We’ve come a long way since the LA TIMES’ Marc C. Bloom tire ads and J. C. Penney white sale announcements. Here in Los Angeles we have the LA WEEKLY. Check out some of these ads.Dr. Pam Mirabaldi offers Vaginal Rejuvenation for only $2500! (Does one choose from various styles? Where can I get a catalog?)
On your next lunch break, instead of hitting Quiznos, stop by Epione for a “one hour face lift” only $3900. I imagine it’s a Joan Rivers daily ritual.
Or, you can spend your lunch hour getting a dental implant for only $699 thanks to Meir Agaki D.D.S. Before you say no just remember this: He’s a UCLA graduate.
Natural Beauty offers 25% discounts on Botox & Restylane injections. Prices like that would put a smile on your face if you could smile.
Mens Renaissance offer hair transplants, just $3 per graft. And there’s plasma TV’s in all rooms along with complimentary chauffer services.
But Crown Cosmetic Surgery allows you to get your hair back for just 67 cents each! Perfect if you only need say twenty hairs.
“Don’t be a gas-hole” proclaims the classy ad for Vespas.
Hey, there’s a Cosmoplast special over at Dr. Michael G. Franco’s. And it’s Zyplast season too! The good news gets even better. No skin test required!
No more unsightly vascular blemishes, gals! Starting for only $100 you can get rid of those Cherry Hemangiomas that have kept you home Saturday nights with that Rabbit Vibrator that everyone is talking about for only $99.
Depressed? Call the Schuster Medial Research Institute. You could even MAKE money – up to $320 for being in a study group. You could put that towards your vaginal reconstruction and really perk up your spirits.
Southwestern Research Inc. will pay up to $500 to depressives willing to be studied. But you have to be $170 MORE depressed than the Schuster groups.
“The Theraputic Power of Water” says the slogan. It’s for colon hydroptherapy. Also in the ad are illustrations of healthy and unhealthy colons so you can compare them to yours and see if you need their services.
DNA testing for Immigration is offered. Must use real hair, not the $3 grafts.
Livingreen store & gallery has Rainshow’r Filters “for softer hair, smoother skin, and healthier lungs”. Most respiratory problems can be traced back to shower nozzles.
Buy a mattress at Sit & Sleep and get free concert tickets.
At Pacific Support Services they say you can “get marijuana with this card”.
Star Strip Beverly Hills features the only shower stage in town. Hopefully they use the Rainshow’r Filters.
Eros Station gentleman’s club in Van Nuys says “If she’s not in your face, you’re in the wrong place.”
Meanwhile, 4Play boasts Tally Stevens who does flips in 9 inch heels! Hey, that one’s only five minutes from my house. I better start wrapping this up.
How could Marc C. Bloom compete with all that? Even if they were to advertise in the LA WEEKLY there’d be a competing ad that says, “Are your tires bald? Try our tread restoration treatment. Rubber grafts just $49.95 a tire. And whiten those white walls for only $69.95.”
11 comments :
Kent,
One of the few things missing is a Doggie High Colonic.
http://www.twitter.com/whatsamatta_u
formerly lewolf@aol.com
I met you a long time ago at Sam Simon's House. Didn't make a great impression. ;>
Considering his name is Ken, not Kent, I'd say impression #2 went over just as well!
Starting for only $100 you can get rid of those Cherry Hemangiomas that have kept you home Saturday nights with that Rabbit Vibrator that everyone is talking about for only $99.
Never underestimate the appeal of the Rabbit.
wv=tracke Where ye olde runners go.
That's such a garbage throwaway paper. I can't remember the last time I wanted to look at it. My friend Tamar picked up a few of the ones that were published after Michael Jackson's death with him onb the cover and believe it or not people actually bid on those things.
I wonder how they felt when they actually looked through it and saw what they had just spent their money on.
I had an experience recently in a Beverly Hills plastic surgery center. Look for the blog here called While In A Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Center-Creative Writing and Love of Music:
www.myspace.com/370392338
I'm guessing it's not aimed at the teen market.
WV: labigrat = a lab rat with an attitude
Is it raining in LA?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8487473.stm
WV: gattle = what a Gatling gun does.
Ken, thank you for serendipitously providing perhaps the one opportunity in which it would not be inappropriate to share the email inquiry I received Thursday night from Yale Medical School that arrived here indirectly via your “I am not a douchebag” blog. of two years ago. Along with the reply I sent.
Honest. As you will see, as an additional bonus, it also provides what is likely a welcome addition to your unsurpassed collection of oddball museum experiences.
Inquiry received from Kelly, Yale Medical School, Thursday Jan. 28, 2010
Hi,
I know this is going to sound totally bizarre, so I apologize for that in advance. I just read a comment that you posted on a blog in Dec. 2008 about working for the Seamless Rubber Co. in New Haven when you were younger (: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-am-not-douchbag.html -- the things google will dig up!) I am a Yale PhD student in history of medicine and I'm currently working on a project about the history of the menstrual cup. There was once a feminine hygiene product called the Tassette or Tassaway, from a company called Tassette, Inc, which was made at Seamless Rubber. It was in production from the late 50s to the 70s and possibly later. I am trying to learn more about its manufacture, so I am starting with Seamless Rubber since it was right here in New Haven. Do you happen to remember encountering anything remotely related to my project? Or know of anyone who would? I know this is a long shot, but I am a bit desperate for leads. My next stop is the New Haven historical society - hopefully they have some sort of archival info.
thanks,
Kelly
My reply to Kelly last night
Congratulations on one of the more (toxically?) shocking inquiries of the week. I apologize for only now going through my email. I guess your google experience with Ken Levine’s blog confirms one of my greatest fears – everything really does go down on one’s dreaded “permanent record.” Congratulations on also further tracking me down, I assume through the Daily Kos link. I believe it’s only the second time that’s happened – and hopefully the first that will not necessitate any kind of a restraining order :)
Having become cup curious, I also feel confident in saying that, without your inquiry, the likelihood that I would ever have introduced myself to anything called the Museum of Menstruation http://www.mum.org/CupTaset.htm would have been something like -.999% (+-3 margin of error). But from that site, I gathered that the discontinuation of the product in question at Seamless Rubber occurred in 1963 -- one or two years prior to my brief summer tenure.
Maybe it’s the old reporter in me, and please forgive if you’ve already considered this, but I had only one other idea from the above "museum link." It mentioned the Tassette was developed and promoted in the early 60s by Robert P. Oreck, whose family was heavily involved in the project and whose brother Marshall was gm of a “vacuum cleaner” distribution company. (The metaphorical possibilities of that being only approached by the story of the Little Dutch Boy and the fact that the last place the Tassette may have been commercially available was Holland.)
Perhaps you can investigate whether David Oreck, the former CEO of the Oreck Vacuum Cleaner company who still appears in all of their TV commercials, and is apparently in his late 80s might be another brother or relative. I believe the company is located in Tennessee and it looks like his son Tom may be their current chairman. Their PR or communications department might be a good start.
I take it that the LA Weekly is an alternative paper? Even here in Cleveland, the ads in the alternative weekly are unlike anything you'd see in more mainstream Plain Dealer.
Hey Ken - just a quick thanks for doing a little houskeeping to remove the garbage from the comments section of a certain recent post. The degree to which some of the comments had begun to get personal and very offensive was troubling. I was going to email you to give you a heads-up abouit how the comments section was blowing up ... but you seem to have removed any info you formerly had here that allowed us to directly email you. So I'm glad that you scoped it out on ypur own; Douglas and several others (including yourself) certainly don't deserve thelack of respect and the personal attacks that were being leveled.
Anyhow - thanks for blogging and for keeping this a more or less civil place to hang out! - Ruth (aka "45 is the new 30" - writing this via B'berry and don't know if I can fill in my user name)
> Or, you can spend your lunch
> hour getting a dental implant
> for only $699 thanks to Meir
> Agaki, D.D.S. Before you say
> no just remember this: He's a
> UCLA graduate.
I would speculate that Dr. Agaki specializes in day-player actors who have broken a tooth the afternoon before The Big Audition, or worse, the afternoon before they have to be in make-up at five o'clock the next morning to go on-set at six or risk never getting cast again because they had to beg out on short notice.
Kirk Jusko:
Yes, the L. A. Weekly is an alternative weekly, owned now by the same merged national chain of alternative give-away newspapers as the Village Voice, the Riverfront Times here in St. Louis, and a dozen or more other cities.
They used to be quirky local papers with local ownership, local music, theatre, and restaurant reviewers, and locally selected alternative cartoonists. They now all are dulled down, with the same physical formats, same reviewers for national acts, reduced-quality local writing where they can't avoid it, and same kinds of ads, as well as having dropped all their cartoons, leaving people like Tom Tomorrow scrambling to keep their financial lives intact.
It's a damned shame.
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