#387 Hogwash

So I was thinking of hogwash the other day. It’s amazing how many porcine descriptive phrases we have in our language. Perhaps stemming from our early rural history. There were big battles on the open range between cows and sheep but just about everyone had pigs. And they were happy as a pig in a poke. Or wallowing like a pig in slop, or fast as a greased pig or possibly slipperier that a greased pig. I always wondered, who was greasing pigs and why? So as I was thinking about hogwash and how hard it is to make a silk purse out of a sows ear—that’s one I still don’t get—I thought of all the sleazy products and snake oil salesman I encountered as a youth. Like X-Ray glasses. Remember those? There was almost always an ad for them on the inside cover of comic books. You only had to send in some nearly unobtainable sum, like two dollars, and you could be the proud owner of a pair of glasses that would penetrate the secrets of all and sundry. Oh, the thrill of seeing through someone’s clothes or through walls and catching people in all kinds of compromising positions. As the glasses never seemed to be featured in Rainbow Pony and Veronica and Jughead comic books, I’m pretty sure the ads were directed at young males. And many the young male was disappointed when, after he hoed the neighbors weeds or collected empty pop bottles for their deposit, he sent off that hard earned money: Cause six weeks later—an eternity in kid years—back came these cheesy fall-apart spectacle things, which appeared to be fashioned from the bottoms of the coke bottles he had earlier taken in for deposit. And when you peered through them, all you could see were blurry outlines, everyone reduced to shadowing skeletal renderings with absolutely no salacious detail. A good lesson for every young person in the principle of caveat emptor. Which I believe means “cavity empty” as in the hole in your brain that led you to do such a stupid thing. But then again there are those in this world who do things first and only look for reasons later. Many times they actually survive to breed another generation. So I’m thinking the next generation is way too sophisticated to buy into that whole X-Ray glasses thing. Today’s kids know all about the dangers of X-Rays anyhow. How much cancer do you think Superman caused with his prying eyes? I’m thinking a new product. Something techno and believable that plays on kid’s desires for secret power. How about the reverse de-pixilator? Yeah, a computerized viewing window that de-pixilates those TV censor smudges. It reconstructs the naked flesh right before your eyes. And bonus, it sees right through the mottled glass of bathroom windows. The reverse de-pixilator unlocks secrets with the best of digital reconstructive software technology. And heck with comic books, you could email the misleading ad direct to techno kids. Using that other pork product—Spam.
America, ya gotta love it.