3 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Mar 2023
    1. Medicine shows became popular after the Civil War when patent medicine salesmen traveled the "kerosene circuit" in rural America. Flourishing until the passage of 1906 Fair Food and Drug Act made them obsolete, medicine shows provided entertainment to attract audiences and then used their intermissions to sell their products.

      This pattern would later be seen in later radio and television when product pitchmen sponsored entertainment in return for commercial time.

      (Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour, "Doctors," February 20, 2008 via http://www.oldhatrecords.com/)

      See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_show


      Also related to tent revival shows which featured music and religion as entertainment and socializing.

      Example in music: Neil Diamond's song: Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show

  3. Aug 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLDF6qZUX0

      The classic Reece's Peanut Butter Cups commercial (circa 1981) in which a boy and a girl run into each other on the street with the following exchange:

      Girl: Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter. Boy: You got peanut butter on my chocolate.

      is a good example of the productive collision of ideas behind the concepts of "ideas have sex" or "combinatorial creativity".