Welfare Cheat (cartoon) – Cremains Mistaken for Food Ingredient (1860s) – False Eyelashes Mistaken for Insect

Warren Emery (writer), Ray Billingsley (artist), “Everyday Criminals Who Never Get to Be Punished.” Crazy #53, August 1979, p. 41. “The guy who drives an expensive new car to the welfare office to pick up his check every week.”

=====
During the early debate over cremation in America, there was, in the mind of at least one concerned person, the idea that human ashes might be mistaken for a powdered food ingredient. The contemporary legends came later.

Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 76. “One female critic, noting that arsenic was sometimes mistaken for baking powder, wondered what was to prevent ashes kept at home from being mixed with buckwheat flour.” [Mrs. P.T. Lamb, “Disapproves Cremation,” Detroit Commercial Advertiser.]

Prothero doesn’t provide the date for his source. The weekly Advertiser was published from 1861 to 1867; it appears that it has yet to be digitized. 

=====

[Proto-legend: Never go to bed still wearing your false eyelashes. I knew a woman who did and while she slept a venomous spider attacked her eyelashes, mistaking them for prey.]

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/frog-tales-over-easy-20211231-p59l29.html

The Age [Melbourne], 2 January 2022

Column 8

At a recent dinner party attended by John Swanton of Coogee, one of the other guests related a cautionary tale for anyone regularly making use of false eyelashes. It started innocently enough, a 19-year-old daughter running late for work desperately searching for her false eyelashes, sure that she had left them on her bedside table when she took them off the night before, and her mum volunteering to help her look for them. “They searched high and low until Mum found them under her bed, being attacked by a large huntsman spider.” Not creepy enough? Imagine if that spider had seen them moving when still attached to the eyelids and decided to launch an attack.

[On false eyelashes mistaken for insects, see Art Linkletter, Oops! or, Life’s Awful Moments (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967), 62; Jay David, ed., Sex and the Single Stewardess: The Uncensored Memoirs of Stews, Crews and Passengers (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), 146-7; Dave Berg, “The Lighter Side of…”, Mad magazine #267, December 1986, 27.]