Not twice ...

Willesden Electricity Department

But at least three times. When the Willesden Electricity Department finally realized that they put out literature that advocated electrocuting people, they cleared up the confusion by adding a picture.

Willesden Electricity Department
"Hey, that's not a vacuum! That's an upright sea bass with a stick in its butt!"

The Willesden Electricity Department really wanted to sell people on the idea that electric appliances would make life easier for women by cutting time and effort. But, even today, it still takes just as much time to push a vacuum as it does to sweep the floor. So, really, these posters weren't meant for anyone but hopeful morticians.

The soldiers in this poster have a lot more to worry about than mono. The man screaming out a jet of unidentifiable fluid is clearly possessed by demons. And if we look very closely, we can see that this has been the case for a while now, and no one has done a thing. The guy on the right is giving him some major stink-eye, but no one looks even a little bit surprised. The corporal -- that's how much detail they put into this -- whose tray is being bathed in PFC Regan MacNeil's hell-vomit looks a little hurt, if anything. But no one is calling for the chaplain; in fact, since no one is even leaving his seat, it looks like this happens every day, and the rest of the unit just puts up with it because this is the Army, motherfuckers. Hooah.

US Army
That wasn't the chant; that's just the sound he's making.

Now, to be fair, whoever turned this innocent "cover your mouth when you cough" message into a poster for a body horror movie probably lived with the memories of loved ones dying in a flu pandemic a couple generations before. Imagining a Niagara Falls of death juice spewing out of a neighbor's mouth probably wasn't that hard of a concept for artists in the 1940s.

For as long as we've sent men into battle, the powers that be have faced this simple dilemma: How do we keep our boys from putting their ding-dongs into jingoism-sapping vaginas? Eventually someone said, "Gadzooks! Posters will do the trick!" And that was when the U.S. government entered the anti-syphilis poster game.

W.P.A. Fed. Art Project
A burning sensation 65 million years in the making.

So what does a sexually transmitted disease that infects humans have to do with a group of animals that died out tens of millions of years before humans existed? Nothing, unless you're implying that sauropods hung around just long enough to fuck humans and give us "The Great Masquerader." Suddenly, the Creation Museum is looking even crazier than before.

Still, someone has some explaining to do with this image. Is the mutant fly taking the girl to his fly lair? Are we positive that the fly isn't regular-sized and he hasn't just caught a fairy? Could this actually be a tilted illustration of a fly and tiny fairy dancing the jitterbug?

We'll never know.

The helpful hints included on the posters are a little bit baffling. Who sleeps in rat-infested houses on purpose? This had to be a real problem, because someone thought it was important enough to use up some of the racist-ink for non-racist purposes (unless you count rats as a race, which is your right, because this is America).

This poster started with a reasonable premise: Children with vision problems probably struggle at school. Fair enough. But instead of simply connecting the benefits of regular eye exams to success, whoever came up with this poster took a more underhanded approach. It starts with the presumption that kids who don't do well in school are "dull," which is 1937 code for "stupid." Like it was an irrefutable fact that schoolwork was a direct reflection of brainpower, which would have been insulting even in 1937.

W.P.A. Fed. Art Project
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith, but we've concluded John is dull. We'd also like to test
for juvenile nincompoopery and early-onset milquetoastism."
"I suspected as much; thank you for your honesty."

Nope. Even parents battling dust storms and starvation would take offense at someone calling their child stupid. Second, let's assume that everyone around John really has his best interests at heart and a set of new spectacles was all he needed to succeed. Why would the sign end in illegible scratches that clearly don't form actual words? DO WE ALL NEED EYE EXAMS? ARE WE ALL DULL?

Nothing about this makes sense. It's understandable that the public library wants to keep its books in good condition, but something was lost in translation when they had this poster made. Glossing over the part where putting gum in a library book is an actual thing that people do, let's take a look at the guy in the picture. Why are his hands and feet covered in chewing gum? Why is he walking on a book? How did he get so small?

What makes this a real treasure is the unfortunate font choice. It makes the G look an awful lot like a big C, which changes everything. If what they really mean is "Don't CUM up a book," the picture actually makes more sense. The tiny man is covered in white goo, and it's stuck to the pages. It boils down to a message that is still relevant, even today:

Please don't ejaculate on our books.

W.P.A. Fed. Art Project
"Use our bathrooms like our local homeless."

It will absolutely kill you.

W.P.A. Fed. Art Project
"You, maybe, pus- [anguished choking]"

We're really disappointed that absolutely none of what we just said was what the poster was trying to communicate. It's actually warning against the dangers of drunk driving, not the dangers of placing a person-sized whiskey bottle next to a gas pump when there's a decapitated skull lurking in the background. Which is too bad, because until we're warned otherwise, placing a man-sized liquor bottle in front of a giant skull is on the calendar for this weekend.