This semester I’m working as a teaching assistant for a course called “Advertising: The Birth of a 20th Century Belief System.” The course is totally great so far and I feel especially fortunate to get to work with a really outstanding course director. Plus, when people ask me what I’m teaching this year I get to make jokes like, “basically, for my two hours of prep each week I practice talking like Terry O’Reilly.”
What I actually do in my prep time is look through a lot of historical advertising databases, which is how I stumbled across this gem:
Apparently kerosene flame guns are still used (albeit not commonly) in gardening contexts to kill weeds without chemicals, especially in the U.K. But I like the idea that some marketing team thought them the ideal snow removal tool for the independent woman who does not care for shoveling.