In this 1975 fad, what object was marketed like a live pet, in custom cardboard boxes, complete with straw and breathing holes, and a 32-page official training manual?
Pet Rock is a collectible toy made in 1975 by advertising executive Gary Dahl. Pet Rocks are smooth stones from Mexico's Rosarito Beach. They were marketed like live pets, in custom cardboard boxes, complete with straw and breathing holes. The fad lasted about six months, ending after a short increase in sales during the Christmas season of December 1975. Although by February 1976 they were discounted due to lower sales, Dahl sold over 1 million Pet Rocks for $4 each, and became a millionaire.
Dahl's biggest expense was the die-cutting and manufacture of the boxes. The rocks only cost one cent each, and the straw was nearly free. For the initial run of booklets, Dahl had a printing job for a client, and "tacked" the pet rock booklet onto the main job. This resulted in a batch requiring only a cut and trim, at almost no cost to him.
A 32-page official training manual titled The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock was included, with instructions on how to properly raise and care for one's new Pet Rock (notably lacking instructions for feeding, bathing, and so on). The instruction manual contained gags, puns and jokes, and listed several commands that could be taught to the new pet. While "sit" and "stay" were effortless to accomplish, "roll over" usually required a little extra help from the trainer. "Come," "stand" and "shake hands" were found to be near-impossible to teach; however, "attack" was fairly simple (also with some additional help from the owner's force)
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Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Pet Rock.
Randall wrote:
Pet Rocks
Alan J answered:
Pet Rock.
mj said:
They were very easy to train
Stay and play dead were especially easy. They didn't leave "presents" on
the carpet. Feeding was cheap. Reproduction was facilitated by a sharp
blow from a hammer. The Pet Rock was a faithful companion.
Dave responded:
Pet Rock. I didn't have one but I think that is the answer. And Wikipedia says I'm correct. I guess in 1975 I had too much going on with my life (work, college and occasional sleep) to pay any attention to adopting any pet- much less a stupid freakin' rock. A lot of drug abuse back then, which might explain why anybody would buy one. The fad lasted about 6 months and made the clown who promoted pet rocks a millionaire.
zorch replied:
The Pet Rock.
Cal in Vermont wrote:
These would be pet rocks. Five (5) million of them were sold (!) for $3.95 each in six months. I bet this was the work of a hippie pot smoker, because who else would come up with something like this, in hopes of getting rich quick, which he surely did. I also bet it took him a week to quit laughing and get busy.
Jacqueline said:
I never had one, but is it the pet Rock?
Mac Mac replied:
Pet Rock. Still have mine, he ran away, but the never Trump sign in my window brought him home in just a few days.
Jon L responded:
Pet Rock
Roy, still isolating in Tyler, TX wrote:
Original Pet Rock approved by the creator Gary Dahl in the 1970s, was the perfect fun novelty gift for retired parents or kids Perfect desk pet and friend that will be your "ROCK" through life's hardest moments 100% rock solid guarantee! I imagine he made a bundle of dough off this thing.
David of Moon Valley said:
just guessing
...but i'm going with that whole Pet Rock thing....(there's one hole i gratefully avoided falling into...sheesh...)
Jim from CA, retired to ID, answered:
Owned one.....Pet Rock
Stephen F responded:
Pet Rock
Micki replied:
Pet Rock. Did anyone actually buy one?
Harry M. said:
Pet Rock
Deborah, the Master Gardener, wrote:
I'm going with a WAG: Pet rock. Hard pass.
Lovely spring weather, still, with some warming up over the weekend. I can't believe we're already at Memorial Day weekend. What happened to March? April? #quarantinebrain
John I from Hawai`i says,
Pet Rock
Dave in Tucson answered:
Sounds like you're describing a Pet Rock.
Billy in Cypress U$A replied:
I first thought of "Chia pet", but then remembered the "Pet Rock" which started the whole "Phony Pet" craze. Now, we have a "Pet POTUS" marketing campaign instead. It comes in a life-size White House filled with orange shit and topped by yellow hair, but it has a very high price tag and only maga-idiots are buying it on the installment plan of all their money and lives for eternity.
Daniel in The City responded:
Pet Rocks
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BttbBob has returned to semi-retired status.
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NASA just named a powerful new space telescope for the woman who masterminded the existence of such observatories in the first place.
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman spent 21 years at NASA developing and launching space-based observatories that studied the Sun, deep space, and Earth's atmosphere. She most famously worked to develop the concepts behind the Hubble Space Telescope, which just spent its 30th year in orbit.
Roman earned the nickname "mother of Hubble" for her role in pushing for that telescope. When it launched in 1990, Hubble became the first of NASA's "great observatories," which are designed to push the limits of human knowledge about the cosmos.
Roman also served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, making her the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency. She died in 2018.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will hunt for new planets and dark energy
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Krasinski aboard to executive produce. He will no longer host the show but will be involved on-air in some capacity, according to Deadline sources.
The series, created to spread some cheer amid the pandemic and the nation's stay-at-home orders, won a Special Achievement Webby Award earlier this week.
Krasinski created the SGN, which he produced with his Sunday Night banner partner Allyson Seeger. It launched March 30 on YouTube. Recording in front of a colourful 'SGN' sign - "my daughter's made it," he told debut guest Steve Carell - Krasinski informed viewers he was attempting to inject optimism into the current climate with a show dedicated entirely to positive news stories.
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Although this elephant - the Eurasian straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) - likely died of old age, meat-eaters promptly devoured it; bite marks on its bones suggest that carnivores feasted on the dead beast, and flint flakes and bone tools found near the elephant indicate that humans scavenged whatever was left, the researchers said.
"The Stone Age hunters probably cut meat, tendons and fat from the carcass," project researcher Jordi Serangeli, head of the excavation in Schöningen, said in a statement.
Researchers have found the remains of at least 10 elephants dating to the Lower Paleolithic - also known as the Old Stone Age (about 3 million to 300,000 years ago) - over the past several years at Schöningen. But this new find is by far the most complete. The remains include 7.5-foot-long (2.3 meters) tusks - which are 125% longer than the average 6-foot-long (1.8 m) tusk of a modern African elephant, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. The researchers also found the complete lower jaw, numerous vertebrae and ribs, large bones from three of its four legs and all five of its delicate hyoid bones, which are found in the neck and help support the tongue and voice box.
This P. antiquus elephant had a shoulder height of about 10.5 feet (3.2 m) and would have weighed about 7.5 tons (6.8 metric tons). "It was therefore larger than today's African elephant cows," Verheijen said.
When their pollen supply runs short, bumblebees bore tiny half-moon-shaped holes in the leaves of flowering plants, causing blooms to appear weeks ahead of schedule.
Bee-bitten plants bear flowers about two weeks to a month sooner than untouched plants, according to a new study, published today (May 21) in the journal Science. Researchers attempted to recreate these bee-bite patterns using metal forceps and a razor, but even then, the damage inflicted by bees boosted flower production more effectively than the scientists could; bee-bitten plants bloomed eight to 25 days before the artificially damaged ones did, depending on the plant species.
Some plant species flower early in response to drought, or in response to infections caused by certain pathogens, but few studies have explored how animal behaviors might prompt plants to bloom early, said study author Mark Mescher, a professor of environmental systems science at ETH Zürich. Mescher and his coauthor Consuelo De Moraes, a professor of biocommunication and ecology at ETH Zürich, spotted bumblebees munching on leaves during an unrelated experiment, and they wondered why.
In early laboratory experiments, buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) appeared to ramp up this biting behavior when deprived of pollen, a key food source for both bee larvae and the worker bees themselves, the authors noted. To test the hypothesis, the team deprived one group of worker bees of pollen for three days, while a different group was provided "abundant pollen resources." When released into enclosures full of flowerless tomato and black mustard plants, the deprived bees began nibbling at the leaves with gusto. The satiated group, in contrast, inflicted only minor amounts of leaf damage.
Edvard Munch's The Scream is one of the most iconic paintings of the modern era, inspiring silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol, the killer's mask in the 1996 film Scream, and the appearance of an alien race known as The Silence in Doctor Who, among other pop culture tributes. But the canvas is showing alarming signs of degradation. That damage is not the result of exposure to light, but humidity-specifically, from the breath of museum visitors, perhaps as they lean in to take a closer look at the master's brushstrokes. That's the conclusion of a new study in the journal Science Advances by an international team of scientists hailing from Belgium, Italy, the US, and Brazil.
There are actually several versions of The Scream, each unique: two paintings-one painted in 1893, and another version painted around 1910-plus two pastels, a number of lithographic prints, and a handful of drawings and sketches. The inspiration for the painting was a particularly spectacular sunset that the artist witnessed while out for a walk. Munch noted the incident in a January 22, 1892 diary entry:
One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord-the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.
Some astronomers believe this sunset was likely an after-effect of the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia; reports of similarly intense sunsets were made in several parts of the Western Hemisphere during several months in 1883 and 1884. Other scholars dismiss this notion, arguing that Munch was not known for painting literal renderings of things he had seen. An alternative explanation is that the red skies were the result of nacreous clouds common to that particular latitude. But the spot where Munch most likely witnessed the sunset has been identified: a road overlooking Oslo from the hill of Ekeberg.
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