another day, another pencil sharpener

If you are a big fan of my previous post about hand-cranked pencil sharpeners (see it here), not only are you in luck, you are also a big loser. It's just another wall-mountable pencil sharpener... get over it.

Monkey News

Two different styles of wind-up monkey toys came in just a few hours apart. Wind-ups are definitely a new collection that is happening. You gather 30 or 40 different wind-ups (preferably stored in a large glass jar), crank 'em up, set 'em loose, and you got yourself a party.

Spirograph

Get ready to have your mind fucking blown...

and if you liked the "Magic Graphic" kit (on the right in the above photo), we've got a bonus generic "Spiral Art" for you...

Another collection of Spirographs can be found here.

NES with Super Mario

A Nintendo Entertainment System, with one controller, and the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cartridge...

The awesome looks-like-a-monitor-but-is-really-a-tv was purchased by The Jammer for $10 at the competing junk store down the street. You just can't beat a value like that. 

And what's really amazing about this find is that the game worked right away when we put the cartridge in. And, as anybody who still has an old NES around (or has used one in the past 20 years) knows, you usually have to blow on the game and click it around in the system for about 10 minutes before it works properly.

Junk Pirate Archive: Star Trek TV Tray

It has been a pretty slow week as far as blog-worthy donations go, so I'm gonna dig into the vault for a little something...

From the Junk Pirate Archives:

Someone donated a near-mint Star Trek the Motion Picture tin TV tray featuring that lovable Mr. Spock... highly illogical.

Game & Watch: Bombsweeper

Long before Nintendo reinvented itself with the Wii and the Nintendo DS handheld, and even before the greatest selling video game system of all time, Gameboy, was created, Nintendo dominated the handheld video game world with its series of LCD screened Game-&-Watch games. These simple games are still fun and usually work if there isn't corrosion in the battery compartment. 

What we have here is one of my favorites: Bombsweeper from 1987. Recently, but before this blog was started, we also got in Multi Screen Zelda (1989) and Multi Screen Black Jack (1985) (in the original box)! Also in the Junk Pirate vault are Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong II, and the amazing Donkey Kong 3 Micro Vs. System (in the box) with little controllers that fold inside the game. A very regularly updated Game & Watch website with every game in the edition, can be found here. You can play an online Java version of Game & Watch Bombsweeper here.

Madballs!

After years of waiting and concentrating on manifesting it, I finally spotted an old Madball among a big bin of musty toys. It is Screaming Meemie, from the original Series One Toys by AmToy from 1985. This is in excellent condition considering it is 23 years old and made of foam rubber.

Madballs went through two series of 8 balls each, plus a series of 4 larger sports balls (called Super Madballs). They later spawned a comic book, a few cartoon episodes, and other toy products. The New York hardcore band, Madball, was, in fact, named after Madballs toys. A redesigned series of Madballs updates have recently been available in toy stores.

Madballs commercial from 1985

Madballs cartoon: Escape from Orb (part 1)

3 Lava Lamps in 1 Week

We just got 3 (three) lava lamps in 3 non-consecutive days this past week. Two of them came from the same donation. The lights in all three worked, but only the red-and-black one got the molten lava flowing good. Not the biggest collection of Lava Lamps (one of the original "Plug-Ins") we have seen, but a good haul for one week.

Other People's Photos - Taxi

The extreme Junk Pirate value of this photo is obvious at a glance.

Freedom Is Not Free

"Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain..."

Junk Pirate Archive: Dolls

From the Junk Pirate Archive come these pictures of a few of the better mint-in-box dolls we've seen. You got the Trailer Trash doll and the Drag Queen doll (both 1st Edition!) .

The link I used to have for these toys (trailertrashdoll.com) now leads to the "Redneck Warehouse" where you can get such favorites as the "Vintage Jeff Foxworthy Redneck Collection" and "Dancing George Bush Doll". God bless America.

the Odyssey 300

Holy crap! It's a 1976 Magnavox Odyssey 300, one of the first home video game systems to use a single dedicated microchip. It plays 3 games: Smash, Tennis, and Hockey (basically three versions of Pong) all with the use of only two knobs (instead of six like the Odyssey 200). Ralph Baer and Magnavox (the creators of the original home video game system, the Odyssey, in 1972) would go on to make several other Odyssey versions, plus even more versions only available in the international market.

This specimen comes in amazingly good condition for a 36 year-old machine, with the power cord, in the original box (with some of the original packing styrofoam)! Who knows if it works, and who cares. These systems are sleek and gorgeous and look better on the shelf than in use.

We have gotten some great old gaming systems here in the past: Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, a boatload of Sega Genesis, Coleco, and even an Intellivision, but I think the Odyssey 300 is the best score of them all so far.

You can see all the Odyssey systems at the pong-story website here.

Vintage Pencil Sharpeners

Old office supplies are the best.

Back in the day, stuff was made from hardwood and steel. These pencil sharpeners are many, many years older than me yet they still work better than any mamby-pamby, battery-powered electric ones they make today do. With a little elbow grease you could grind a new pencil down to a sharp nub in under 30 seconds. No classroom or art studio should be without one of these. Plus, once you get three variations of a similar thing happening you call it a collection and let the hoarding begin!

I especially love how there are variable hole sizes, in case of the rare instance when you need to sharpen one of those extra thick pencils.

Skull Mug

File this one under the heading Cool Mugs and Drinking Glasses That Are Shaped Like Things:

It's a pirate skull mug.

Pretty big, too. It probably holds about a pint and a half of grog. Maybe more. The fact that it is glass and not ceramic adds a couple of bonus points.

WorldWarOner

I forgot another important category of Junk Pirate donation treasure... weapons! Be it BB guns, machetes, switchblades, ninja stars, bullets, pepper spray, or just a good old fashioned broadsword, weapons always make good donations. You can never have too many instruments of death around in a pinch. Hell, even toys weapons are pretty cool, especially the old kind of water pistols that look pretty real before the law was passed that made them all have neon colors. Here is a picture from the old Junk Pirate archives of one of the many incarnations of the Junk Store Arsenal:

While this donation isn't exactly a weapon, it still qualifies as far as I'm concerned. An authentic wooden ammo-box that housed a World War One missile. Ka-boom!

Fine Wine

No big deal. We got a couple bottles of wine products the other day. They both look WAY past their prime. We'll see if any of the crew is brave (or desperate) enough to step up to the plate with these bad boys.

Holy Water

Not one, but two bottles of Holy Water from France.

Aaaaaaagh! It burns!

Simpsons Dice

Two new additions to the recent resurrection of the dice collection. These are both from different packagings of the Simpsons Trivia Game. There must be a dozen different packaging variations of this game, and apparently some are more classy than others.

On the left we have what is no more than a blank plastic cube with some little stickers on it. On the right we have the real deal, with boldly printed images of Chief Wiggum, Bart, Mr. Burns, Krusty, Moe, and Apu right on the plastic.

The Ravages of Aging as seen through Note Pads

Here we have five different note pads from Real Estate Agent V. Rodriguez (Your Neighborhood Professional). You can see her growing older in each one. My favorite is the one with her chilling with the "sold" signage. What a pro.

Drink Beer - Make Plane

Another great piece of beer can art: a Budweiser airplane with bottle cap landing gear and a huge propeller that really spins!

This isn't even the first beer-can-plane we've gotten. It isn't even the second. In this classic image of the Giant Foam Head from the Junk Pirate archives we can see a couple of Fosters can-planes on the left. There were also others I didn't get pictures of. Drink beer and get creative, people.

I Want Your Skull, I Need Your Skull

While animal bones and skulls certainly are not a daily donation, they aren't nearly as rare as they probably should be. I'd say we get a skull or two in about three times a year. This is a pretty good haul for one box. Nice variety here.

We also get other bones, teeth, claws, and shedded snake skins now and then. We've gotten two horse skulls on separate occasions (one just appeared when no one was looking), and the greatest donation of all time was a skull... a human skull. I shit you not. That is whole different and crazy story. Here is an older pic from the Junk Pirate archives of the old bone drawer: