Wednesday, June 3, 2015

4 Things Found In The Last Week


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5 comments:

Parm said...

"Found?" Or, to be more complete, "Brought home?"

If I approach this grouping of images like it were an SAT question, the mushroom is clearly the odd-man out. I think . . . .

I was back and forth about whether that yellow thing is a duck or a platypus (or something else that perhaps doesn't even occur in nature). I decided it was a duck, even though I can't tell if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

Not sure why, but clearly my immediate (and entire) reaction to that collection of images was to treat it as a problem to be solved.

June 4, 2015 at 9:43 AM
W. "Not a hoarder (yet?)" Biscuit said...

Background on this week's image:

These items were all "discovered" quite by happenstance while wandering around the streets of San Jose. The duck/platypus thing caught my eye when I was riding my bike...I wondered what the heck it was supposed to be. I figured I'd take a photo and see if I could find a match via a google image search. I also thought it might be blogworthy in some way.

A day or two later I came across the oreilly.com elephant sticker on my way back from getting a haircut--I thought it would be a nice addition to the stickers on my Road Trip ephemera container.

The day after that I saw the Shiitake pin walking home from Whole Foods...and the concept for a "found items" blogpost solidified.

I discovered the final piece, the broken-off porcelain elephant head, on my lunchtime walk at work...it was kind of an "A-ha!" moment, sort of a cosmic inspiration that put it all together. So now you know the rest of the story.

June 4, 2015 at 2:40 PM
Elaine said...

I think it's a platypus, not a duck, just saying...

June 5, 2015 at 10:40 AM
yawndave said...

Yeah, I thought it was a platypus too. It's just kinda odd--I've never seen a small platypus squeeze toy before.

June 6, 2015 at 8:32 AM
Parm said...

I'm quite happy to call that thing a platypus. But it surely is fanciful.

We have a number of so-called silver beetle boxes that are "boxes" in that they have a "box" and a "top" that is hinged to the "box" and that were originally intended to contain beetle nuts (good for chewing, getting a mild buzz, and then for spitting out a chewing tobacco-like nasty red wad). Anyway, these things are 3D animals that are quite intricate, typically hammered out slowly by Thai or Cambodian craftsman squatting in some jungle. The animals are quite realistic when they represent something found in those jungles. So, rats, cats, and tigers are quite realistic. Things can get a little weird when they work from pictures, memory, or whatever, however. The animals start to get odd proportion, features, and sometimes extra-accoutrements that seem borrowed from some other animal.

Point of all that is, perhaps that same circumstance lies behind the designing of this duck-like critter?

June 7, 2015 at 9:47 AM

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