Stuffed AHHHHHHH!!nimal

@pastelgothsloth on Twitter writes:

This is still the best thing I’ve ever stumbled upon in a thrift store

I tried to look up information about HOW THIS COULD HAPPEN, and—amid stories of hilarious mix-ups at the Maytag factory—I found an article about a Mexican drug cartel that stitched a man’s face onto a football as a warning to a rival drug gang. So…now we all know that happened.

The moral of this story is never Internet. Ever.

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The Poster of the Loneliest Person in the World

See also: The Coffee Mug of the Loneliest Person in the World.

Okay, yes, it’s cute; yes, teddy bears are awesome. (Also yes, that $12 price tag is the craziest thing.)

But holy sh*t, how bad do your friends have to be before you come up with some of these? “Teddy bears are great! They don’t laugh at your clothes!” “They never tell you you’re too fat!” “They never sleep with your boyfriend and wait until your wedding day to tell you!” I sort of want to give this person a hug, but I’m afraid their hug muscles are so atrophied that their chest would just cave in.

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VH-YES: Beanie Lover Video

Welcome, yard sale adventurers, to My New Favorite Thing!: finding weirdo VHS tapes at yard sales/thrift shops/dollar stores that haven’t been uploaded to YouTube yet, and making them available for the whole world to enjoy. (…Until I’m carted away by the Internet Police, anyway.)

FIRST UP:

Sleepin’ with the Horsies

@beezlebrat on Twitter writes:

Today we found a pillow at goodwill that is a dead horse head? Idk we bought it

I can only assume this is what you leave in the bed of a four year old when you want to send them a message (about eating their peas or whatever). Either that, or someone’s making a Torsey plush and this was the leftover bits.

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A Murder of Alfs

Alternate title: BEST CUDDLE PARTY EVER (UNLESS YOU’RE A CAT)

I think my favorite Alfs (Alves?) in this pile have to be the themed ones—“Cooking with Alf” and “Generic Sportsman Alf” (not to mention “is actually Gizmo from Gremlins Alf”). Reminds me of when they ran out of Ninja Turtles and started making action figures out of what-if scenarios, like “what if Raphael went back in time and starred in the 1932 film The Mummy?”

(Yes, that’s real. It’s not “Raphael as a mummy.” It’s Raphael, specifically as a mummy from the 1932 film The Mummy. You can see a whole list of the weirdest Ninja Turtle figures here.)

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The Hundred-Acres War

NO!! NOOOOOOOO!!!

What they were going for: “Awww, how cute! It’s a little baby doll dressed in a Pooh bear outfit!”

What they actually made: BRING ME THE SKIN OF POOH

3 Guys, 3 Rugs

The Best and Worst of Today’s Yardsales

Worst: The guy who was charging $10 for a used tissue box, and just wouldn’t hear of me bargaining him down to five. Me: “So, would you maybe take half for that?” Him (and I have to stress that this is an exact quote): “HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNGH.”

Worst: The sale I went to that was just three old dudes selling three area rugs (one rug each), and nothing else.

Double Worst: They advertised it as a “multifamily yardsale.”

Triple Worst: It took me ten minutes of driving around to find it.

Worst: The Cranky Old Couple who couldn’t stop sniping at each other at their yardsale. “Whaddya MEAN you couldn’t find the SpongeBob tape?! THE SPONGEBOB TAPE IS RIGHT HERE, YOU MORON!” “Well what the hell’s it doing right there?! WHO TOLD YOU TO PUT IT RIGHT THERE, YOU MORON?!” Meanwhile, a third supposed adult was screaming his head off at his crying child for crying (which did not make her stop), while a fourth was very insistent that I purchase his 1980s-era electronics. “It’s like-new!” he said, scraping a few flakes of rust off of it.

Double Worst: I drove two towns out of my way to visit this yardsale because the Craigslist ad said that it was their last one ever, and they wanted to share this special day with everyone.

Connecticut Prices

You know what? I’m just going to say it—screw anyone who posts their Craigslist ads more than a week in advance. I ended up driving 15 minutes out of my way today in search of a neighborhood-wide sale that ended up not existing, because the stupid listing was posted a week early, and I hadn’t noticed.

…Okay, granted, if I had actually looked at the date in the listing, I would’ve realized that it wasn’t today. BUT WHATEVER. There’s no need to get your ads out that early; nobody cares! Do you really think someone’s going to be like “Well, I was planning to visit my nonnie in the hospital that morning, but NEVERMIND! THERE’S A YARDSALE! CLEAR MY CALENDAR!” These people are almost as bad as the jerks who only hold their sales on Fridays, WHEN EVERYONE’S WORKING, YOU DUMMIES! MAN!!

…

Okay, I’m done fumigating now. Here’s some stuff I found.

Season Finale

And so the yardsale season comes to kind of a puttering end, as so often it does.

This week my wife Lizo joined me, for one of only a few times this season, because I believe she’s put off by just how much time I put into looking through people’s future-garbage. There weren’t a lot of nearby sales to choose from this week, and so we had a big decision to make—the kind that all couples have to go through at some point in their relationship:

Did we want to visit the big church sale on one end of town, and risk smelling like old people for the rest of the day? Or did we want to visit the “30-vendor sale” at the high school on the other end of town, and risk having to find nothing but vendors?

We went with the latter, and while we didn’t actually buy all that much (more on that in a bit), we still managed to find a few choice products:

“Homemade” banana bread! I shudder to think of the meaning behind the quotation marks. Is it something as innocuous as “we actually just bought them from a store”? Or is it something more sinister, like “enjoy your loaf of razorblades, bloody-mouth!” We steered clear, for obvious reasons.

“Using Wayside Plants” (and also fish)

I’m developing a new-found appreciation for estate sales. Previously, I’d just seen them as a dumping ground for adult-goods, and not the cool kinds with naughty bits protruding everywhere; I’m talking about ratty linens, little porcelain cat figurines, and spoon collections. And I’m not wrong—that’s still 90% of what they sell at these things (note: that statement is not intended to be factual)—but they can be a lot of fun if you don’t see them as a yardsale, exactly, but as a living museum (where all the exhibits happen to be on sale).

I visited one last Saturday, and I couldn’t help but—prepare to be stunned—think of it as a videogame. Have you ever played BioShock, or basically any other RPG-style game set in a post-apocalyptic world? (This is where we really separate my audience who’s familiar with my other work from those who just want to read about yardsales, dammit.) One of the primary story-telling devices those games use is that of the found-object; much of your in-game time is spend just exploring your surroundings, picking up things, examining them, and learning about those who came before you and what happened to them. It was hard not to think of that as I’d explore a living room, and spot books about journalism and writing on a shelf, or visit an office, and spy old stationary with the letterhead from our local paper—objects telling a small part of the story of who these people were.

Maybe I’ll start a new blog called The Yardsale Detective. Or possibly a series of best-selling novels.