing “temporary death.”

The prolific Robert Bloch also contributed two stories to the lineup: one about a group of gangsters who discover the Fountain of Youth, and one about a real estate agent battling fairies.  Rather than credit one of them to a house name, like Alexander Blade or Frank Patton, Bloch and Palmer opted for something less generic.  So it was that the fairy story was ascribed to Tarleton Fiske.  And Palmer, never one to do things halfway, even printed a photo and bio of Mr. Fiske.  Here, then, is Palmer in his prime, with a page devoted to an imaginary writer.

Parker Brothers’ 1927 creation, “Lindy: The New Flying Game,” was touted as “A Sequel to the Famous Parker Game TOURING.”  “Touring” was about cars; the sequel was about airplanes.  It used a rather large deck (99 cards), and many crisp black and white drawings of ’20s aircraft.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)