It's All Relative

Saw this yesterday— there's a new bargain store opening here in my hometown.

Take a long hard look at the store's mascot. Apparently Albert Einstein is alive and well, going by the name of "Ollie" and selling quality items at reasonable prices in Evansville, Indiana!

"When you shop in Ollie's Bargain Outlet for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you shop in a Walmart for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity."

Flea Market Finds

I went to a flea market this past weekend and scored a couple of new (to me!) items. First up is this attractive print from the "Sad-Eyed Kid" style so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It's about three feet tall and it'll look great on the Wall Of Tackiness. Best of all, it was only $15. It was originally $20, which I was more than willing to pay, but the lady selling it talked herself down to $15 for some reason, with nary a word from me. Someone needs to tell her that's not how you negotiate....

This was most likely part of a matched set of paintings. These things tended to come in pairs, so at one time there was probably a painting of a Harlequin boy in a matching outfit.

The only bad part: now I'm gonna have to rearrange the entire ferkakte wall to make room for it.

Then I found this little guy. It's apparently a hip flask with a rubbery drunk guy's head as a cap. I think the head looks a lot like something I would draw; it's definitely similar to my style. Maybe that's why I couldn't resist it. I like the drawing of the body as well; it's got a definite 1960s look about it.

The only thing I don't like? The flask is made from plastic, much like a bottle of Bactine. Every hip flask I've ever seen (which admittedly is not a large number) has been made of metal. You carry it in your back pocket, right? A metal flask is more likely to hold its shape when you sit on it, unlike a plastic one which will explode in your pants the minute you take your seat. A plastic hip flask is about as useful as a cardboard step ladder. Oh well. I still like his head.

Maybe one of these days I can find a nice metal hip flask and paint a body on it and then transfer his head to it. For purely decorative purposes only, of course. I don't normally carry around a hip flask full of booze.

Now that I think of it, where do you even buy a hip flask? At a liquor store, maybe? I don't drink booze, so I honestly have no idea where you'd find one.

The Past Ain't What It Used To Be

Last weekend I went to a flea market mall here in town. You know, the kind that has dozens of individually owned booths inside. This is the largest such place I've ever seen, as it's located in what was once a large, two storey department store.

Time was when I went to flea markets I'd see items mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, with an occasional helping of 1980s ephemera. Things that would make you say, "Hey, I remember that! I haven't thought about those things in years!" Dried up Lava Lamps and Six Million Dollar Man lunchboxes; things like that.

Not any more. It's been years since I've found a decent Tiki mug at a flea market. These days when I go to one everything there is from the recent past. And I do mean recent. On this particular visit I saw wheelbarrows full of Hanna Montana items, dozens of High School Musical DVDs and about a metric ton of Silly Bandz. That stuff all came out in the past couple of years. Even less in the case of the Silly Bandz.

I assume this is a side effect of the public's gradually diminishing attention span. It used to take a year or more for a fad to burn itself out. Now thanks to the internet, today's hot new sensation becomes old news in a month or less. Soon fads will be popping up and going out of style in the same day.

Since it's destined to end up there anyway, maybe the manufacturers of all this crap should cut out the middle man and just deliver it from their factories straight to the flea market!