Category Archives: Popular Culture

Business, Humor, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Hisamitsu

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For years, I’d been wondering what that little phrase was that you hear women sing at the end of commercials for Salonpas pain reliever. I did eventually manage to track it down. It sounds like “Sammy too,” but it’s actually the manufacturer with the name of the title of this post (obviously Japanese). I would have thought it was pronounced HIsaMITsu, but apparently it’s HiSAMItsu .

Anyway, they must have finally gotten the message from viewers that it was a head scratcher, so for the first time this morning, I saw an ad in which they actually showed the word at the end. It’s funny that they’d been singing it for all these years with complete ineffectiveness at conveying what it was.

[Update later afternoon]

Apparently I misspelled it: It’s Hisamitsu.

History, Popular Culture

Bob Newhart

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RIP. He was a very funny guy, with a deadpan delivery that couldn’t be beat. A great straight man as well. And not just visually. He was famous for his hilarious phone calls, in which you only heard his side. We had one of his albums when I was a kid in the 60s. It was called “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Here’s an example:

It’s funny, but I recently saw a rerun of the 80s show, and I’ve had the theme song (which was by Henry Mancini!) getting stuck in my head periodically since. The last episode might have been one of the most brilliant endings of any television series, if you were a fan of the show in the seventies. It was part of one of the best Saturday-night prime-time comedy lineups in television history, with All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore. Oh, and Mash.

History, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

World’s Fairs

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Reflections from Lileks.

We went to New York in 1965 and Montreal in 1967. I remember on the way back from the latter we had to pull over and duck in a ditch for a tornado between Port Huron and Flint. New York had some things that later went to Disneyland, including the wretched “It’s A Small World.

I also went to Vancouver in the 80s, but don’t recall the year. I was particularly amused by the Romanian Pavilion (this was before the fall of the communists) that claimed they’d invented the airplane in 1906.