Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Real Easter Egg (1971)


Back in the 1970s, many people complained that the word “Easter” had been dropped from the packaging of chocolate eggs. They also claimed it was only a matter of time before other Christian Easter imagery, such as anthropomorphised cartoon chicks playing with bashful ducks or dungaree-wearing bunny rabbits, received the same treatment.

The Scarfolk Confectionery Company was only too happy to remind consumers of the true biblical events surrounding Easter: Gruesome acts of mutilation and torture, filicide/suicide, crude carpentry and auto-exhumation were all necessary to atone for the original sin that most people agree is historically unfounded, though still blame on one woman’s innocent desire for a healthy snack.

The Scarfolk Confectionery Company ensured that the word “Easter” was not omitted from its products (see above, from a 1971 brochure), in fact it was printed on the packaging over 100 times with corrosive ink that burned the word into the skin of the consumer. Anyone not bearing the burn scars was deemed by the government to be "unBritish".

Happy Easter from Scarfolk!
For more Easter-related artefacts, see also Rabies Easter Eggs, Jellied Babies and Confectionery Branded Cigarettes.

Friday, 20 January 2017

The De-evolution of Mankind (Pelican Books, 1975).


Many people are unaware that a young Donald Trump appeared on the cover of a book called The De-evolution of Mankind, published in Scarfolk by Pelican Books in 1975.

From the introduction:
"Scientists predict that, at some point in the early 21st century, humans will stop evolving and will start the process of de-evolution. Several signs will herald this decline:
i. People will stop reading books. It's estimated that the length of an average book will be eighteen words, including the title and copyright page.
ii. Increasingly, people will only vote for leaders who can communicate using an abbreviated, primitive dialect, a sort of "Dunce Patois" in which whole sentences will be reduced to single words: "True!", "Bad!", "Shame!", etc.
iii. The distinction between the real and the imaginary will be lost and fictional characters will ascend to the highest posts of office.
iv. Human hands will shrink through inactivity and will become little more than tiny, feeble scoops [...]

[...] The mighty space stations we once imagined in our future will drift unpopulated because the knowledge required to reach them will have been either outlawed or carelessly forgotten. The threadbare remnants of mankind will scrabble around a dying earth, daubing themselves with orange mud to avoid being burned due to the global overheating they said would never happen. We will return to this development in Chapter 4, which is entitled 'Consummate Dickheads'."