Photo by Martin Walls via stock.xchng
From James Lileks’ The Bleat today:
When I was a kid “taking down the Halloween decorations” meant removing the jointed cardboard Ben Franklin skeleton from the window; now it’s like striking the set of an Andrew Lloyd Webber play.”
We had one of those skeletons when I was a kid too. The bones were an inexplicable green. Probably cold war concern about being nuked.
Yeah I remember having a green skeleton too. I always thought skeleton’s turned green when they decayed but I took a human osteology class in college and we studied several different human bones. Not a green bone among the lot.
Nigel Tufnel: This is my exact inner structure, done in a tee shirt. Exactly medically accurate. See?
Marty DiBergi: So in other words if we were to take all your flesh and blood…
Nigel Tufnel: Take them off. This is what you’d see.
Marty DiBergi: It wouldn’t be green though.
Nigel Tufnel: It is green. You see how your blood looks blue.
Marty DiBergi: Yeah, well that’s just the vein. That’s the color of the vein. The blood is actually red.
Nigel Tufnel: Oh then, maybe it’s not green. Anyway this is what I sleep in sometimes.
Do they still have those horrible candies that come wrapped in orange wax paper and were like chewing rubber cement? I would tell you what flavor they were but they were a flavor that did not exist in nature and therefore indescribable.
I have not seen those candies for a while, but I must confess that I liked them even though, as you say, they were like chewing on rubber. They were actually made using refinery still bottoms, so perhaps the price of crude has killed the industry.
I seem to recall a really waxy peanut butter like taste. I had some around 4 years ago. Still the same. They came with a cousin wrapped in black wrapper. I think it’s rejected Silly Putty sent to Brach’s where someone clad in a white lab coat injects the flavor.
I think the green was because that’s the color of the cheap phosphorescent material that makes them glow weakly in the dark when exposed to sunlight for a few hours.
I think you’re on to something there Raoul, though I don’t remember a glow.