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 It's their term, not mine. Behold:

You may wonder why this particular piece of 1930s cheesecake is being posted on a newspaper blog. Simple: it's a promotion aimed at people who want to advertise in the Star. . Let's take a look inside:

That's right: women read the sports pages because they know the jocks or newspaper writers. What other type of lady reads the paper?

 . . . which is manifested by eating potato chips while on the phone, I guess. Or is she biting on a handkerchief while waiting for the good news?

Also:

That about covers it. Or does it? Nay. Stylish, serious women who gamble and drink and discuss the issues of the day over cigarettes and cottage cheese read the paper too:

What type of stores interests them? TROUBLES SOCIAL BABY NAUGHTY

The booklet notes that the Star does not accept liquor ads, so you're getting a clean crowd when you advertise. 

Included in the book was a letter to salesmen touting the new color Sunday section. It contained a button you could wear to drum up interest - can you recognize the character?

Yes: the Spirit. This made me remember something I'd taken from the microfilm records many years ago: a promotional cartoon done by a staff member to tout the Spirit's adventures.

Someone who saw the original post many years ago showed the pictures to Will Eisner, the brilliant artist who drew the Spirit. He laughed. 

Probably kicked himself for not coming up with that piano, though. What a sidekick!

No. More? Okay. 

Reading the comments here and there about the stadium-area development, you almost get the sense that people have pre-existing ideas about the world they can plug into anything that happens anywhere, and be proven right. This proposal to replace one structure with an expanse of green and some office buildings proves the validity of the political perspective I also offered in the story about zebra mussels. My work here in the comments section is done, at least until there is a story about the TSA or genetically-modified organisms. We’re all impressed, and thanks for playing.

Some have complained that the buildings are bland . . .

Ryan Co.

.... but I don’t agree. I think they’re perfect for the site. It needs a wall, and that’s what it gets. It has symmetry, which balances the other messy elements it can’t do anything about. In a way, the buildings recall the great 20s and 30s apartment buildings around Central Park, and their conservative design enhances the modern style of the stadium by contrast. Of all the big BIG plans we’ve seen for downtown, this one might be the best.

FOOLED YOU It’s called The Coyote Illusion.Warner Brothers drew blurred lines to indicate speed and activity - also because it was more suggestive than a literal depiction of limbs moving quickly. Mainly because it was easier. As it turns out, “motion blur increases apparent speed.” The proof:

More illusions here.

Since I mentioned animation, barely-related good news: there’s a new Toy Story short coming. And it’ll be 30 minutes.

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU There’s been a sudden drought of irritating headlines that use the YOU format - you know, ’36 things you’re doing wrong, Best Solar Flare You’ll See today, etc. I thought the trend was dying, but no. Today’s thing YOU are supposedly doing, from the Daily Dot: “Not Only Are You a Criminal, You’re Bragging About it on Facebook.” The editors must have loved that one! People can’t help but click on that.

It’s an Amnesty International site that analyzes your pictures and contacts and figures out whether you’d be beaten to death in Nigeria for drinking alcohol and associating with unrelated persons of the opposite sex, and so on. There’s a surprise.

FOLLOW-UP The link yesterday about the restaurant owners who took to Facebook to demolish their brand in front of the entire internet? It was all Teh H@XORZ.

Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy &Samy

By all means, read the comments, which include all sorts of speculation about what’s really going on at the restaurant. Forbes piles on some more.

This does seem to suggest someone guessed her password, though. She’s not capable of coming up with lulz-related text like that.

BTW, does it bother anyone that the Facebook comments link says “View Next Comments”? Shouldn’t it be “view more,” or “view additional comments”?

ADS Tweet what’s boring and they’ll make it brilliant! It’s an ad campaign you may have missed with a rather innovative site. By which I mean almost incomprehensibe. Of course, this is fake:

You can tell it’s fake because no one in the waiting room is looking at a phone or other type of glowing rectangle.

This morning was gorgeous, and promised just the day we’ve been waiting for, no? Sun! Heat! How hot? A few days ago my Yahoo weather app said it would be 97 today. This was downgraded to 91 a day later. Still one might hope. Then the clouds drew a clammy hand over the sun, and you felt a fool for having believed. But now it’s sunny (hold on; checking . . . yes) and we’re back on track for the first day of the year when people complain about the heat.

Please don’t do that.

 ARCHITECTURE I like the stadium. But will it wear well? The Metrodome achieved a sort of timeless banality, after all, so devoid of style it almost became a style on its own. The problem with building something that fits the contemporary standards is always the verdict of the fickle future, which rolls its eyes at the things the past thought hip. Well, we’re never going to build one of these again . . .

. . . and probably just as well. The form may be old and familiar, but it feels too collegiate, and too big for the style. That’s just a barn. The new design avoids the curvy forms of the past few years, the fluffy puffy style that made sporting arenas look like confections; it’s not a jumble of off-putting shapes piled at random to disguise the function. It’s simple. It almost has the posture of a bear hunkered down and ready to spring. And then there’s that awesome maw:

Intimidating more than welcoming, perhaps - but then you walk in and see the field below, and suddenly you’re king of the world.

ART! It’s called the Frieze Art Fair. A HuffPo piece says:

In the wake of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, we tried to make sense of the overwhelming amount of mirrored objects, food sculptures and shelving units masquerading as art. We don't know about you, dear readers, but we find the emperor's new clothes effect to be highly troubling.

Really? Oh, come on. It can’t be that bad. Let’s take a look.

Okay, it’s that bad.  In related art news, from Cartoon Brew:

In last weekend’s NY Times Sunday Magazine, the paper published a profile of artist Paul McCarthy in connection with his new show WS (which stands for “White Snow”). The epic performance piece, which opens June 19 at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, will consist of “a massive, fantastical forest with towering trees, two off-scale houses, equipment and props from classic film-sets, and layers of film and sound.” During the piece, McCarthy—as Walt Disney—will participate in an orgy with Snow White and the seven dwarfs.

All that is well and good,

No. No, it’s not. But we continue:

what alarmed me about the piece is why Times writer Randy Kennedy compared McCarthy’s portrayal of Disney to Hitler in the article’s second paragraph.

More at the link. Of course Disney is compared to Hitler! The Jewish thing, you know - which has been debunked, but never mind. Also the hatred of “degenerate” culture, perhaps; Walt wasn’t one of those transgressive types who liked to break down barriers and shock the bourgeoise. So, sure, Hitler.

The picture from the Times shows the artist looking like Walt Disney, grinning, with his pants down. This is a reminder that we live in a mucb more vital culture than the one where Walt was shown with his pants on.

CAPSLOCK AND LOAD Fans of Gordon Ramsay probably remember the meltdown at Amy’s Bakery Baking Company; fans of Buzzfeed have noted the “Most Epic Brand Meltdown on Facebook Ever.” If you don’t mind reading streams of profanity in all caps, then by all means check out the restaurant owners going up against . . . reddit, which is like 4chan with a few atoms of remnant conscience. If all this is new, then watch the excerpt for backstory. Also, I drove past that place just a few weeks ago. If only I’d known!

TIMEWASTER You may enjoy this. Via ABC news:

It’s the 37th birthday of the classic Atari game Breakout, and if you type “Atari Breakout” as a Google image search query, you can play the 1970s brick game right inside your browser.

That you can. Enjoy! I lasted for 45 seconds before I was bored and flitted off to something else, but that's the internet for you. I''m surprised I have the attention span to get to the end of this, because there's always another page to OH LOOK PUGS IN KNIT CAPS THEY'RE ADORABLE

And then there’s the alpha-dogging Ted into a mid-afternoon stupor - he pounds three slugs of Canadian Club just to warm up, and uses his Professional Alcoholic skills to get some collab out of the session before depositing his victim in public where everyone can tell he’s sotted. .

Where the heck did that man come from? Why, it was the Don Draper everyone knows and loves, at least among the audience. But everything was turned up to eleven and played with soulless dead-eyed calculation, as though the last small sympathetic and admirable attributes had been revealed as something we read into the character, not something the character possessed. He’s a bad man. That’s what Weiner was telling us here. This is who he’s always been. What, you didn’t see that?.

If you wonder why he behaved that way, well, basic cheap psychology: faced with a comparable talent as a partner, he tries to dominate Ted with personality, only to lose face in the airplane; given a free hand with his mistress, he tries to dominate her completely, only to lose when she calls an end to the interlude. He’s bereft and unmoored at the end because both gambits went sour. Not that he’d thought them out. Not that he’d allowed for the reactions of other people. A guy who can correctly calculate the emotional appeal of a margarine commercial aired to millions of people can’t see beyond his own actions. 

"The Last Picture Show," by the way, was the book Don took from his girlfriend to read in the plane. Read into that what you wish.

VIDEO This is the modern world: when someone is kicked off a plane for repeatedly singing a Whitney Houston song, not only do you hear about the story, there’s video.

Here’s the story:

An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a woman on board refused to stop singing Whitney Houston’s hit song 'I Will Always Love You'.

The unnamed woman was handcuffed and removed from the flight by air marshals after it was forced to divert to Kansas. Remarkably she was still singing the 1992 song when escorted from the plane.

What stuck out for me was the Flight Attendant laying down the law for the rest of the passengers: no photographs allowed on the plane.Since when?

 Related: Most fliers had electronic devices on planes last year, and nearly 30 percent “accidentally” left them on. Yes, that’s it. Accidentally. Sure. And yet the planes arose into the sky without incident, found their way to their destination and gave the earth a smoky scorched kiss when its tires met the runaway.

 The NYT notes:

As I reported in 2011, travelers are told to turn off their iPads and Kindles for takeoff and landing, yet there is no proof that these devices affect a plane’s avionics. To add to the confusion, the F.A.A. permits passengers to use electric razors and audio recorders during all phases of flight, even though those give off more electronic emissions than tablets.

One of these days they’ll change the policy and there won’t be a jot of explanation or apology.

OKP That’s “Obligatory Kubrick Post,” since the internet has decided in the last few years we must either talk about “2001” or “The Shining.” Here’s a HoJo restaurant book for kids explaining “2001.” Why would they do that? Well:

Simple, addictive, frustrating, full of useless exhileration - perfect time-waster. Have fun. 

THEN AND NOW A find from the postcard collector’s show. Can you identify this Minneapolis street? It’s rather difficult, since everything you see is gone.

I'm pretty sure it's now  . . . this.

The building in the distance is the old Post Office. The next one from the left, the Onieda. The "Minnesota Loan & Trust" was the Bank of Commerce.

Time was not kind to the street, was it.

Busy day; more later.