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Friday, August 15, 2008

Shrine of the Sea Monkey

Things I saw and decided to capture with the picture box machine in my phone.

wasps_having_sex

This, one of the many copies of Dori Carter's Beautiful Wasps Having Sex at a thrift store. The title struck me as hilarious, especially when paired with the cover image, until I realized that it probably refers not to wasps — the things that sting with rear-end venom injectors — but WASPs — the things that sting with gin-sharpened cutting remarks. Note to the cover designer: Acronyms become invisible when all the other letters are also capitalized as well. Doy. For whatever reason, the Amazon page for Beautiful Wasps Having Sex says that people who bought it also bought nothing else besides X-Files merchandise. Perhaps the books WASPs actually have venom injectors?

record_player

Then there's this: a sign posted at a different thrift store. (It was a busy weekend, clearly.) I have to give the sign's author credit for being far more optimistic a person than I could ever be. Realistically, a record player sold ten years ago is probably gone for good, likely sold again to other thrift stores twice over by now. And there's something wonderful in (a) publicly displaying a photo of your now twentysomething-year-old son gleefully holding a pair of oversized pajama pants, (b) having the only available photo of the thing you're looking for crop out about a third of said thing, and (c) informing the public that, despite the carelessness with which you treat your apparently treasured record players, you've somehow managed not to accidentally sell your son at a thrift store as well. Am I the only one who's never heard of an Altec Lansing record player?

miley_cyrus

And then this, which marks the first ever time I've bothered to mention Miley Cyrus on this blog. It wasn't a deliberate attempt to ignore her. I just didn't have good enough reason to bring her up until I saw this magazine, whose cover accuses her of doing the very thing that is the premise of the TV show that brought her stardom. You have to admit it's kind of funny. It's like accusing Raven-Symoné of being sassy. No, wait that's probably true. It's like accusing Cody and Dylan Sprouse of living in a hotel? Does that work?

5 comments:

  1. The Altec-Lansing is a generational thing. Those of us a tad older (and how old is Tad anyway?) than the author of BOTCB will remember them fondly--often they were the turntables of choice at radio stations, actually.

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  2. I'm guessing Tad would be in fifth grade at least.

    And your awareness makes me suspicious: Are you the one who posted this?

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  3. I do not have a cute little boy in that photo or any photo, so it wasn't me.

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  4. Hey, I know it's a little late, I came across this blog, while looking for this book on Google.
    When you see this book on Amazon and people who bought it also bought X-Files merchandising, it's because the author of this book is Dori Carter, wife of Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files.
    Also, this book made a cameo :P on the 2nd X-Files movie. So, that's why. Mystery solved :D

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  5. Anonymous: Random. Thanks for clearing this up.

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