The Pig Got Up And Slowly Walked Away

Here's Rudy Vallee:

"You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses"
And the pig got up and slowly walked away:



Lyrics (alternatives here):

PIG GOT UP AND SLOWLY WALKED AWAY

(Music: F W Bowers / Lyrics: Benjamin Hapgood Burt)

Frank Crumit - 1934
Johnny Bond - 1966
Jim Croce - 1975

Also recorded by: Sam Hinton; Rudy Vallee;
Harry Belafonte; Clinton Ford; Acker Bilk.

One evening in October
When I was about one-third sober
And was taking home a load with manly pride
My poor feet began to stutter
So I lay down in the gutter
And a pig came up and lay down by my side

Then we sang "It's All Fair Weather"
And "Good Fellows Get Together"
Till a lady passing by was heard to say
She says, "You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses"
And the pig got up and slowly walked away

Yes, the pig got up and slowly walked away
Slowly walked away, slowly walked away
Yes, the pig got up and he turned and winked at me
As he slowly walked away

I also well remember
One evening in November
When I was creeping home at break of day
For in my exhilaration
I engaged in conversation
With a cab-horse, right on the corner of Broadway

I was filled up to the eyeballs
With a flock of gin and highballs
So I whispered to the cab-horse old and grey
I says, "It's these all-night homeward marches
That gave us both our fallen arches."
And the old horse laughed and slowly walked away

Yes, the old horse laughed and slowly walked away
Slowly walked away, he slowly walked away
And the old horse laughed and he turned and winked at me
As he slowly walked away
As he slowly walked away

Fashion Ads From The 1970s

There's approximately a gazillion of these available on the interwebs, and I've probably posted way too many of them - once I started I had a hard time stopping! The vast majority of what I've included here are ads for men's clothing, because they're so many standard deviations from the current norm - the women's versions look (relatively) normal.

I have to say, too, that I lived through the 70's, and although this stuff was, obviously, advertised, I don't remember actually seeing much of it. On the other hand, I don't remember an awful lot about that time period.

The only person who pulled this fashion statement off, sort of, was John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and I'll bet it's been waaay to long since you watched it  (watch full screen):

This ad seems to be patterned after Travolta:

I don't know what to make of this:

I'm pretty sure I never heard of Flagg Brothers, but I love the pimp style and the women hanging onto their legs:

A couple for the ladies:

And for the whole family:

Early attempts to produce the flying car we were supposed to have by now

Hobbes: "A new decade is coming up."

Calvin: "You call this the future?? HA! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the flying cars?"

~ Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (wiki) December 30, 1989

Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come. 

~ Henry Ford, 1940 

By 1953 motor-cars will be obsolete, because aeroplanes will run along the ground as well as fly over it.

~ Sir Philip Gibbs,  1928.

Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a "copter". These tiny "copters", when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads.

~ Harry Bruno, 1943

Weren't we supposed to have flying cars (wiki) by now? Below are some early attempts:

Nov 1947:

A ConVair Car Model 118 flying car during a test flight. The hybrid vehicle was designed by Theodore P. Hall for the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company of San Diego, California, but never went into production. A test pilot had to make a crash landing after the vehicle unexpectedly ran out of fuel — he'd been reading from the car's fuel gauge, not the plane's. 

 April 1924:

A car with wings and a propeller protruding from the radiator grille drives through Times Square, New York. It was the invention of A.H. Russell of Nutley, New Jersey.

1928:

An aerocar, unconfirmed as being able to fly, which had a triple function: a combined car, airplane and boat.

Jan. 1946:

Ted Hall's NX59711. It had a top road speed of 60mph and flight speed of 110mph. Hall developed it as a design for paratroopers and commandos.

Lots more at Mashable, Daily Beast, and Smithsonian.

Tuesday links

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was born on May 22, 1859

Exercise for Women in the early 19th Century

What to do if you find yourself choking -- and no one's around.

1927 documentary on how to dial a telephone.

Gallery of photos from the Halifax explosion - the naval accident that erased an entire city in Canada.

Remembering the ‘Knocker-Ups’ Hired to Wake Workers With Pea Shooters.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include the invention of the baby carrot, phrases commonly used today that come from obsolete technologies, a device used to resuscitate canaries in coal mines, Ziploc bag engineering, and the guy who makes the world’s best paper airplanes.

Friday links

The Great Sperm Race: The Most Extreme Race on Earth, Scaled To Human Size (plus bonus Monty Python). 

"Meet Glenn. Like most average men Glenn has no idea about the miracle of engineering tucked away in his pants." 

Medieval fitness programs.

A bank glitch gave a 24-year old, down-on-his-luck Australian man access to unlimited funds. Then he did exactly what you think he did with it.

An Interactive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actually Lead to Rome.

25 Lost Survival Tips from 100 Years Ago – with Illustrations.

The Man Who Continuously Hiccuped for 68 Years.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include the practice of execution by cannon, ancient Rome's urine tax, more human feet washing up in British Columbia, and pigeons with cameras.

Friday links

For Buffy the Vampire Slayer's birthday, here's a list of her birthday catastrophes.

If Cooties Were Real, What Disease Would They Be?

Weird Beauty Hacks of Yesteryear.

On January 21 - It's Stonewall Jackson's birthday - here's the story of his left arm's separate grave. Also, French King Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793 - here's Allan Sherman.

Adults Trying To Recreate Childhood Photos.

How Apple Pie Became 'American'.

ICYMI, Wednesday's links are here, and include how to build an igloo, what Alexa and OK Google are doing with your family's personal information, Ben Franklin's birthday, and a set of 1906 photos illustrating women's self-defense moves.

Tuesday links

October 10th, 732 - the clash of civilizations at the Battle of Tours.

What You Actually Got From Those Vintage Back-of-Magazine Ads.

Why 3 Man-Sized Cages Hang From a Medieval German Church Steeple.

Get a Nobel Prize ready: If you’re dealing with menopause symptoms, this beer that might help.

How Do Termites Build Their Huge Structures?

The Plan to Launch Giant Wi-Fi Balloons Over Puerto Rico.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include and include nose hair extensions, body organs you can live without, Columbus Day, the 4.5 million pieces of undelivered mail that piled up in the Washington, D.C. Dead Letter Office during the Civil War. and some remastered and colorized images from the Civil War era (including Lincoln and Mark Twain).

Friday links

A collection of vintage ads you would never see today.

Ex-FBI agent opens cold case review into who betrayed Anne Frank.

The Existential Horror Created by the First X-Ray Images.

Need a gift for the person who has everything? Check out the reviews on this UFO Detector.

Someone Bought Hitler’s Boxers for $6,700.

How a bit of nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper set off bloody conflicts and discovery of the New World.

ICYMI, Wednesday's links are here, and include advice on settling in New York in 1820, a guide for speaking to hormonal women, some wedding dress history, and, from 1803, the Ottoman Empire's first map of the newly minted United States.

This 1957 film on how grocery stores work is a hoot

The joys of shopping at a new-fangled supermarket in 1957: If you’re a baby boomer who went grocery shopping with Mom back when you were a young whippersnapper, this will bring back memories. Watch all the way to the end to see how much an this mother paid for a shopping cart full of groceries in 1957 - the total is at 10:40 if you don't have the patience to sit through the whole shopping trip.

1954 film: How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb

A gem from cold war history: "The lack of safe house keeping has doomed this house to destruction."

Atomic tests at the Nevada Proving Grounds (later the Nevada Test Site) show effects on well-kept homes, homes filled with trash and combustibles, and homes painted with reflective white paint. The makers of the film (which apparently include people selling home improvement products as well as the U. S. government) assert that cleanliness is an essential part of civil defense preparedness and that it increases survivability.

Related posts and links:

Fan of mushroom clouds? Dozens of nuclear test videos declassified, uploaded to YouTube.

The anniversary of Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech

This is fascinating: 25 years later, deer on the Czech/German border still avoid the Iron Curtain.

A Secret Cold War Bunker under Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1961, US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina

Russian Nuclear Launch Code Backup Procedure: a sledgehammer.

Hard to tell if there's anything to this:  Nixon blocked Soviet nuclear attack on China in 1969.

Classic Pin-Up Girls Before and After Editing: The Real Women Behind Gil Elvgren's Paintings

Before Photoshop, artist Gil Elvgren (wiki) relied on the technique of painting from a photograph of a model instead of from the live model. His classic pin-up pictures of curvy-girl-next-door types with their skirts billowing adorned the noses of bombers and the walls of soldiers barracks in the 1940s and '50s. In addition to dozens of calendars, he illustrated stories for a host of magazines (such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping) and also provided advertising images for Coca-Cola, General Electric and Sealy Mattress Company, among others. 

As the '70s approached and the pin-up girl craze started to die, Elvgren was down to one business account. When he died in 1980 he was broke, and his last work was published posthumously. In the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in the pin-up girls, and Elvgren's work in both advertising and calendars has become highly collectible - in 2012 one of his classic pin-ups sold for $176K. In 1998 Elvgren's youngest son Drake produced a 200-page coffee table book includes hundreds of photos of Elvgren's work entitled Elvgren: His Life & Art. 

Even if you're too young to remember any of these specifically, they're so ubiquitous that they probably look familiar. Below are some of his paintings, alongside the photos on which each was based.

More pictures here, here, and here.