I caught the Discovery Channel’s Oddities this weekend and I could not look away. The shows I saw featured both a sword-swallower and a contortionist “blockhead” (he puts 10 inch nails up his nose), a mortician cum model cum clothes designer and a guy with a mummified cat who traded it in for a hundred dollars and a mounted two-headed cow head.
It would be fantastic if this show keeps getting these far out antiques and, well, oddities. My favorite segment was a walk in who was cleaning out his deceased grandfather’s stuff and stumbled upon what he thought were Civil War musket balls in a glass jar. The male proprietor told him no, they were not musket balls-- they were gallbladder stones.
“I was going to ask for 50 dollars when I thought they were musket balls but now I think I’ll ask for 150.”
“Well, these are really nice gallbladder stones but they aren’t great. This one here is a great one,” the proprietor says as he pulls out a stone as big as a tennis ball.
You gotta wonder if these are real, very quirky people or if it’s all a set up.