Life, 1904-12-15 · page 27 of 44
Life — December 15, 1904 — page 27: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Main Cartoon (Top):** Shows Harvard's 1909 football team as caricatured figures wearing "H" jerseys. The crude, exaggerated facial features appear to employ racial stereotyping common to early 1900s satirical illustration—a troubling historical norm. The satire likely mocks the team's performance that season or comments on collegiate athletics culture. **Text Content:** Two separate pieces: 1. **"Too Much"**: A humorous complaint about excessive advertising in subway stations ("ad-mosphere"). 2. **"The Curse of Calendars"** by Agnes Repplier: Social satire targeting the commercialization of calendars. The author critiques how novelty calendars—decorated with dogs, children, hunting themes, church photographs—have become ubiquitous gifts despite serving no practical purpose beyond showing dates. She particularly mocks women earning money by photographing churches and selling calendar-adorned versions, calling it shameless while noting the congregation still bought them. **Modern Relevance:** This satirizes consumer culture excess and gift-giving obligations—concerns that resonate today with holiday commercialization complaints.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
HARVARD'S Too Much. LIKE hot air in winter time And ozone when it’s clear, But in the Subway I don’t care Much for the ad-mosphere. The Curse of Calendars. T was a melancholy day for us when the artistic possibilities of the calendar first dawned upon the commercial mind. We can all of us look back upon a happy time when a calendar was a utility, and nothing more. One ‘or two sufficed to carry us cheerily through the year, and these were of an unvarnished simplicity befitting their vocation in life. Now the average Christian, receives between the asth of December and the 1st of January a dozen, perhaps a score of brilliant and bulky wall-decorations, which all propose to record the flight of time, A really popular person, with a large circle of affectionate but not ex- travagant friends, could paper his rooms with calendars, and then go away and live else- where so as to avoid looking at them, He has pictures of dogs, of cats, of frowzy girls, of sweet little children, of lovers, jockeys, FOOTRALL EL. N OF 1909, UNDER PRESID angels, rough-riders, and the local habitations of poets, And the sole excuse for this griev- ous superfluity is his supposed need of ascer- taining the day of the month every time he lifts his wearied eyes. A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted each successive year in an exhaustive study of the meretricious. There are always “ novelties” in the market. A green cardboard with two crossed corn-cob pipes which can't be smoked, a corn-cob match-safe which won't hold matches, and a calendar pasted in the corner. A happy combination of silver-gilt stirrups, miniature hunting crop, and acalendar, Per- petual calendars, which impose upon us the onerous duty of pulling bits of ribbon up and down, Picture frames, in which calendars are laboriously inserted. Who can possibly want these accumulated horrors ? A correspondent of The Ladies’ Home Journal advises girls “who wish to earn a little money" to take photographs of the churches they attend, mount them upon colored cardboard, attach a calendar to each, and sell them to suffering members of the congregation. She confesses that (although apparently a professing Chris- tian) she has herself done this shameless LT, OF HARVARD, thing. She says the congregation bought the calendars. Yet there are those who claim that the days of religious persecution are over. Agnes Repplier. “1 GUESS THIS MACHINE A CENTIPEDE !” WAS BUILT FOR comicbooks.com