Some people name their kids after this. Sheesh.

Barbara Millicent Roberts is 50 years old today. That's Barbie to you and me. The first Barbie's came out in March 1959. There is much written about this iconic toy so I'll leave you to read the stuff that's out there.

I choose to look at a few of the duds and what were they thinking for Christ's sake anyway? Like the Barbie that came out in 1997 that featured an African American doll in the unfortunately named Oreo Fun Barbie collection.

Even more supportive and wholesome was the 1965 Slumber Party Barbie whose package contained a diet tips book that suggested kids don't eat to loose weight. Whoa.

How about the Rosie O'Donnell Barbie? I'm serious. And Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. C'mon.

Gotta run. It's time for me to move away from the crabbing about so many consumer products and return to technological disasters. As fun as cereal was, it's time to turn my sights to more pressing historical chestnuts like the perfectly safe and family friendly development of the jet engine.

Oh, in case you have any questions, I direct you to the Breakfast Cereal Information Service (I am not kidding). Hey, they're online at http://www.breakfastcereal.org/ . Knowledge IS power.

See ya next time.

Oh you brute.

Sorry for the delay, I believe I was hung up playing video games. Now it seems that Lucky Charms (this family's personal favourite) had a short run in the 70's when the leprechaun fellow, LC, was replaced by a wizard named Waldo. It did not take off, thank god for that. But the real thrust of today's post is more of the mis-aligned marketing that's rampant, even today when products are aimed at children. Cereal is more an more marketed as a good food anymore, so it doesn't matter as much.

But a few decades ago the marketing people often did not have it figured out when it came to mascots. Case in point: Fruit Brute by General Mills. (You know they could have spelled it Fruit Bruit, or worse, Frute Brute).

It sold for an amazingly long time for a gimmicky cereal, almost ten years, and was last seen on grocers shelves in 1983. This stuff was part of the "monster series" of cereals that included Boo Berry, Count Chocula, Franken berry and of course that healthy stablemate, Yummy Mummy. The latter was discontinued too, wonder why.

The actual brute was a werewolf and the cereal was obviously fruit flavoured, but I cannot find a reliable description of just what flavour that was. I've found a few sources that describe it as something like raspberry, hmmm so so, and lime. Wow now that would be harsh.

Look for Lance eating a bowl of it in Pulp Fiction.

Canada goose.

A couple of good flying stories coming out in the Canadian press the last few days worthy of snarling at. First, it's the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight in Canada. Now I ran a few posts a while back that had more than a few planes flying before the Wright Brothers, so no doubt, if you give me a bit I'll find something that pre-dates the Silver Dart's first flight, not just for Canada, but the whole damn empire.

How Canadian can you get? Christ, they flew the thing from a frozen lake, Lac Bras d'Or (the name of a very fine beer too). The machine was designed and built by the Aerial Experiment Association, a committee (how Canadian is that?). The thing was actually built in the states and flown a couple of times in early 1909 before being dragged to the frozen lake for a few circuits around the pond. The projects patriarch, Alexander Graham Bell had his summer home at this lake, which no doubt was much more pleasant in the summer.

At the other end of the spectrum, and no less Canadian, and for some dumb ass reason shares roughly the same anniversary, is the death of the Avro Arrow. Built by the A.V. Roe aircraft company of Malton, Ontario. The company was originally the Victory Aircraft company, and was bought out by Hawker Siddeley of Britain in 1950.

Their first jet was the Avro Jetliner, and it was their last. There were no problems with it, in fact it hauled goods for years. But they wanted to build real sexy stuff like fighter jets cause all those damn commies were just over the horizon. The silly jet liner set all sorts of records for the time and was not prone to falling apart like other early ones.

Turning instead to military stuff, Avro began to design the Arrow, the CF-105. The first flight was March 25, 1958. It could beat pretty much anything going at the time. So, it was scrapped February 20, 1959.

Politicians at the time could not bear the price tag of over a billion dollars and scrapped the project. When I say scrapped, I mean it. The whole inventory of 7 machines cut up and mulched. C'mon. The argument that they were worried that the bad guys would steal the technology doesn't hold water. The damn thing was almost 80 feet long. Couldn't they just take the spark plugs out?

Who in the heck is Antoinette?

So I've dwelt on the General Mills cereals for a bit, and really, they had some questionable products and some dodgy marketing. That means it's time to pick on Tony the Tiger!!! A Kellogg's product first introduced in 1951.

So there is really nothing wrong at all with the damn cereal. It is up there as a breakfast meal and TV snack. There is no dispute about that. But Tony the Tiger was just one of a number of animals to promote the product.

Animals that helped out in the beginning included a kangaroo named Katy, an elephant called Elmo and a gnu named Newt (what were they thinking?) Katy made in on the box briefly for the first year and then it was all Tony's show.

He had quite a brood and his boy, Tony Junior, even has his own cereal, Frosted Rice. Then there's Mrs. Tony (his wife), and mother Tony (his mom). And, since you're curious, Antoinette is his daughter.

Double bass

This is the part of writing that sucks. When ya gotta get down and and say a few words about someone extraordinary. Today it'sLuigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni. We know him as Louie Bellson.

Born in Rock Falls, Illinois on July 6, 1924. Obviously of Italian heritage, he got behind the drum kit when he was 3. But boy , did this guy play with them. let's see. Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee in the 1943 movie The Powers Girl, and with Carmen Miranda in The Gangs All Here. Barely out of his teens he joined up with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton and other jazz heavy weights in the 1948 classic A Song is Born.

Not one to be affected by stardom or the Hollywood lifestyle, even after marrying Pearl Baily in 1952. They remained married until she died in 1990.

I can't even list the major players he played with during his career. So good that Buddy Rich asked him to lead HIS band, when he was off sick. Now that's a gig. He was one of the first drummers to play a real big kit, 2 bass drums and all. That's scary with him behind it.

He continued to arrange and lead bands right up until his death. That's him up there with Carmen.

cars have rear view mirrors for christ's sake.

You remember when I ran a few posts with dimwits making trains too big for the damn track or cannons with a 36 inch bore? and they did it on purpose? Well, the screwy thing is that screw ups can easily be just as big, and then they do it again. My god.

So it seems that over the last week we have managed to run 2 bloody satellites into each other (I mean space is pretty big, right? I mean that's why it's called "space". Doesn't matter. Not surprisingly, there is a law about what to do if you have a fender bender, or a big crack up. It's called the Convention of International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects or CILDCSO. For the love of Pete, you think even scientists can think up a sexier name than that.

The law boils down to a very simple concept: you launch it, you pay. The thing was they were expecting the damn things to fall DOWN. But if they hit another space object, and presumably, someone owns the other "object", and we know who that is, then it's like car insurance. Someone has to be found to be at fault. Trouble is the Russian satellite was dead, gonzo, junk. So, is it like that old rusty car on a side street that has no plates? And what happens to all the bloody parts that flew off? How can you sue if one of those slams into your garden? How to tell whose it is.

But anyway, I'll leave law to science. On another front, here's another poser. Just how do 2 nuclear submarines run into each other? C'mon, the sea is big too. And you'd figure they have a little more electronics than a fish finder on board. The British and French are blushing tonight.

But, it has happened before.

On 20 March 1993, the USS Grayling (name a submarine after a trout and see what you get) collided with the Novomoskovsk, a Russian ballistic missile submarine. And they were trying to NOT be seen by each other.

Up and down.

I was planning a nostalgic look at one my childhood TV shows, a French Canadian thing that ran after school and featured, among other characters, a clown named Patof. He referred to his head as a boot (la botine). That's the influence young ones need alright.

But, instead I was sidetracked by the news that Muzak has filed for bankruptcy. I thought I would have a look at the soul of elevator music. ( Just to put things into context, according to Bankruptcydata.com, 2008 saw 231 major bankruptcies, although notable, it is far short of the 2001 dot com fiasco. number of 383.)

Founded in 1934, that's 75 years folks, by George Squire, an engineer, inventor and somewhat of an adventurer (he was the first passenger ever on an airplane, when in 1908 he took a short ride on a Wright Brothers aircraft).

But it was his invention of transmitting phonograph tunes over electrical wires in 1922 that started the Muzak story. He sold the patent to North American Company who in turn bankrolled the original Muzak, called Wired Radio Inc. (what a great name!) but it took 12 years to get the thing into the American marketplace. So in 1934, voila, he looked around for a catchy name and coined Muzak, by joining music and Kodak (after super popular portable camera of the time).

In one of those damned life ironies, Squire died that year and never saw how Muzak would change and bother the world for 3/4 's of a decade.

Straight Shooter

There is nothing like a good honest cereal, something you feel good about. Something that's wholesome and has a good "vibe", you know, the kind of feeling you get when you do the right thing. The kind of feeling your parents long for when they talk about hambuger going for 25 cents a pound.

So it's amply apparent I'm setting something up here.

Early breakfast cereal had a real health side to it, in fact, that was the only side. Other than the weird evangelical side, but that's for another post. Anyway, we all think cereals got sugary and really bad for you in the 60's.

Think again. I give you Nabisco's Ranger Joe. Wholesome fellow, square dealer, his trusty horse by his side.

It came out in 1939 and was a pioneering product in that it was one of the first sugar coated cereals. What I could find out was that in 1939, a fellow named Jim Rex got the idea to coat puffed cereal with honey, so not actually sugar, but darn sweet anyway. There was a TV show of the same name that ran for years. Finally in 1954, not a bad run for a small town based cereal, Nabisco bought the brand and renamed it Wheat Honeys with the venerable Buffalo Bee schilling for it.

They are small

It is with delight that I, after doing some pretty good snooping (my word for amateur research), have been able to almost trip over some truly amazing items for my current obsession.

I mean, just when I think I've found a gem of a cereal, far too absurd to be real (and it is!!!) I find another that is even more interesting.

Case in point, Dwarfies Cereal, made by the Dwarfies Corporation, who else? of Iowa. Nearest I can find out it was made in the 20's and 30's and was a hot cereal, so not a classic milk and crunchies variety, but hell, the clever name was good enough to make this post.

It was a wheat based cereal, not oats, like porridge, and had pictures of happy dwarfs cavorting about in a wooded glen, sitting on toadstools and stuff. I couldn't find out about anything else the company made. But no doubt it would have something to do with dwarfs.

Guess Who

There is just too much good stuff in the world of breakfast cereal, so I have to take my time and savour the purely fucked universe that is breakfast time in the 60's.

That being so, I thought I would educate the reader about the beginnings of rock and roll. On this day in 1960, at just 27 years old, Jesse Belvin died. He was an R&B singer/songwriter, who had he lived was definitely poised to move into that vast ocean of the young white hip consumer.

His first pro gig was as a backing singer for Three Dots and a Dash, of Big Jay McNeely fame. Anxious to move up on his own he signed a deal with Specialty Records (Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker) and released song after song till "Dream Girl" made it to #2 on the R&B charts in 1953.

He hit the big time with the Penguin's huge hit, Earth Angel in 1954, co-written with Curtis Williams and Gaynel Hodge. He had success on his own too the following year with Goodnight My Love, featuring a young Barry White on piano.

He recorded with lots of musicians including Johnny "Guitar" Watson, but by the end of the decade he was looking to move away from the pack again and show he had the good. 1959 saw his only major hit "Guess Who" released. An album followed and by 1960 he was moving away from rocking R&B into softer, more melodic ballads, and into mainstream territory.

After giving a concert in Little Rock, Arkansas, the first that allowed a mixed race audience ever in that city, him and his wife died in a head on car accident.

Happy birthday Vince.

Little too pooped to go after cereal tonight, but I thought it would be good to let you know that on this day in 1948, Alice Cooper was born.

Oddly enough on the same day in 1963, The Ballad of Jed Clampett, by Lester Flat and Earl Scruggs, topped the Billboard charts.

A gorilla, an elf and a kid.

I think I lived in a a cereal free zone when I grew up, or maybe Eastern Canada was actually a small communist state and no one told me. But, for the love of me I never saw any of these crazy cereals.

Today's offering is just that. Screwed up. General Mills had a good run in the 60's.

Wackies cereal came in 2 varieties: regular and banana. The odd thing is that the regular flavour apparently had banana bits in them. I suspect the just wanted the big gorilla to shill for the damn stuff.

The "Wackies" part of the deal was that these banana bits were in what they called "squiggles and squaggles" shape. Or if you weren't on the floor convulsing with laughter, then the other shapes they came were "bingles, jangles, oflutes and oclots". That should do it. Sure sent the spell checker off.

Time for a cardboard ray gun.

Gotta have something to shoot a Fruit Brute

Today marks the anniversary of the Buck Rogers U-235 Atomic Ray Gun. This replica toy made by Daisy Manufacturing Co., was one in a string of premiums or tie ins for the insanely popular radio shows, movies and comic books.

The first ray gun tied in to the show was actually made of cardboard and came out in 1933. It was offered as a mail in freebie from Cocomalt Cereal ( "a natural laxative"). Other items included a Buck Rogers cardboard pop gun (that must have had a shelf life) and Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering cardboard helmets, all in an effort, no doubt, to get get kids screaming about the house zapping their buddies and freaking out the cat.

Honestly, the ray guns put out by Daisy are the coolest toys and look very menacing for the time.