# I see your American Pickers and Pawn Shop and raise you one Oddities.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-see-your-american-pickers-and-pawn-shop-and-raise-you-one-oddities/564041>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [December 13, 2010, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-see-your-american-pickers-and-pawn-shop-and-raise-you-one-oddities/564041 "2010-12-13T22:08:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-see-your-american-pickers-and-pawn-shop-and-raise-you-one-oddities/564041/1 "2010-12-13T22:08:05Z")

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I caught the [Discovery Channel’s Oddities](http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/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.