*In late 1987, RJR created "Joe Camel" as the mascot for the brand. In 1991, the American Medical Association published a report stating that 5- and 6-year olds could more easily recognize Joe Camel than Mickey Mouse, Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny or even Barbie.This led the association to ask RJR to terminate the Joe Camel campaign. RJR declined, but further appeals followed in 1993 and 1994. On July 10, 1997, the Joe Camel campaign was retired and replaced with a more adult campaign which appealed to the desires of twenty-somethings to meet—or be—beautiful and exotic women in 1930s attire and themes. *Wikipedia
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**Okay. Let's get this porcupine on the street. A race of carrot-topped demigods, known everywhere as Red Beards, appeared at various places in the ancient world, transforming the natives, spurring them to develope highly advanced civilizations in a very short time, leaving behind vast pyramids and other solar/lunar architecture when they suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. That much is fact. It is also historical fact that the Chavin, Mochica, Olmec, Zapotec, and Toltec peoples also vanished abruptly and without explanation. Apparently, the Red Beards had powerful enemies, capable of zapping whole civilizations into other dimensions. If the Red Beards were extraterrestrial, a lunar race dispatched to earth, for whatever reason.. then their enemy would have been a solar society, the blonde ..ruling class. Call them Yellow Beards. When the Yellow Beards learned what the Red Beards were up to on earth, they immediately zapped the people with whom they were conspiring. Poof! Off went the Chavin, next the Mochia, then the Olmec and so forth, transplanted from the universe to the anti-universe, leaving no forwarding address. Friendship with the Red Beards bore a certain liability.
Stuck in the anti-universe, still the Red Beards did not give up. They had faith in the potentiality of earthlings. They beamed their telepathic vectors into earthly dimemsions. Only a few humans responded, and they exclusively redheads.. but the response was far from desirable. Reception of the extra-dimensional transmissions confused them and frequently brought them grief. For example, Vincent van Gogh, the most famous redhead.. took to painting vases, chairs, stars, etc. as if they embodied the life force, which they likely do; as if there were vibratory fields, auras, around them, which there probably are, but everybody thought poor Vincent on the wierd end of the banana.. After several centuries of failures the Red Beards refined their techique. They began to concentrate on a specific redheaded individual.. Thomas Jefferson, an ideal receptor because of his wide-ranging sensibility, to affix a pyramid to the first American paper money issued since the colonial days.
When after a century, that play hadn't turned any big tricks, they beamed to the brain of a redheaded lithographer a more ambitious transmission.
The Red Beards had established a telepathis broadcast path.. that cut directly and deliberately through Washington, D.C., the most important of world capitals. Developement of Camel cigarettes was occurring, fortuitously, within the mainstreams of that channel. In 1913, most smokers rolled their own. Camel was the first cigarette to shoot for national (later, international) distribution. Moreover, R.J. Reynold's recipe for Camels called for a substantial amount of sweetener. Sugar, like lust, accentuates the reddish pigment in the hair and/or freckles of the lunar-oriented people, especially when they're exposed to direct sunlight..
All right. Now we're cooking, now we're dressing this alligator in gold lame'. There was something else about the new cigarette that made its package the ideal medium for a Red Beard communique'..
The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely..
Trnasmitting to the receptive antenna on the red roof of the lithographer, the Red Beards saw to it that palm trees were included on the package.. Satisfied with the placement of the camel and the palm trees, the Red Beards turned their attention to their main concern, the pyramid.. so sucessful was their telepathic prodding of the lithographer that not one but two pyramids appeared on the Camel pack.
Since the fellow was still tuned in, and responding beautifully, thank you, the Red Beards also had him work into the design a naked women, representative of the Moon Goddess, the Great Mother, the feminine principal of creation, growth, change and renewal.. In order not to spoil the composition, she was rendered most subtly on the package, hidden in the yellow and brown coloration in the left forequarter of the dromedary.. As a reminder that the Moon Queen is ever threatened by the Solar King (we witness this cosmic drama monthly as the wanning moon is consumed by the light of the sun), a yellow-maned lion, the ancient and prevalent solar symbol, was also hidden in the body of the camel, above and to the right of the women.
**Tom Robbins from "Still Life With Woodpecker"
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