Tag Archives: Found items

A small box of things

Things

I have, once again, taken all the stuff out of my attic closet in the hopes that at some future time I will have a nearly empty closet. Yeah, that’s going to happen.

boxOne of the things I have kept, for unknown reasons, is a small box from the Joseph Spiess Company store in Elgin. It was a gift from my best friend at the time, Cindy. I think it either held my POW bracelet or else a gold metal mesh belt ring. Cindy wrote, “That’s a put-on!” on the cover of the box because she purchased the gift somewhere other than Spiess and used the box in which to put the gift. Spiess was an upper-end store — somewhere we certainly didn’t shop, and I guess Cindy’s family didn’t either, very much.

Inside the box now are three apparently random items.

ceramic figure with no head, holding a basketOne is a white decapitated ceramic figurine in a dress, holding a basket. I have no idea where it came from or why I kept it in the box. I vaguely recall finding it in the dirt somewhere.

monkeyAnother item is a one-eyed plastic monkey with a hole in its head which probably once held a tuft of hair. The monkey probably came out of a gumball machine, but I have no recollection about when it.

The third is a spark plug.

spark plugThe only item I know for sure why I kept was the spark plug. I kept it because my dad used to give me old spark plugs to play with. I guess I liked the combination of ceramic and metal. Or something.

These are going in the trash today. Honestly. Three down and 10,000 things to go.

A Modern Fairy Tale in Pictures

Memories, Things,

The things I find in my mother’s extra bedroom! This latest find is an anniversary card I made for my folks on their 24th anniversary. That would have made me 22 years old. Let’s agree that the artistic genes in the family skipped a generation and not mention it again. My artwork at 22 is worse than my mother’s at a much younger age. Also I was a poor speller.

Note, if you click on one of the photos it will take you to a slideshow which may be easier to navigate.

Guns and saccharine

Things, ,

Drawing of a handgun with the caption "This killed 9000 Americans last year. Drawing of a pack of saccharin with the caption: This killed 4 white rats...Caption under both reads "Can you guess which one's been banned?"

Back during the Reagan administration I clipped this political cartoon out of the paper. I don’t know if it was the Elgin Daily Courier News or the Chicago Tribune (or even the Chicago Sun-Times). I taped it to the front of my desk at the school where I worked. While the message was probably lost on the moderately functioning developmentally disabled students I taught, at least the teachers who popped into my room would know I was for gun-control.

I’ve not changed. I despise guns. I truly believe that if we had better gun control (I cannot see the United States ever banning guns) we would not have the same murder rate in this country.

Unfortunately the gun control issue has become very contentious in recent years. Gun proponents call on the Second Amendment and claim that guns are not responsible for the gun deaths in the country. Those in favor of gun control point out that if the guns were not available to most of the folks who pulled the triggers the people they shot would still be alive. To me it is obvious who is right. It is clear as day to me that if we had better gun control those 20 children killed in Newtown, MA would have celebrated another birthday. The 32 college students killed at Virginia Tech would have graduated by now and the 12 people murdered during the Batman movie in Aurora, CO would still be alive and able to watch more movies.

The number of gun deaths in 2013 is reported to be 12,000 according to http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/president-obama-gun-control-push, however there is really no data on gun violence anymore because the Republicans blocked the CDC from researching gun violence saying they didn’t want to fund propaganda. (http://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-say-no-to-cdc-gun-violence-research)

Yes, the saccharin comparison is a bit misleading. It turns out that saccharin was never banned in the United States, although, according to http://enhs.umn.edu/current/saccharin/reghistory.html, in 1981, probably the year this cartoon ran in the paper, “The National Toxicology Program (NTP) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listed saccharin and its salts as “anticipated human carcinogen” based on Canadian rat studies.”

Anyway, I wanted to make sure this clipping was saved and I was able to tell the story of how I came to have it in my collection of everything.