Francis Frog

This must have been tramautic as hell for Japanese kids reading this in the 70s

only thing stronger than hate is love

Marge Simpson once appeared on the cover of Playboy Magazine. Not in a joke episode. Not a parody. The real magazine. November 2009 issue. A spokeswoman told the BBC at the time, "We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd." The timing was calculated. The Simpsons had just hit its 20th anniversary. Barack Obama had just taken office. Avatar was about to dominate theaters. Fox partnered with Playboy to turn a cartoon mom into a cultural headline. Marge became the first mainstream animated character to pose for Playboy. The issue included a full feature. A fake in character interview. And a centerfold that pushed further than most people expected from a TV icon. In the interview, "Marge" explains why she posed for Playboy: "A nice girl like me would never display her body if it weren't to raise money for charity. I'm donating my hefty fee from this tasteful pictorial to SPHG, Saving and Preserving Historic Gazebos. Gazebos are disappearing, people, and they're not coming back." She also said that her "turn ons" were having enough saucers for your cups and her "turn offs" were "slim men who work out regularly and take care of their bodies." The racy images were drawn by animator Julius Preite, who later tweeted how weird it was, saying, quote, "I felt like I was drawing my mom."

It gets to a point.

This footage was captured in 1965 and was a social experiment showing how girls react to a young handsome teacher: their reactions are priceless.

met a man on the street last night who said he is an abstract artist who has “purposefully not been generating income for the last five years”

One of the most insane things I’ve ever come across: Up until World War II, the majority of renters in NYC all moved at the same time on May 1st at 9am. This is because (almost) every housing lease in NYC expired on the same day. This goes back to an old Dutch tradition where every contract had an end date of May 1st. This was carried over when Dutch settlers immigrated to the US. And in 1820, the state of New York actually passed a law mandating that any housing contract without a specified term ended on May 1st. Many housing leases were just oral / handshake agreements and not actually written down, so they all had this same end date. At the height of Moving Day in the early 1900’s, it was estimated that over a million people in NYC all changed their residences at the same time. For context, NYC’s population was 1.5m in 1890 and 7.4m in 1940. Every year on May 1st, tens of thousands of farmers, etc came into NYC with wagons to make money moving people and their things around all day. There’s a few quotes about this on the Wikipedia page. A good one from 1832: “On the 1st of May the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day. Every one I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable, if you inhabit a rented house. More than one of my New York friends have built or bought houses solely to avoid this annual inconvenience” Moving Day finally ended during WW2 because they couldn’t get enough able-bodied men in town to help move people. They were all away at war. These labor shortages + a general housing shortage + rent control finally put an end to NYC’s Moving Day.