Vintage Christmas

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56916-xmas.jpg

Probably hard to tell at this size, but this Claremont banner reproduces a Christmas-themed citrus crate label that reads “College Heights Orange Association.” This would date to Claremont’s citrus past. A nice touch. Seen at the Metrolink station.

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  • Allan

    Posting prior to my awesome gig as a basement troll…

    For a bit more detailed image of the label:
    http://content.ci.pomona.ca.us/u?/Labels,1690

    Gifts in the bag include dolls, er, “action figures”, a horse, a cannon, and a couple of vuvuzelas. A vuvuzela’s purpose is to make noise. A cannon, on the other hand, considers noise as an inconvenient byproduct. I guess the kid who got the cannon can use it on the kids who got vuvuzelas. Maybe Kringle isn’t so wholesome after all.

    Still waiting on that Walter WA 2000, Klaus!

    Here’s another Claremont label that can fit under “Greetings of the Season”
    http://content.ci.pomona.ca.us/u?/Labels,425

    [I think of you more as a basement elf, Allan, if that's any consolation. -- DA]

  • Bob House

    Off Topic: David, What do you think is the deal with the nonsensical spam messages related to various kinds of loans that periodically pop up as post comments? Surely it can’t be from anybody who thinks they will generate business? They’re so unintelligible that they seem like some sort of coded messages like the mysterious short wave radio stations that continously broadcast strings of numbers and letters. Conspiracy?

    [A lot of them seem to come from English-challenged typists overseas. I delete them when I check in here (I killed 5 this morning, an unusually high number) to keep them from polluting the atmosphere. I don't see how they'd fool anyone. It's interesting, too, how they pop up on very old, random posts. -- DA]

  • Allan

    Addressing Bob House’s question — could be a few things.

    1) It could actually be selling something on the other end.

    2) It’s generated from an infected machine or server whose sole purpose is to infect more computers to create a larger zombie “bot-net” able to do the bidding of whoever controls it. Thousands of remote-controlled computers can be valuable in the black market.

    3) It’s a phishing scam — cast a wide enough net and it’s bound to catch enough people willing to give out their personal information. A large enough number of those and it’s once again currency in the black market.

    4) It’s an old trick to try and get better positioning on search-engine results. I’m not sure how it has evolved since, but Google’s pagerank system gave a site more “weight” if it is linked to by others. It may be part of the seedier methods of ‘search engine optimization.’

    My wordpress ‘blog’ gets hit with spam posts but has a spam-filter (Akismet) that keeps the suspect posts from going public without my approval.

    Then again my blog posts are usually “so unintelligible that they seem like some sort of coded messages like the mysterious short wave radio stations that continously broadcast strings of numbers and letters.” :)

    [This blog originally required my approval for all comments and that bogged things down on my end. Once the gates were open, I was inundated by spam. Then we went to the type-in-a-code system, which shut down the spam. But a few hardy messages still make it through. Thanks for the technical explanations. The "phishing" one was fairly obvious but the others had never occurred to me. -- DA]

  • Fred Henderson

    Hi Dave:

    Love all the old crate labels. My parents both worked for Cucamonga Mesa Growers (among others) and told us how they tossed those labels into the trash by the tens of thousands — Cucamonga Mesa Growers, Excel, Blue Goose, Upland Lemon Growers, Old Baldy, and so many others.

    I am a bit confused about what Bob and Allen are saying. When translated into the English language, save me a copy.

    Fred Henderson

    [What they're referring to is only obvious to the people who obsessively read the "Recent Comments" section...sometimes mortgage loans and other such comments show up there, contributed by spammers, before I can kill them out. -- DA]