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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

"No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache"

Robert Anton Wilson readers will recognize the phrase "No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache." In Schroedinger's Cat, Joe Malik explains that he ran across the title in an issue of "Reader's Digest" magazine:

Joe Malik, as he had been trying to explain amid the din of the Wildeblood soiree, had been engaged in neuroprogramming research, trying to become one with the Reader s Digest, when he
found that wonderful title, which led him to immediately abort the experiment. He knew,
intuitively, that the mystery of a title like that was much better than the solution, the explanation of the title, could ever be.

If you are unable to resist the siren call of wondering what the article actually was about, we can help. Here are gifs of the article, ioriginally printed in the November 1955 "Reader's Digest" but reprinted in: Advanced reading skill builder prepared by Isabel M. Kincheloe [and] Harold A. Anderson, published in 1958. They were sent to me by Scott in Wisconsin,  a longtime reader of RAW since about 1976.














5 comments:

Unknown said...

Fantastic! Been casually looking around for this for years. Thanks for posting.

Unknown said...

Don't know what it means, but IMDB lists an episode of TV Reader's Digest called "No Horse, No Wife, No Moustache" with a Robert Wilson listed in the cast: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0715754

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the article. Never thought I'd see it.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for finding this and posting it.

Tid said...

No horse, no wife, no mustache was an old cadet saying from the early days of West Point. A cadet could not have a personal horse, a wife or a mustache. Not a whole lot has changed at West Point. A cadet still can't have a wife or a mustache, but he can have a car during his First Class year

There was also a song called "No Horse, No Wife, No Mustache" in the musical film Flirtation Walk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flirtation_Walk