Hole in the Clouds

Double Toe

Feb 28, 2012

If you believe the banners in this ca. 1885 chromolithograph,  the Standard Tip T.M. Harris & Co. boot comes with a double toe that is not only warranted and trade mark registered but also highest grade sole leather tip. It's not clear what the people frolicking in the ad have to do with double standard tip shoes, and it's not clear what a registered trade mark has to do with warranted highest quality, but what else is new. As my grandmother used to say: You believe that one and they'll tell you a bigger one.

The shoe factory in the background was a building on Cherry Street in Philadelphia that was originally built for manufacturing chandeliers.

The Sharing Economy

Jan 4, 2017

Some of the trolls in the 1972 masterwork d'Aulaires' Book of Trolls had a dozen heads, each one demanding to be fed first. Other trolls had a single head on their shoulders, just like humans, but perhaps with only a single eye, or else with three eyes. And then there were the trolls pictured here who had to share an eye with their troll associates, taking turns to look through it.

But there's a thing about troll eyes. They've all been pierced by a troll splinter, which skews their vision. What's good looks bad to trolls, and what's right looks wrong.

Whenever a troll explodes, which happens more often than you might think, the splinter in its eye shatters into millions of tiny needles, which are liable to pierce the eyes of people in the vicinity. And that explains why so many of us nowadays see the world all askew, prone to trollish errors of perception and judgment.