Ephemera

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Ah, the long stretch of drudgery after the hectic holiday season. It’s a time of sickened overindulgence and desperate boredom in equal parts. What better moment to post pictures from my own simultaneously crammed and void seasonal stretch? Early in December, arriving home and seeing the full mass of Christmas decorations heaped on our dining room table, I felt inspired* to grab the ol’ point n’ shoot.

(*inspired = wanted to avoid getting pine sap all over me.)

Years of family history lay in tangled heaps, briefly exhumed only to be packed back up in short measure for another year’s basement exile.


This is the oldest ornament my family has, from my mom’s family. I think of her as the Sugarplum Fairy. She’s too fragile and precious to risk hanging low on the tree, easy cat bait, so we tend to hang her high. Wait, that came out wrong.


These must have been created at the behest of some well-meaning elementary school teacher – too clunky to actually hang on the tree, but with photos specifically taken for the holiday season. Nothing says ‘Merry Christmas!’ like awkward personal poses.


One small testament to the skill of Grandma Tillie, not a blood relation but our grandma’s best friend. Aside from copious canvas needlepoint, she stitched each of us stockings for our first Christmas. We still use them.


Brass and vague resemblance to ‘Love Is’. Ah, the ’70s.


Another well-intended class project.

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Marge Simpson told Bart (who told Krusty) God never closes a door without opening a window. Long-running Ohio roadside attraction Prehistoric Forest and Mystery Hill Family Fun Center has closed, but their gloriously awkward website lives on to let you know YOU CAN BUY THEIR DINOSAURS. That’s right, you, right there reading this (unless you’re a bot) can purchase the remaining dinosaurs and full-family cabins once dotting the park.

They have an Apatosaurus:
Picture from www.mysteryhill.com

…a Stegosaurus:
picture from www.mysteryhill.com

…a Pleisiosaurus WITH FLIPPER ACTION!:
picture from www.mysteryhill.com

…and the result of a Pteranodon/tiger mating:

…all with the promise of more to come. It’s sad seeing pictures of families enjoying a stroll through the Prehistoric Forest on the site interspersed with giant red text saying ‘NOW CLOSED’. America’s highways are becoming one long, monotonous strip periodically dotted with a clump of chain restaurants identical to the clump before and the one to come after. Roadside attractions are fewer and far between as the families running them grow older or can no longer afford to keep operating. It’s a shame that this is how I’ll come to own an eight-foot Stegosaurus lawn ornament, but at least I’ll keep one small flame going for American weirdness.

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Walking past a neighborhood building I noticed a pile of unusually pink rubbish. On closer examination, someone had thrown out the early 90′s girl-targeted board game ‘Dream Phone’, its blindingly magenta cards spilling out all over the sidewalk. Either someone got there before me or the game’s owner had their priorities straight, because none of the ‘guy cards’ or phones were there. Dang it! Still, I kept these:




For those of you unfamiliar with the wave of ‘girl’ games fobbed on young ladies in the early 90s including Mall Madness, Girl Talk, and Dream Phone, here’s the commercial:

(I love that it flashes the warning ‘PHONE IS NOT REAL PHONE AND CANNOT BE USED WITH ANY PHONE NETWORK’ at the bottom.)

The game’s a more gossipy version of ‘Guess Who’ with the added creepiness of tasking you, presumably a teen, with calling 30-year-old gym and mall rats to find out who ‘likes’ you. Whether this is better or worse than Mall Madness’s goal of moving your piece around pretty much at random to ‘buy’ stuff is hard to tell. None of either game’s horribly reductive gender stereotypes were new, though the addition of voice-chip technology was a modern twist:

Oh, GIRLS. Always wanting to shop and talk about boys! Perhaps it’s the lens of time but the dud looks totally fine to me. Maybe by 50s standards not having rigidly Brylcreemed hair qualified you as Hobo McBeatpoet or something. The dudes of ‘Dream Phone however….well, take a look:


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Letting you down by shrinkage? That’s not the first time that’s happened!

I appreciate the gender-specificness of ‘Editress’, and that she gives her strongest recommendation, but the product could use a little less abbreviation. It’s practically a Wheel Of Fortune round as-is.

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