....Yes, you read correctly....

Ya know, despite the Craptacular name, sometimes I sell things that are actually quite nice.

This is not one of them.

This is about as "What were they THINKING?" as they come. And this time, dear Craptacular reader, I must place the fault not with the giver—who no doubt had the exact same open-mouthed reaction that I had when I first saw this—but instead on the shoulders of whatever heartless corporation and/or creative committee or starving artiste that first came up with this object d'arte.

Ah, yes, the early Eighties. The beginning of the "Me Decade". An innocent time, when innocent, gentle jokes saturated the media and got flogged to death through overexposure, instead of the stuff nowadays that you actively *wish* would get flogged to death in a more literal sense. Mean, nasty, cynical things like the Craptacular was the last thing on the mind of a substantially younger Mojo, so chock full of promise, as she kissed public school goodbye forever and entered the hallowed halls of a private college, complete with hidden dorm fees and "Whaddaya mean, 'that'll be seven hundred dollars'? They're only textbooks!" at the campus store.

Who doesn't like kids, huh? And who doesn't want their kids to grow up to be creative, precocious, obnoxious little geniuses like our beloved Mojo?

When Mojo was a child it was just occurring to a bunch of hippies that they could mold and twist young minds as one might shape a lump of Play-doh, and thus destroy the Establishment from within. There were no magnet schools or "gifted" programs as there were when my Favorite Younger Sister attended school. No, when they were not traumatizing me with the Junior Fire Marshall program ("if you don't make your parents get rid of that half-used quart paint can in your garage, rest assured you will BURN TO DEATH IN YOUR BED!"), I was subject to all manner of psychological experiments, like the infamous Open Classroom of Third Grade, a la the famous/infamous "Summerhill" program over in England. During our Open Classroom, we were allowed to skip about the room and do what we wanted for a year.

...plus make exciting penguin-shaped ICE CUBES!

Given the popularity of March of the Penguins, let's begin this description with a rhetorical question: Who doesn't like penguins? Apparently there is at least one person out there who can't stand them, judging by what they have done to this poor innocent penguin who never hurt anyone.

As we all know, a recurring theme of the Craptacular is yet another rhetorical question: What were they THINKING? Mojo likes to ask rhetorical questions for two reasons. The first is, she likes to use the word "rhetorical" because she thinks using big words makes her look smarter than she actually is. But also she is particularly fond of rhetorical questions because she likes to hear herself talk, and should she open the floor to others by asking them a question that actually required an answer it might cut into HER valuable talking time.

Despite my happy childhood, I am not without my childhood traumas. Since my upbringing itself was relatively uneventful, I used my active imagination to create dangers and drama where none existed. They ran the gamut from the obvious character-building traumas (i.e my parents never let us buy a pony and keep him in our suburban garage, due to some wild injustice they called "zoning laws") to things known only to myself. I reveal some of them them here for the first time.

Some are shared by many—circus clowns, of course, which soon morphed into clown dolls and from there to Evil Clown Dolls That Strangle You In Your Sleep. I also had an intense dislike of Raggedy Ann and Andy (the only difference between the two was Andy apparently wore a kicky sailor hat). I did not like Raggedy Ann because I was given a book of her stories and the illustrations had these dolls walking around interacting with real things (animals and whatnot) in a manner I found most unnatural and spooky. (My concerns proved to be well-founded when I got older and read of that famous evil ghost-hunting husband and wife team who had a demon-possessed Raggedy Ann who apparently tried to strangle her owners in their sleep. You see? They are Evil, I tell you! Eeeeeeevil!)

Weird ceramic duck sponge holder thingie

Okay, so I think we've determined I'm not the greatest housekeeper out there. But hey—even if I may be the anti-Martha I can still spot useless crap at a hundred yards. This is one of those things.

I suppose if you like little ceramic duckies you will like this. But a scrubber sponge the size of a postage stamp? Um, when I make a mess, it's not a dainty little thing that requires a swipe with a tiny thing like that. Think more along the lines of "open gallon of paint being flung about the room by an angry gorilla".