Infomaniac Monthly, November 1950

The origins of Infomaniac Monthly (The Magazine for Bitches who need to know on a need to know basis) are murky, but the "coded" text, for those who didn’t need to know it, was perplexing, to say the least. It’s publisher was a real kitten with a whip who went by the name “Mistress MJ”. Still it was one of the must reads in Ottawa by the territorial government, and said Queen Mary found its contents very subversive - yet she claimed she only read it for the coupons.

Every November the magazine held a contest and gave away either a McLaughlin Buick or a Meteor Niagara (later a LeMoyne). You know, those folks in Manitoba really love their LeMoynes. The only time the contest backfired was November of 1959 when the faithful readership almost rioted when the car give-a-way was a basic Frontenac sedan. Really!

Like all trends, the magazine got popular in the lower forty-eight when husband’s began using the excuse that they “had to cross the Ambassador to get a copy of Infomaniac.” When what they were really up to was visiting the titty bars in Windsor for a show and a quickie lap dance before heading home, the copy of Infomaniac covering their stained trousers.

It reached its frenzied peak in 1970, when the American talk show (of the same name) was hosted by David Suskind, and he invented Maria Muldare to “feltch her violin,” and put on a show for the audience.  After that elephant sat down in the living rooms of middle America, you could hear a pin drop.  Now that the lid was off the box, and Pandora (and society, too) ran amok in its efforts to find a dictionary and look it up, and break the code.  "Feltch.  That's a funny word, isn't Andy," Aunt Bea was heard to say in an episode of the Andy Griffith Show.

Oddly, there was no definition for the word until a minister's housewife in the Quad Cities caught "feltching that chocolate pudding out of the container"  at a church function.  How unhygienic is that?  Dessert?  I'll pass.

Today, Infomaniac is a blog - electronic media media, they call it.  New fangled like dental floss and stuff like that.  And at it's essence, its back to being what it was meant to be - the place where Bitches who need to know on a need to know basis find out what it is that they to know.