Give me a break! "Executive Puzzle" my ass! I know a Slinky when I see one. And exactly how is this a "puzzle" at all?!?
I actually think this would be a cool thing for some high-powered CEO to have on his desk. And employees would say, "Hey, is that a golden Slinky?". And the boss would say, "I'll have you know it's an Executive Puzzle and I use it to uniquely hold my memos. You're fired!"
Hans is back? No, Hans never left. He simply donned a homemade Zodiak helmet, climbed the ladder and posted up on top of the collapsed white boxes like a big stuffed gargoyle killer, ready to tumble onto your neck when you were just trying to take down that extra box of audio cassettes.
Then Hans took his reign of Sorting Room terror to a new level by kidnapping an innocent girl-doll while sporting this frightening monster mask. That was a gnarly morning.
Currently Hans is going with the "mad scientist" look, complete with spooky grey streaked hair, surgical gown, test tubes, and an evil mustache/goatee combo.
Now we can quickly mine-sweep for bits of copper, lost arcade tokens, and perhaps even the occasional foreign coin mixed in amongst the rubble of the sorting room floor.
It finally happened... someone or something donated some abusable prescription drugs.
Now, getting doped up on pills isn't my thing, but Top Cat and Big Merl were more than happy to divvy the loot. I'm just happy that something this wild and inappropriate and so long in the waiting has finally come in. And it isn't just the bottle...
There are at least 9 or 10 pills in there. So what if they expired exactly 8 years ago today.
When Jambo and I first created the Donation Manifestation Wish List, Garbage Pail Kids were at the top of the list. Not because I particularly wanted them, but it just seemed like the thing that would likely get donated to the Junk Store on a regular basis. Much to my surprise, other than one or two cards floating in here and there, we hardly ever see them. And we certainly don't see any from the first four edition. And you can just forget about wax packs. Maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough on it.
Not quite as awesome as an authentic Pac-Man arcade cabinet (or cocktail table) video game, this Coleco Mini Arcade LED Pac-Man will have to suffice for the moment.
From RetroThing.com: "At the height of the Pac-Man craze, video game craze, and handheld electronic craze, Coleco created mini versions of famous arcade games. They started with Pac-Man, but it wasn't long before Ms. Pac, Galaxian, Centipede, and others joined the family.
It's rather impressive how much of the flavor of the arcade originals these little versions could capture within the limits of VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) technology. The games were colorful (unlike battleship gray LCD, or red blip LED games), had a nice assortment of sound effects and music, and added simultaneous two player modes so that both you and your brother could crowd around your 9" high personal arcade cabinet."
Here are some other great Pac-Man images I found on the interweb:
A working 16 mm film projector with sound speaker. It didn't come with a film, but luckily enough we have been stashing a student film product called "Water / Ducks" for a few months for a situation just like this.
The bulb was working and the motor sounded decent so I threaded it up. Finally, the skills I gained in my five years as a film major at a private art college are coming in handy.
We sat around and watched 10 minutes of ducks, ponds, fountains, flowers and other plant life in of the bay area projected onto a white marker board. Once I got the gate-loop set, the film ran smooth. There was no optical sound track, so we didn't get to test that, but it didn't even skip at the tape splices. I consider this a victory for the junk store and my film education. However, there was one problem...
The projector was no donated with a take-up reel, so we basically just let the whole film pile onto the floor as it ran out the back of the projector. For the rewind we just threw that sucker into reverse at the end and watched it backwards.
Riding hot on the heels of Neil Diamond's autograph, like an out of control downhill skier, comes another awesome donation from a completely different source:
Now, us Junk Pirates of the sorting room are never above a fake-autograph prank or two (just asked the kid who bought the "Babe Rooth" autographed baseball), and this autographed LP came in less than 5 days after the last one that it seemed a bit suspicious. Let us try to get some random internet confirmation on this one:
Wow, looks like the Bono autograph that I embedded from another host got removed as well. Cher is spinning in her grave.
Good enough for me.
Out of respect for those who are no longer with us, we decided to actually nail this one on the wall instead of letting it get buried. RIP Sonny. Best Wishes.
Could it really be an authentic autographed LP from Neil Diamond. Let's take a closer look:
Ok, now let's compare it to another Neil Diamond autograph I randomly grabbed from the 'net:
Yup! Looks good!
Update: Looks like somebody didn't appreciate me linking through to their Neil Diamond autograph. Trust me, it looked really similar to the one on our donated record.
Now what to do with such a rare and valuable item?
Put it on Ebay? No.
Frame it and put it on the wall? No.
Sell it with the rest of the records and stoke out some Neil Diamond fan? No.
Smash the record and then lost the autographed cover under fabric mountain? Bingo!
Sorry, Lynne, but you should hold onto your valuables.
Not literal cold beer (I wish), but another one of those Plug-Ins. Just to prove that I'm not just taking a new picture of this one, here they both are together.
In honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival, I present the Woodstock of my generation. No, I'm not talking about Woodstock 94, and I'm especially not talking about Woodstock 99. I'm talking about those awesome commercials for Freedom Rock!
From the opening chords of "Layla" to the dude's little guffaw when he tells you that the original hits are "by the original artists!" to the bright blue screen that tells you how to order, the commercial for Freedom Rock has been etched into my brain. All the song snippets have locked themselves into this order so that The Byrds "Turn Turn Turn" is inextricably mashed with Skynyrd's "Freebird". Heck, some of these song are only known to me still as 5-second snippets.
The gods of rock must have made sweet hippie love to the gods of donations because half of my dreams came true when disc 2 of Freedom Rock (albeit a bit scratched-up) arrived at the Junk Store.
In truth, Freedom Rock does not "have it all, man". In fact, this compilation is pretty awful and certainly not worth $24.95 (from 1987, which, with inflation, would cost $47.15 today). There are a lot of bullshit, not rocking, unfree filler like James Taylor swamping up the true rock classics. I'm still glad it came in though, if only for giving me a reason to post the Freedom Rock commercial on this blog.
A collection of Star Wars Pez dispensers. These are all "Jar Jars" (Star Wars merchandise released as part of the Episode I frenzy) but still worth a photo when they show up in these quantities. The candy was not included.
The Jammer got me all psyched up on collected plastic Jack-O-Lantern buckets. The fun thing to do notice is all the different tooth patterns that exist. Sometimes you have 2top-3bottom, sometimes 1top-2bottom. Sometimes they are triangular fangs.
This is a classic photo, but lately we have taken to stringing them up on a bungee cord. We even got a neon pink one in.
I'm just cruising the Junk Pirate Archives this week and bringing out some classics from years and locations past. Not that there isn't a huge backlog of amazing recent items that need to come to light. I figured it would be fun to relive some traumatic donations and moments from back in the day.
Children's gun mug.
Cause it's never to early to get used to the great feeling of a firearm in your hand.
A quick glance through the Junk Pirate Archives unearthed this old photo of our collection of vintage vibrators. Guaranteed to get you where you need to go.
I just realized this blog is over 1 year old now! Awesome.
With over 125 posts! Hot damn.
Please keep the comments coming. Or don't. I like them but really I do this for me.
Just for the hell of it here is a photo of the Heap from the Junk Pirate Archives:
In other news, the 2nd Junk Pirate Art Exhibition has been confirmed! It will be in Oakland (venue to be announced later) in March 2010. Here's a photo from the last show in late 2006:
The first skateboard I ever owned was a Nash Heat Zone. Just like this one that was recently donated, except mine was neon pink and didn't have the rails or a tail block or anything. Man, that was a crappy skateboard, but I was pretty psyched to get it for my birthday back when I was 8 or 9. I never really rode it that much and didn't actually learn skate until I got a street deck when I was 15 or so. Still, in the unlikely event that I'm being interviewed in a skating context and somebody asks me about my first skateboard, I'm gonna have to tell the truth: "Heat Zone".
The fact that an arts and educational non-profit resale store can amass this collection of dildos, vibrators, and other unmentionables from their daily donations is just all sorts of fucked.
And this doesn't even include the vintage vibrators that at least have the decency to look less like a penis and more like a giant power drills that strap to your hands.
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