Encyclopedia Drew and the Mysterious Table of Mystery

Perhaps you might remember when I wrote about buying a coffee table. I did so here on this blog, in the post wherein I discussed the set dressing from a cancelled Raven-Symone sitcom, the monsters from Tremors, severed mannequin legs and the estate sale of Not Joni Mitchell. Yes, that post. At the very end, after the detailed listing of all the things I did not purchase, I mentioned that I bought coffee table.

That, I suppose, was a lie.

I bought a piece of furniture that I have chosen to use as a coffee table even though it’s most likely intended for some other purpose. I’m just not sure what.

Here is the table in its oval form:

What makes this table strange, however, are its leaves. They don’t especially increase the overall surface area, and they also don’t fold under the table, as extend-o-leaves usually do. Instead, they fold up. Here, with the edges vertical, the shape takes on its second, rectangular form:

So why would a table do this? The leaves, when folded up, make it difficult to put things on and get things off the table, so I’d guess seems like you’re supposed to use it with the leaves down. But why would you ever want the leaves up? Did this table go on a ship or something else that had reason to be less stable that a normal, tacked-to-the-ground house? Or did someone once arrange items on this table and then move it somewhere else, arranged objects and all? With the sides folded up, the handles make it easier to carry, I suppose, but overall the table is not especially light. I can’t imagine why a whole table — legs and all — would be simpler to move around than, say, a tray that you could place anywhere.

Anyone? Really at a loss for what this thing is. And please, no jokes about it being a sex table, because I’ve already eaten off it.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Unclaimed Canvases

The short version is this: I have these canvases and I’m not sure what I should do with them. They’re not mine, as far as most conceptions of ownership go, yet they’re all in my house.

In a sense, it’s not all that inappropriate that I should have anything of indeterminate origin in the house I live in now. As I’ve said before, my house is an odd showcase of stuff I didn’t buy but now have essentially come to own — furniture and photos and items of decor that came from some previous tenant and that remain here by virtue of the fact that this place hasn’t been completely vacated in years. Who bought these? I have to wonder. Amber? Lisa? Deirdre? Scott? Marion? Any of the other dozen or so names that still get mail here? But that’s beside the point. These canvases are more cause for concern than the furniture and photos and items of decor that people either didn’t want or simply forgot about.

On Sunday, I spied my one-house-over neighbor— a doddery old man who I’ve watched for years silently watering his garden — walk an armful of attempted paintings to the dumpster in my apartment complex. He’s not supposed to, I don’t think, and he knows this. I’ve even seen him walk a trash bag over to the dumpster, only to turn around and return to his home because he heard a voice from within the courtyard. I suppose he didn’t want to be caught, though I seriously doubt anyone would object to him infecting our garbage with his. After I watched him return to his home after he’d successfully disposed of his atypically artistic trash, I went down to the dumpster myself.

You see, I’ve had all this cursed free time in the past two weeks. I need the free time. I need to get away. However, when faced with the fact that said free time is the only advantage of my current situation, I feel the need to constantly take advantage of it — writing, reading, watching movies, playing video games, contemplating pop culture minutiae, following one man’s quest to conquer the Encyclopedia Britannica, thrilling at Hal Jordan’s induction into that famous space corps, seeing little Palom all grown up, and whatever else happens to seem like something I’d enjoy doing. This new master rules me with such a hard hand that if I’m at any moment not taking advantage of my free time, I feel like a slacker who’s indulging his own laziness at the expense of his overall happiness.

At some point, I decided to paint, which I haven’t done in more than a year. The canvas — which originally sported had a pine tree crudely spray painted on it in an effort to further deck the apartment’s halls for a Christmas party years ago — first became a Tequila Sunrise, with a red-to-yellow fade piled on thickly to cover up the bumps indicating the evergreen beneath. Then I ruined it all and re-slathered the canvas with green and blue without any intention of what I’d do with it. This topography dried and eventually became the background to an abstract — that is, as I use the word, just a little sloppy and lacking in much detail — landscape depicting only a tree. I don’t know why. I don’t know where it came from. I suspect that it may be a manifestation of my mental state.

This is what it looks like:


It may develop further, but I can’t imagine how. I’m happy to never touch it again, yet I don’t feel like I want it hanging up in the house. I may slap on even more paint. I may stick it in the closet and continue with a new canvas. Whatever, right? It’s my free time. Why not act on whatever whim I feel at a given moment?

Canvases, however, cost money, and I don’t have enough of that at the moment. This monetary deficit — which, apparently, I can’t solve by selling my spare free time — sparked my interest in Old Neighbor Man’s trash paintings. I picked through them, ignoring the ones made only on stiff paper and taking the actual canvases. I brought them up to my room. I figured I could gesso over them later and make them my own.

Then, on the way to lunch, I noticed a sign tacked to a phone pole just cattycorner from my place: “TAKEN — PAINTINGS THAT WERE SITTING BEHIND MY CARE. THESE WERE NOT TRASH! HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? CALL (XXX) XXX-XXXX.” (The real sign had a phone number. You knew that, of course, but this is a true story and I don’t want be accused of embellishing.) So I called the number. No answer. I left a message, explaining that I was pretty sure I found the missing paintings and that whoever it was that I was leaving a message for should call me back. Figuring they’d probably want all their paintings, I went back and picked up the ones I left next to the trash.

That was Sunday afternoon. I have heard nothing. This morning, I called the number again. It didn’t even go through to voicemail. I suppose I could have tried again and perhaps even should have tried again, but I didn’t. It occurred to me that I could have punched the number into my phone incorrectly, so I went to the same phone pole. The sign was gone.

Now I must make a decision. I could just paint over the canvases and go on with my life, though I suppose the original paintings could emerge through what I’d painted — a pentimento Tell-Tale Heart that would eventually drive me insane. If it’s any consolation, this is what the “good” paintings look like:


Not to be a dick about it, but covering them up with my original artwork wouldn’t exactly deprive the world of some museum-quality work. (Then again, who am I to talk, little Mr. Smear Tree?)

I could also embellish the better ones — the female nude in particular — and turn them into some combined thing, representative both of the original artist’s intent and my desire to fill up my empty hours. That, however, wouldn’t solve the problem of the remaining pieces, which are of lesser quality and aren’t even worth the trouble it would take to repaint them. They look like this:


I could ask Old Neighbor Man if he can tell me where these came from, but that might be awkward. I don’t think he speaks English and I’ve lived next to him for about three years without ever so much with a pleasant exchange, even though I imagine it would be harmless enough to tell him that I appreciate all the work he does to keep his garden looking nice.

Or I can find another something to exist in place of all the nothing and just ignore the paintings until I grow sick of them and stick them in the attic, likely forgetting about them and rendering them some mystery for a future tenant of this apartment to ponder. When I’m a ghost in the mailbox like Amber and Lisa and Deirdre and Scott and Marion, some Encyclopedia Whoever can stumble on these and imagine that they have more history in this house than they actually do.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Case of the Haunted Clock

The longer it’s been since I actually lived in Hollister, the rarer the occasion arises that I think to share my favorite story about it. This story is not representative of my hometown in any way. I’ll say that again, since people often tend to think the opposite: This story is not representative of my hometown in any way.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I headed back home, worked at the newspaper, and watched the house while my parents were away on extended vacation. In all, not a bad way to spend three hot months. By virtue of having the place to myself, however, I had to shop for groceries on my own. I’d never felt more grown up. Sure, I had made grocery trips during the previous year, when I lived in the dorms, but shopping for food myself in my hometown at the store my mom shops at made me feel like an adult in ways that little from my first year of college did.

On one trip to the grocery store, I was standing in line and noticed two older women queued up behind me. I glanced back and saw that they were both around my grandmother’s age and could have very well been friends of my grandma’s, given how social circles work in Hollister. The two women were chatting back and forth with the usual call-and-response pairs that people so often exchange when they haven’t caught up in a while.

Then there was a lull.

Then this: “Did you hear about Pearl?”

(An admission: Though this story should be considered non-fiction, I can’t be sure that the woman being discussed was actually named Pearl. She could have just as easily been named Fern or Inez or Dotty or Mabel or Genuflessa or Eunice or anything else from the stable of names that women of this generation were saddled with. For the sake of telling this story, I’ll stick with Pearl.)

“No. What happened to Pearl?” the other one asked.

“She’s in the hospital. She’s been very sick!” the first woman responded.

“That’s awful! I hadn’t heard. What’s wrong?” said the second woman.

“Well, it started out with a clock she had bought at an antique store,” the first women began to explain. “And right after Pearl brought the clock into the house, she started getting sick. And they didn’t know what was wrong with her. They did tests and they gave her this and that and she didn’t get better. And so then it turned out that there was a ghost living in the clock that she had bought and the ghost was what was making Pearl sick.”

“You’re kidding!” replied the second woman, her voice indicating genuine astonishment — not at the fact that a ghost played a role in the story but that the root of the illness turned out to be a ghost. “So what did they do?”

The answer: “Oh, well, they got rid of the clock.”

I delight in the story for several reasons.

As far as I could tell at the time, no one else heard the story. I looked around to see if anyone’s face might contort in a way that indicated they too were trying to follow the story’s crazy logic, but I saw no such reactions.

I don’t know what kills me more: The first woman’s belief that (a) ghosts can make you sick at all, much less to the point that you would require hospitalization; (b) that ghosts haunt clocks; (c) that this whole mess could be solved by something as simple as throwing away the apparently cursed clock. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the second woman didn’t seem to question one bit of that logic and instead received the haunted clock story much as she would have a story about Pearl falling and breaking her hip.

It didn’t help at all that I’d just previously profiled this women as people who could potentially be my grandmother’s friends. I actually thought about bringing the matter up with my grandmother — “Grandma, do you by any chance have a friend named Pearl who recently spent time in the hospital?” — but I never did, mostly out of fear that investigation would only reveal that I was the only person in town who didn’t think that ghosts made you sick.

Finally, there’s the matter of who the story’s “they” was and how this distinguished group determined that the source of the disease was the clock. It could be that I’ve abridged this part in my mind or it could have been that the woman telling the story never mentioned it. It seems important enough to the chain of events, however, that either I should have remembered it or she should have spelled it out. I really hope the “they” she spoke of actually referred to two groups: the medically professionals at the hospital and some separate group of crazy people who think ghosts live in clocks.

Previous Encyclopedia Drew mysteries:

• The Knock-Off Clock
• The Phantom Skull
• The Mixed-Up Currency
• The Troublesome Tang
• The Look-Alike Cats
• The Barfing Bathtub
• The Rabbit-Eared Woman

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Knock-Off Clock

(A narrative of obscured origins.)

Where to begin?

I have websites saved on my list of Google bookmarks that I cannot remember saving. Nor can I remember why I found it necessary to save these sites for later viewing. Like this: the Wikipedia page for the fictional card game Cripple Mr. Onion, which I saved on December 13, 2006. I have no clue why. I don’t play cards and I have almost no awareness of the works of Terry Pratchett, from which the game originated — and, for all I know, remains.

Other things have meaning, but I can’t remember why or how the entered my life. This post concerns this type of mysterious bookmark — specifically one concerning Cinnamoroll.

A quick Google search tells me — and likely you too! — that Cinnamoroll is a Sanrio character, which apparently means he exists in the same universe as Hello Kitty. I have almost no understanding of the Sanrioverse. In fact, the closest my personal universe has ever come to treading into this land of things anthropomorphic, big-headed, and relentlessly cheerful was a girl in my seventh grade class who had a Sanrio-themed pencil set. She was mocked ceaselessly, even after the pencil set stopped going to school with her.

Regardless of whether I acknowledge the Sanrioverse or not, Wikipedia tell us that Cinnamoroll is “a white puppy with long ears that enable him to fly, blue eyes, and a plump and curly tail that resembles a cinnamon roll. He starred in his own anime movie which was released in autumn 2007. Some people mistake Cinnamoroll for a rabbit because of his long ears and rabbit-like looks. Cinnamoroll was created in 2001.”

Somehow, I or someone who knows me stumbled onto a YouTube clip of a Japanese commercial for a Cinnamoroll toy. Now, I am not an eight-year-old girl, but to this day the toy looks like one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Call it good marketing. I don’t know if it’s the jingle or the fact that doll seems to be powered by, among other things, a motorized ass, but I can’t help but think this toy must be amazing. If it had been available to a younger me, I would have demanded it and then told no one that I had it. Its mechanobutt would drive it to countless flips and twirls in my room — my own private dancer. Also, in my imagination of how this would go, it would sing the song from the commercial and move in time with it.

Somehow — whether before The Age of Cinnamoroll or during, I’m not sure — my house came into possession of an alarm clock that looks a hell of a lot like Cinnamoroll, though just enough unlike him that its creators would avoid a lawsuit. The alarm clock lives in Aly’s room, though knock-off Sanrio appliances aren’t really her thing.

One day last summer, while I was home and bored, I took photos and videos of various strange things in the house and included in the long list of subjects was the Pseudo-Cinnamoroll alarm clock. As a YouTube user informed me via comment, the clock is Korean, not Japanese, thus more points in favor of the theory that it’s a knock-off.

The video has been viewed 435 times since I posted it in July. This itself I find strange, that 435 people would sit through even a short video of an alarm clock making noise. But I must remind myself that people will watch anything on YouTube. Even the video I took to document our downstairs neighbor covering A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” which I posted under the title “not worth your attention, this video” and with no tags, still managed to get sixteen views. (Yes, she had no idea I took the video. No, you can’t see her in the video so I don’t think it’s creepy. Yes, all the sound was recorded from within the walls of my house, which means she was singing too loudly. And no, she doesn’t do a very good job, but that wouldn’t stop her from singing the song as loudly as she could — often repeatedly but sometimes alternating with “Son of a Preacher Man.”) No comments have yet clarified whether the character is supposed to be Cinnamoroll or just something that happens to look just like him.

I am personally unable to say which came first — the Cinamoroll clip or the clock — but both have been languishing on the Google bookmark list and I felt they needed to be freed and shared with the world. Spencer or Aly could probably talk me through how the house apparently became fixated upon them for a period, but until then, they shall remain parts of one of the stranger and more Asian-influences Encyclopedia Drew mysteries yet.

EDIT: The story has been clarified, not that any of you all were on the edge of your seats. Aly received the clock from a roommate some time before she moved in here. The Cinnamoroll video was found in an effort to look into what character the clock was ripping off. While Spencer was in Hong Kong, he took some photos of licensed, legal uses of Cinnamoroll’s image. He — she? — apparently shares equal standing with Hello Kitty nowadays.



Previous Encyclopedia Drew mysteries:

• The Phantom Skull
• The Mixed-Up Currency
• The Troublesome Tang
• The Look-Alike Cats
• The Barfing Bathtub
• The Rabbit-Eared Woman

Encyclopedia Drew and the Phantom Skull

A happy Venture Bros.-esque coincidence involving a table candle and a wine glass at Ca'Dario last night. Nothing accompanies fine Italian food better than the reminder that you are, in fact, going to die.

Cred to Noam and his Noamphone.

Previous Encyclopedia Drew adventures:

• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Mixed-Up Currency
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Case of the Troublesome Tang
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Look-Alike Cats
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Barfing Bathtub
• Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Rabbit-Eared Woman

Encyclopedia Drew and the Case of the Troublesome Tang

If you pick up a copy of this week's Independent, you might notice an item in the news briefs section that mentions the horrible sulfur stench that's been so tenaciously clinging the area around East Cabrillo Boulevard. (The same subject is addressed in a longer IndyNewsFlash item that went up on Tuesday, in case you're interested.) When the article came across my desk in an earlier form, the reporter had referred to the stink — which, it turns out, is emanating from stagnant water at the bird refuge being steamed up by last week's heat wave — as being a "problematic pong." Confused, I asked three nearby editors if they were familiar with this word — independent from the prefixes "ping," "beer" and "early video game sensation" and instead to mean "a bad smell." No one had, though we could all guess what it meant given its context.

I went to the dictionary and found olfactory sense of "pong" missing from the abridged Webster — that version being the one you don't have to pay for — as well as from the American Heritage Dictionary. Dictionary.com had it, finally, defining it as I imagined it might be and giving its origin as "obscure."

Good to know it exists, I decided, and curious how it somehow escaped my notice for twenty-five years, but I felt it should be substituted with something the average newspaper-reader would know. Statistically, if four people who work at the paper had never heard of it, four randoms who just read said publication might not either. Worse yet, I worried it might be mistaken for a typo for "pond," since it was a body of water that made the stink to begin with.

Though everyone concerned agreed that the alliteration of "problematic pong" should be preserved, but I lost the ultimate vote and the chosen replacement was "troublesome tang." I am not particularly happy about this, in part because I felt "offending odor" worked just as well but also that olfactory sensations are not the first one might associate with the word "tang." Add to that the infinitely worse pairing with "troublesome," and I at least get an immediate mental picture that's very disturbing. Of course, if one really did have a troublesome tang, bad smells might a major factor in that trouble. I just hope I wouldn't have to print a news story about it.

In any case, if you read the brief and wondered why the hell that phrase in particular was chosen, I thought I'd offer an explanation.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Rabbit-Eared Woman

While going back through my files to scan old newspaper articles for clips, I came across a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen in a while. The photos of me and Jill in Solvang, for example. However, I also thumbed through an odds-and-ends collection that I had hurriedly labeled “artsy shit” when I set up my filing system last year in an effort to organize my life. (The files, by the way, have not been added to since and everything keep-worthy from the preceding year is sitting in one big pile, next to the file box.) Included in the artsy shit file is a lot of stuff that I did in art studio classes at UCSB — none of it worth putting on the wall, really, but also none of it being anything I felt like throwing away.

One of the things I apparently decided to keep is the following image:

It’s a woman. She has rabbit ears. Her name, apparently, is Dorothy. It’s drawn in black marker on an otherwise blank index card. There’s nothing written on the back. I found a few other index cards in the folder that look like they might have been part of the same assignment, but for what class and for what purpose I can’t remember. Most of the images on the other cards look like something I had copied down from somewhere else. Maybe that was the assignment. Maybe I’m a plagiarist.

In any case, this image in particular has intrigued me a great deal. You’d think I’d remember a woman with rabbit ears, especially one who looked rather down about it. If anybody can fill me in on who Dorothy is and where I may have encountered her, I’d appreciate it. I'm half-temped to xerox some copies and post them around the neighborhood with the words "Have you seen this woman?" written on it, if only to see what kind of response it might get.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Mixed-Up Currency

As my grandmother cleans out the house she's been living in for the past fifty years, she comes across things that she'd like to pass down to younger generations of the family. As a result, it's now not uncommon to receive Christmas presents from her that verge on heirloom status. Some family members complain, but I like the practice.

This last Christmas — a day that, as of this writing, is more than a month past — my grandmother gave my brother and me each half a collection of Japanese pesos. The only background information she could supply was that her cousin Dave had picked these up during his stint in southeast Asia in World War II. She didn't know how or why the Japanese government got to printing pesos, much less disseminating them through out the Pacific.

Having never been to southeast Asia, I can't identify the tall tower depicted on these bills. I can, however, clearly read the word "peso" — not "yen" or "dollar" or "giant stone coin of the Yap islander." What's especially odd to me about these bills is that the text reads "one peso" and "the Japanese government" in plain English text.

I eventually got around to researching these weird bills online and found that they are the result of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. It seems obvious, in retrospect. The Philippines still use the peso as its currency today, and English is one of its official languages. It seems that when the Japanese took over the Philippines, they tried to force this currency on the Filipino people. Essentially IOUs from the Japanese, the bills were met with resistance from the Filipinos, who dubbed them "Mickey Mouse dollars" and correctly figured that they'd never be worth anything. Instead, the people persisted in using crude, homemade currencies.

I wish there was more info about the Japanese peso online. So far, all I've gotten that still works is the talk section for the Wikipedia page on the Filipino peso — good ol' Wikipedia, once again — and this eBay page detailing one guy's attempt to sell his pesos for, I'm guessing, actual money. I suppose there's this page to now, so good luck to you future researchers of the Japanese peso.

I like these bills, and not only for their status as a trivial footnote in recent world history. Just looking at them, I feel like they represent some crazy intersection of too many cultues sweeping through one area in too short a time. The Japanese government, English text, a Filipino monument, a currency that initially began in Spain and a graphic design that to me looks like it was inspired by that of the American dollar. In a way, these short-lived bills are nicely emblematic of the Philippines in general. This little nation has been unfortunately bitched around by bigger nations for such a long time that its currency looks like some kind of multicultural singles mixer.

That, plus the fact that when I read "THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT" all in caps like that, I hear it in this ridiculously official megaphone voice. And that's funny.

[ "m" minus some serious hardcore. do you get it yet? ]