The Old Dark House

Plastic Pumpkins: The Deleted Scenes

Hey! Since I don't have a camera or scanner to help me come up with something new to post why don't I dig through all my old files and see if I can find some crap that I scanned or photoed in the past and then never bothered to write about for whatever reason and then write about those reasons. That sounds close enough to an actual idea to just barely fly...

This first pic of some of my PEZ dispensers displayed on an old spice rack was originally going to be some sort of Plastic Pumpkin's Thrift Shop Design helpful hints type post. My helpful hint... old spice racks make excellent PEZ displays. Couldn't really flesh that out into an entire post...

Here are some old ride tickets from Lakeside Park. Lakeside was an old amusement park in Salem, VA that was torn down years and years ago. My only memory of the place was of me in a stroller being pushed alongside of a creaky old wooden coaster that seemed on the verge of imminent collapse. This may not really be a memory from my own childhood and might instead be a memory from the made-for-TV-movie, "Death of Ocean View Park," a truly, truly atrocious movie that I would sell my best friend to a blood-drinking cult in order to see again. If anybody knows where I can get a DVD of this movie please let me know. I will go bootleg. I'm not afraid to say it!

Sidebar: another interesting thing about Lakeside Park was that it was torn down and replaced by a shopping center that is called "Lakeside Plaza" or something along those lines, which is an example of a phenomenon that I call "Naming Shopping Centers After The Shit You Tore Up In Order To Build Them" as there is no longer a lake or Lakeside on that spot. Other local examples include; "Orchard Hill Shopping Center" which sits on a hill that ain't got no orchards on it any more, and "Willow Lawn Shopping Center" which has neither of those two things, unless you count the cartoon willow on the sign and your idea of a 'lawn' is 'asphalt.' Take a look around your own neighborhoods for more fun examples.

This is a weird Greco-Roman-esque (I don't really know what any of that means!) temple that sits at the very back end of a local church's graveyard. It's kind of weird in that it's a Greco-Roman-esque(It really sounds like I know what I'm talking about! Ha!) temple at the back end of a small Southern Church and for the fact that the grand staircase you see leading up to the temple is facing away from the church and the rest of the graveyard and towards an overgrown back corner of the property and an empty neighboring field. In order to approach the temple head on, you must first sneak in through the back, walk down that flight of stone stairs and then turn around and walk right back up them. This was weird enough that I thought it might make for an interesting edition of 'From The Plastic Pumpkin's Case Files,' but no... it wasn't that interesting. For those of you asking yourselves "How would that have differed from every other Case Files post?" I say to you... just shut up!

Here's a close-up of the Greco-Roman-esque(I think I saw that word in a Wonder Woman comic!) temple. Still not interesting...

Here is a picture taken from afar. Slightly interesting, but too little too late.

Ya'll remember Simzilla don't ya? Back in the day, Simzilla was a favorite here a the big PP. That was back before I forgot where I put my Sims CD. Now the only things we have to remember him by are these two never before seen clips...

This first scene was from a never finished episode entitled "Taxi Cabs Never Stop For Kaiju." In it you would have watched as poor Simzilla tries to hail a cab after an evening of barhopping. Taxi after taxi would have sped right past him without slowing down until poor Simzilla was forced to take the bus home. This episode of Simzilla was going to be heavy on social commentary disquised as sci-fi adventure, much like "Star Trek," "X-Men," or "The Death of Ocean View Park." It was too hard to make it look like Simzilla was hailing a cab (he just kinda stands there looking at them as they drive by) so the whole thing was scrapped. Plus, 'social commentary?' Who the hell am I, Maya Angelou?

This is Simzilla being frightened by a plastic flamingo. Amusing, but limited story potential.

I was going to use this picture of dead leaves as the background for some sort of Hallowe'en logo back in '06 before I remembered that I was lazy. In '07 I remembered early on that I was lazy and went the black Sharpie on index card route and passed it off as a plot point. Suckers!

I thought that I might come up with something funny to say about this old magazine ad, but no go. Seems like there should be something in there, though.

I had some sort of "Night of the Living Dead Gingerbread Men" thing going on here that never really went anywhere.

I have no idea how I've amassed that many Candyland game pieces...

And last, but not least... or should I say "L st, but not l ast?"... at the time that I took this picture I thought that it was friggin' hilarious. "Who's L?" I thought, "And does he know what they have in store for him on Thursday." Then, when I was no longer really, really, very drunk, I realized that it wasn't all that funny. Luckily, I'm really, really, very drunk right now so I'm laughing my ass off.

I just reread this post and realized that I used the word 'shit' a few paragraphs back. I usually like to keep the blog four-letter word free, but I'm feeling a little PG-13 tonight so fuck it.

Memories... Light The Corners Of My Mind

So... yeah. How you been?

So what's the deal with the no posts since April? What's that and what is up with it? Where is that going and what's it gonna do when it gets there?

Well, first I drop my camera over a waterfall (true story), then I accidently knock an unopened bottle of Coke, and I mean one of those heavy glass mothers, off my desk and onto my scanner which was sitting right below it with the lid up and which made a cracky, tinkly sound when a Coke bottle was dropped on it (true story) and then I made angry, shaky Basil Fawlty fists in God's direction and then tripped over a moose head.

True story.

So without a camera or a scanner and with not enough gumption to just make up my mind which new camera and scanner I want to buy to replace them I haven't had much blog-worthy material to post in the past month. I almost resorted to "What I Had To Eat Today Posts" just to keep things humming along around here. Today I ate Minty Chocolate S'moreo TIE-Fighters. Yummy!

So anyway, it's Memorial Day. And, since I can't let a holiday pass by without a post, here are some pictures of memorials that I took at a local cemetary a few months back...

Seven Minutes In Heaven

Have I ever mentioned before on this blog here that I'm gonna marry Stevie Nicks. I sometimes forget to bring this up when I meet new people. I realized that I was going to marry her when I was about twelve years old, so at this point in my life it's such a given that I forget that not everybody knows this about me... I'm gonna marry Stevie Nicks someday. Don't know when. Have to meet her first. She has some top-notch security working for her, but I'm nothing if not tenacious. And lacking in common sense. And I've pretty much convinced everyone who's known me for more than a few years that this is going to happen at some point in the future, so when the black-laced trimmed wedding invites show up in their mailboxes one day they'll give a quick look and just say, "I think I'm free that day." Plus, you're all invited as well.

Why do I bring this up now? Because I just found this six minute and fifty-one second long clip of Stevie standing in a recording booth and not doing much of nothing but looking pretty, singing the words "Ooooh, yeah" a couple of times and bouncing. Oh, how she bounces...

If you love Stevie as much as I do (and I know that you do not, because you're not the one who's gonna marry her one day!) then you'll stay glued to this vid until the very end. Those non-Stevie lovers among you will be bored within the first eleven seconds, so you should just go meander through the links section and come back here another day...

'Cause Moody's How I Feel

I'm not usually one to let the weather affect my general disposition, I'm much too self-involved for most external things to have any bearing on my life at all. Everything outside of a 1/2 foot radius of myself is pretty much just a meaningless blur of shapes and colors which only catch my attentions when they wave food or money beneath my nose. This past week has been a whole 'nother story... a couple of weeks into Spring and we're still getting nothing but gloomy, overcast days full of drizzle, sleet, hail and 30 degree temperatures. I'm over all this and have been over it since late February and now it's gone past being a minor annoyance and has put me into a foul, dark mood for this whole week passed. I'm just wandering the city streets looking for people to yell at and when that fails I start looking for kitties and fluffy bunnies and seeing if I can make them cry.

We're heading into the second week of April and I need to be sitting in the garden sipping my icy cold mint juleps while fanning myself and humming soft hymns to the evening stars and instead I'm huddled up in the pouring rain thinking up new and poetic ways to besmirch the names of various deities every time another gutter full of ice water splashes down the back of my neck. Fie!

But the flowers are beginning to bloom in spite of the weather so yesterday afternoon I thumbed my nose at pneumonia and went outside to commune with the garden. And I found that the garden looked as soggy, rusted and mildew covered as I felt...

This last picture is dedicated to the strange little girl who followed me around the Goodwill store the other day screaming "The eensy, beansy spider climbed up the water spout..." over and over and over again until I finally had to scream, "It's 'itsy-bitsy' you idiot!"

Sorry about the whole 'making you screech and run away' thing, strange little girl.

Things Found In A Thrift Store Baggie

A $1.00 baggie hasn't brought this much fun since the early 1970's...

These books are full of other people's spit.

Apart from the vision of Reddy Kilowatt in a French maid's outfit, the strangest thing about this mish-mash of 'Up With Electricity' clip art is the fact that it's the centerfold spread of an otherwise Reddy-free church auxillary cookbook. So random...


Tell him I sent you.

April Foolery