New Year, New Pic!

[Jamie123]

My first post of the year so Happy New Year!

And what better time to have a new profile pic?

We all know how impressed women are by acts of random violence (be they at the beach, the fairground or on the dance floor) so this one's a tribute to the great Charles Atlas, champion body-builder and exploiter of the male inferiority complex.

Though the dude himself died in 1972, his ads continued to appear in boys' comics well into the late '70s. If you're male and over 50 you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, but for the benefit of anyone else:

So there you have it! Our hero goes from kicking chairs, upsetting table-lamps and knocking pictures crooked to some "real" aggro - and gets the girl to boot! How could any 11-year-old resist? So I "gambled the stamp" back in 76, fully expecting to receive a mobile gym/magic muscle potion by return of post. What I actually got was a glossy (though blurrily printed) brown-and-white booklet containing pictures of muscular men and short articles on how puny males don't deserve to exist and how it's every man's duty to send £2.50 (I guess around $50 in modern US money) to Charles Atlas for his "Dynamic Tension" course.

My father caught me reading it, had a good laugh, and assured me that Charles Atlas was dead. "I remember seeing Charles Atlas on TV," he said. "He was a great big fat man. That's what happens to muscular men when they get older you know. It all turns to fat!"

Well as you can imagine, I was devastated. If Charles Atlas was dead, who had placed the ad? Who would dare masquerade as the godlike man who turned "Mac" into a jerk-thumping babe-magnet?

Common sense prevailed in the end and "Charles Atlas" never got a penny out of me. But I've nevertheless often wondered; does Dynamic Tension (which as far as I can tell is being your own resistance machine) actually work? 

Edited January 16, 2019 by Jamie123