Say Our Name, Say Our Name

It's been brought to our attention more than once that the vast majority of the world neither speaks Old High German nor watched Deadwood, and therefore has absolutely no idea how to pronounce our name. Is it huzz ah or huzz uh? Quite honestly, we've been known to pronounce it both ways depending on our mood, but the former elocution is the more correct of the two, if only because 'huzzah' is an exclamation (and exclamations generally encourage a lifting of the voice on the final syllable rather than a lowering). Bored yet? We thought so.

Click here to listen to a stilted, computerized lady voice say huzzah (sans, of course, all requisite emotion).

Dear Readymade: We're Breaking Up

My Dearest Readymade,

I am afraid that our near decade-long romance ends here. When we met back in 2002 at checkout stand no. 7 of The Berkeley Bowl, I found your charms irresistible. Unlike Punk Planet and those other hip, low circulation periodicals that you sat amongst (and that I read feverishly at the store but never purchased), you possessed a certain je ne sais quoi that compelled me to take you home with me month after month. Was it the fact that you took your name from a Duchamp-coined word, or that you were published in Berkeley by two women entrepreneurs, or that I discovered amidst your stylish pages a heady and original mix of DIY projects that I (or my more evolved friends) could recreate after a quick trip to the local recyclery or reuse depot? The answer is 'yes' in every instance. But now, mon cherie, I find you rather dull and unfocused. On one page you're telling me how to enjoy heirloom tomatoes a la Vegetarian Times, and on the next you're showing me pictures of standard-issue 'tiny but trendy' living spaces a la Apartment Therapy. This thematic schizophrenia is still more apparent in the insipid blog tutorials that you've begun to merely abstract and republish a la Reader's Digest. (That you would actually waste paper to rehearse a blog post on DIY haircuts in which the most sage advice is to 'pay careful attention at your next professional haircut' and then to 'watch haircutting tutorials on YouTube' is really beyond me.) I'm also concerned that you've become something of a handmaiden for Etsy, which I love, but which I get for free on my computer.

I know that you are, in part, a victim of your own success, dear Readymade. Because of you, more people are doing-it-themselves--an ethos that, thanks to the Internet, now includes publishing, too. Consequently, I suspect that it's somewhat difficult to find contributers who'd prefer the stability of print publicity to the ease and accessibility of push-button publishing. I also understand that the 2009 relocation of your offices from Berkeley to Des Moines, IA completely up-ended your staff, and that producing a decidedly West Coast publication in the Middle West must be...problematic. (As a one-time Berkeley-to-Iowa transplant, I understand this more than you will ever know.)

I want you to know that I don't fault you, Readymade, and that I will cherish the fine years we spent together, you and me. I wish you the best, and hope that you will succeed among your new audience of subscribers, which, tellingly, includes my mother.

Always,

Team Huzzah!

She'll Get You There

Delighted, I suppose, not to live in a time when airlines draft beguiling women to convince a primarily male clientele of the safety and comfort of their flying death tubes. Not naive enough, however, to think that the image of 'woman as vessel (of sexual pleasure for men and maternal containment for mankind)' has lost--or will lose--its symbolic currency.

Case in point:

Blog Design For All: Easy Clickable Images

In this, the inaugural tutorial of our new Blog Design For All! series, we show you a quick and dirty method for making your images clickable (like the one above) to an outbound link. We'll also demonstrate how to tag your clickable image with simple HTML markup language so that the user sees a small bit of text near the cursor when she mouses over it. Although we'll be illustrating these techniques within the context of the Blogger platform, it should be noted that they may be incorporated into any website and/or free blogging site like Wordpress. Now, on with the show!

Step 1: Upload your image (already sized to fit the allotted space on your blog, preferably) to a free photo hosting site like Flickr.

Step 2: In your Flickr photostream, find and select your recently-uploaded photo by clicking on it. Next, click on the 'Share this' drop-down menu and select the 'Grab HTML' option. In the new drop-down menu that appears underneath the HTML code, select the desired image size (i.e., the size you originally uploaded) and copy all of the HTML code that appears in the window above the size menu drop-down.

Step 3: In your Blogger publishing window, select the 'Edit Html' tab and paste the HTML you just copied on Flickr into the window. Click on the 'Compose' tab to check that the photo appears in the proper place among the other elements on the page.

Step 4: Back in the Blogger 'Edit Html' window, find the code you just inserted and replace the Flickr url after a href= with the url of the webpage that you'd like your image to point to. In the highlighted example above, http://www.flickr.com/photos... has been replaced with http://huzzahvintage.com/product... so that users are now taken to the product page for the pictured jacket instead of the Flickr page on which the image is hosted. Voila! You're done.

Extra Credit: Change the text inside the quotation marks after title= to whatever you like (a description of the image, special promo code details, etc.). Now, when the user mouses-over the image, she will see your special message and not the Flickr-generated title.

Extra Extra Credit: If you don't want users to leave your blog entirely, and would prefer, instead, that a new browser window open up upon click, simply add the tag target="_blank" after the title tag.

The end result:

* Next week we'll show you how to make a more stylized series of clickable images, like those featured in this post.

Dear Golden Vintage Giveaway Winner!

Congratulations to anastasiac, comment contributer no. 10 in last week's Dear Golden Vintage Giveaway! Thanks to Lauren of Dear Golden Vintage and to all those who entered, tweeted and more generally spread the word across this great system of tubes called the 'Internet.'

Vintage Craigslist Howler

FLAGGED!!! Clearly belongs in misc romance category.

♥ Vintage Clothing ♥

Scrunchable

Top four things to do with your $10 neon green scrunchie after Advertising tricked you into buying it:

4. Wipe the wet hot tears of regret from your eyes

3. Start a LOLROTFLMFAO time capsule to be buried in McCarren Park

2. Wear it around your wrist as a constant reminder of your consumptive failures

1. Your dishes

Blog Design For All

Exactly one year ago this week we began blogging with little direction and even less technical knowledge of this series of tubes known as 'the Internet'. We were so daft, in fact, that we understood a widget only as a unit of production and javascript only as the typeface on a bag of coffee. After 52 weeks and much googling, though, we've accumulated quite a bag of programming and design tricks, and we've recently begun to wonder if perhaps our readers wouldn't be interested in learning how to implement some of them on their own sites? From simple operations like removing the thin, branded Blogger banner from the top of your blog to more complex hacks like tracking outbound links to sites like your Twitter account and your sponsors' websites, we can help pull back the proverbial curtain standing between you and all those zexy blogs you've been swooning over.

SO, leave us a note about what trick(s) you'd like revealed, and, assuming there's enough interest (and we're fluent), we'll start spilling the beans in a weekly tutorial geared explicitly toward you, Gentle Reader of the Huzzah! logbook.

Dear Golden Vintage Giveaway!

********************************************************* THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED! Please see our current giveaway HERE!

SHAZAM! This week's giveaway comes to us courtesy of Lauren of Dear Golden Vintage, who's offering one lucky reader the fantastically-graphic, slim-fit vintage top pictured above. The dark blue and white poly-knit top features a zipper at the back neck and measures 32"-34" across the bust, 14" across the shoulders, 24" down the sleeve and 22" in length total. It would best fit a small, and makes a killer one-of-a-kind gift for those 'minor celebrities' in your life (me thinks).

To Enter: Simply visit the Dear Golden Vintage shop and leave a comment (along with

your email address so that we may contact you in the event that you win) before Sunday,

July 25 at 10:00 p.m. PST. Good Luck!

For up to 3 additional entries & opportunities to win:

+ Tweet about the giveaway & leave one additional comment

+ Follow the Dear Golden Vintage Blog & leave one additional comment

+ Follow this blog via either Google Reader or Bloglovin' & leave one additional comment

(No purchase necessary to win. This giveaway contest is open to readers worldwide. One winner will be selected from among the qualifying entries at random by Huzzah! Vintage at the close of the giveaway on Sunday, July 25 at 10:00 p.m. PST.)

10-Second DIY Petticoat Chandelier

We're not convinced that a romantic petticoat chandelier works in our spare, mid-century modern-ish living room, and, yes, we just slipped a probably-flammable vintage petticoat over a hot arc lamp in a lazy attempt to re-create the effect, but we really like the idea and imagine that it would look swell in the right room, with the right execution.

Honestly, Petticoat Chandelier, it's not you, it's us.

Recent Purchases That We Have Not Regretted

:: Vintage Dress 1, 2, 3 (thrifted), 4

:: Throw Pillow

:: Ceramic Mug (thrifted)

:: Wooden Bowling Pin (thrifted)

:: Map Coasters

A Video Of My Dog Being Funnier Than Chelsea Handler

Sassy has recently mastered what can only be described as a 'courtesy pee,' or, a negligible release of urine designed to legitimize an otherwise inessential trip outside to sniff around and look at shadows. This is a short video of the sonic prod she's crafted in association with her pee racket.

My Parents Are Awesome

...because they filled out my cherished Cabbage Patch Kid adoption certificate with the ridiculous-sowhatwhocares-she-can't-read-anyway names "Bill Stuff" and "Sweaty Betty." Can't blame 'em for thinking I'd manage to destroy the paper long before I'd master phonics, I suppose.

Bravo Appreciates Art Like It's 1984!

While I never expected Bravo's newest competition reality show, Work of Art, to be anything more than an Andy Cohen-approved showcase of lame pop culture references and unfounded smugness, I was brought to uproarious laughter last week when resident sorority girl-cum-artisté Jaclyn found herself swimming in a sea of praise from the hackneyed committee of NYC art wonk judges. In her absurdly cliched collection of photographs of anonymous men looking at her bronzed, tumid fun sacks as they walked past her on the street, the judges found an 'impressive' and 'successful' effort to subvert the so-called 'male gaze'--a chestnut of an idea about as interesting and revolutionary to artists and intellectuals as Myspace is to teenagers. Perhaps next week she will subvert capitalism by setting fire to dollar bills taped to an Audi? Viva la revolucion, Bravo.

(Please find below selections from my current fine art wishlist ~ in case you're wondering what it takes, creatively, to please an old crank like me.)

When Your "Personal Massager" Was Your Doctor

We read hundreds of books during graduate school, but none stuck with us quite as much as Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (2001). We recently flipped through it again, and had a nice chuckle at the thought of 'hysterical' (read: sexually unsatisfied) women achieving great 'relief' from physician-administered 'vibration treatment.' As Maines details, physicians didn't particularly like to offer this very popular therapy (knowing, presumably, the very carnal source of their patients' relief), so it was with much joy that they began recommending handheld 'personal massagers' upon their appearance in the early 1910s. Below are two images and an excerpt from a 1908 physician's manual on vibration therapy, or what Maines cheekily calls 'the job nobody wanted.'

Egregious Mad Men History Gaffe

Whoops!: In season 1, episode 6, Joan implies to Peggy that she need not personally thank Don for her new copywriting gig by motioning to her own comely face and remarking, "You know what they say, the medium is the message." A clever reference, for sure, but rather unfortunately anachronistic; they didn't start saying this until four years later, after it was coined by Marshall McLuhan in his renowned 1964 book Understanding Media.

(At last, our advanced degree in American media and culture pays off. Makes the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt totally worth it. Yep.)

Fashionably Narcissistic

At first glance, I thought these clever photo collages by Felice Fawn were actual screen-printed garments. Alas, they are not. Seems you'll still need to go to the county fair to get your vaguely gang-related custom airbrush clothing.

Helmets & Ringlets (Or, "The Future")

In 1939, Life asked Hollywood imagineers to dream up "The Girl of Tomorrow." Quite predictably (the future, after all, always looks the same), they envisioned us wearing "wire eyelashes," "indelible lipstick that lasts two weeks" and tight ringlet hairstyles protected by bulbous celluloid helmets. Instead, of course, we're injecting sausage poison into our frown lines, gluing synthetic hair to our scalps and sewing sacs of salt water into our bosoms--a reality so grotesquely unimaginable, I'm not surprised they missed the mark back in '39.