Passed Crap

When I was a kid my dad often went to Taiwan on business. And after conducting business, he often spent a day or two in Hong Kong with a huge shopping list his loving family (that would be us) compiled for him to get. (I suppose if he did not come home with it, we would be less than loving.) We kids really liked to get stuff (and we still do! Hint, hint) but we also just liked to casually mention to our friends that "oh, yeah, our dad's in Hong Kong again" and act like it was one big bore. (Hey, when you're only ten things like that seem really important.)

...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.

Mojo has done many things, gone many places and pursued many interests in her checkered past. Instead of taking a ton of pictures and/or buying t-shirts and other mementos, she has a tendency to store memories in her prodigiously large (aka "swelled") head. People occasionally take pictures and send copies to her under the mistaken impression she will treasure them forever, but what really happens is, she throws them in a box. Sure, she means someday to arrange them in a photo album and has even purchased some photo albums to do this, but she really can't be bothered. Hence her box o' photos sits there, and occasionally--if she leaves a picture out too long--the cat tries to lick the gelatin off of it.

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!)

Lest people accuse me of my usual intellectual snobbery, let me point out or admit or whatever verb you wish to use here that back when I was a wee lass I probably saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show at least a half a dozen times in the movie theatres. Not enough to be considered a raving dress-up fan, but I knew most of the songs and I knew what to do or shout or throw at all the appropriate times. And yes, it was great fun.

My first Rocky Horror experience was when I was in high school and I was invited by my collegiate brother to a midnight showing at the UConn campus in Storrs. This was UConn's pre-basketball fame days, when you could actually walk around the campus without being pelted with basketballs. I remember my first Rocky Horror jaunt as a complexity of mixed messages and nonsequiturs that (being the puerile fool that I am) make me giggle to this day.

What's almost as good as a Harvard degree but a lot less money and work? Must be a vintage Harvard beer stein! Yes, now you too can pretend you're one of the Old Boy Network and impress your beer-swilling pals with this-here beer stein. I'm not sure how old it is, but it was the property of a friend's father so I'm guessing it's probably older than me, which puts it around fifty. I don't know if he went to Harvard or not. All I know is, he had this-here beer stein, and now *I* am blessed with it. Lucky, lucky me. And soon to be lucky, lucky YOU if you win this auction!