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(CNN)
(Photo: Terry Jones' Medieval Lives)
—>Historians and conservationists have united in Virginia against a common foe: Walmart, which wants to build a 38,000-square-foot Supercenter near near Wilderness Battlefield, a Civil War site and National Park. The groups filed a suit on Wednesday charging local officials with brushing aside concerns about the site when they approved Walmart's plans in August. More »
—>Paul Smith, who lives in San Diego and has a credit score of 751, had his HSBC credit card limit lowered from $7,000 to $1,400 recently for mysterious reasons. He called HSBC to find out why. More »
—>The Consumer Reports Money Adviser has compiled a great list of sites that store your personal information and will provide free copies of their reports to you if you ask. More »
—>Slate has posted a slideshow documenting ads since the 1970s, when corporations starting heavily targeting African-American consumers. Check it out. More »
—>Remember when you could buy barbiturates for the baby? Cover your house with asbestos? Or get heroin from the doctor? Okay, probably not, but thanks to the immortal beauty of advertising, you can take a trip back in time. Here's our pick of some of the most ironic ads in American history.
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—>While perusing old advertising trade journals, I came across this ad for the New Yorker. You win if you can correctly answer what the message is here: New Yorker readers are under-exercised fat cats? That blackface was more common in hotels than we ever thought? That retail stores once secretly conspired with the New Yorker's ad department to divulge customers' sales histories? More »
—>Credit cards weren't always the adorable little pocket debt machines that they are today. They weren't even plastic until AmEx decided to class things up in 1959. Travel back to the good old days when credit cards were a "ticket for anyone to spend freely and decide when was best to pay it back" with this revealing photo set from Slate. More »
—>Robert Duvall, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, is really just not cool with Walmart's plans to build a Supercenter near the site of an important Civil War battle. More »
—>Sorry to disappoint all of you who think that the two-person Segway is the most innovative thing GM has produced in its long history — it seems that the company's most important new idea was consumer credit. More specifically, convincing a nation of thrifty debt-averse tightwads that taking on debt was socially acceptable. Yes, it's true. We weren't always a bunch of debt junkies. More »
—>Last summer, we highlighted an ominous-looking animation that traced the spread of Walmart stores across the American landscape over the past 5 decades. Now the same guy behind that map has put together a new one, this time tracing Target's growth. More »
—>Man, cigarettes were awesome in the past, if these old ads collected by Stanford University are to be believed. They calmed your nerves so you'd stop humming nervously! They soothed your throat! They made you a movie star and helped you capture animals on your big game hunt! We don't know what tobacco was made of before the mid-80s, but no wonder everyone smoked. More »
—>Sometimes gentleness is required of your toddler. Sometimes ill-tempered old folks get too agitated and threaten you with canes. That's why sometimes the best solution is a good old fashioned thorazine pill, or a barbiturate elixir. Weirdomatic has a collection of bizarre ads like these from the past. Our favorite, aside from the drug ads, is the one showing Olympian speed skater Jack Shea taking a break from his skating to enjoy the rejuvenating effects of a Camel cigarette. So that's how Phelps did it. More »
—>The FDIC was created in 1933 by the Glass-Steagall Act, and provides $100,000 of deposit insurance to checking and savings deposits. "Bank panics" used to be fairly common, and the FDIC was intended to instill confidence in the banking system after the Great Depression. The most recent big failure, that of California bank IndyMac, will cost the FDIC between $4 and $8 billion, and they estimate that about $1 billion of IndyMac's deposits are "potentially uninsured," meaning that the depositors had more than $100,000 on deposit. So what does a bank run look like these days? More »
—>Poor Kevin Martin. The Senate is well on its way towards killing his proposal to let newspapers get all freaky and consolidate with television and radio stations. Martin shouldn't be too surprised: this is exactly what happened the last time a FCC Chairman tried to ram media consolidation down our throats. More »
The Boston Globe profiles the last remaining shoe and boot maker in New England, Alden Shoes. The company's classic footwear has been worn by the likes of John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Indiana Jones... and the Massachusetts state troopers. The shoes will set you back about $350-$500 a pair, but they seem like awfully nice people. "Our shoes don't wear out," says Robert Clark, Alden's vice president. [Boston Globe] More »
