Wow, blast from the past! I think my buddy bought his fiancee’s engagement ring at a Best Products store in the mid-90s.
Best made a big splash in the Sacramento area (where I grew up) with this very unusual store design, which looked like a hole had been blown out of the corner of the store (due to, say, a bomb). I guess the concept never really caught on, but it was eye-catching.
I’ve never been to a Best Products store, but I remember an article, possible in the 1970s monthly revival of Life Magazine, about the unusual designs of its stores (and there is a mention of this in the Wikipedia article about the company). I kind of wish other companies did things like that.
In addition to Rasputin’s, the Bay Area has another mini-chain of music stores called Amoeba.
Amoeba and Rasputins have stores located about a block apart from each other on Berkeley’s Telegraph Ave.
The Sacramento area had a chain of music stores called Dimple Records, which survived all the way to Sept 2019. They closed when their owners retired.
So I guess Northern California is a hotbed for surviving independent music stores.
Thanks for the explanation - I would never have figured it out on my own.
And *cojones *is a Spanish word, although apparently slang.
The industrial band Ministry borrowed the phrase for the name of their third album. I’d thought they’d made the name up as a play on words, and to be shocking. But Wikipedia says they saw it on a souvenir mug in Canada.
How about “Squat and Gobble and Squat Again”?
I have a friend that works for Dick’s. He went to college at Ball State. Sounds like a joke, but it ain’t.
There’s also Dick Blick Art Supplies. They had a Christmas party at the hotel I worked at while I was in college, and the “L” fell off the sign (or more likely was deliberately removed).
We went through a wave of this notion at my firm. “We don’t sell products, we sell solutions.” Ugh…
“Shear Ecstasy”. Or “Shear Bliss”. They’re right there for the taking.
Heh. Back in (community) college, I used to hang with a crowd in the theater arts department who were working on forming a sketch troupe (along the lines of Firesign Theatre). Their go-to protagonist/Everyman was a character named Kendall Phlegming.
Y’know, if you made an enchilada with a toroid form factor, “The Hole Enchilada” might actually be a pretty clever name for it.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I don’t think you two should be allowed to post consecutively…
In the early 70s a restaurant opened on campus called Sambo’s Pancake House. I think it was a chain. They had illustrations from the children’s book Little Black Sambo adorning the dining area. Even that long ago, the name and theme seemed quite wrong.
In the same token, there used to be a grocery chain called Pickaninny’s. I may be spelling that wrong because I couldn’t find a Google hit for it.
Nah. They make the little vermin fill out time cards and put cover sheets on TPS reports.
In the original book, Little Black Sambo was a dark-skinned South Indian child (hence the tigers). Later versions used stereotypical depictions of Africans (including the one I read as a child in the 1950s). The name of the restaurant chain was based on the knicknames of the original owners, Sam and Bo, but they used illustrations based on the books in decorating the restaurants. At least later on, they tried to emphasize that the character was Indian instead of African, and tried changing the name, but it didn’t work and they folded in the early 1980s.
And that’s kinda too bad, as they were pretty much the last bastion of the five-cent cup of coffee…
You can still visit the last Sambo’s, in Santa Barbara, CA. It has a nice view of the beach.
When my brother and I were younger, we loved Sambo’s in Southern California. I never knew or comprehended what the name meant until I was grown-up.
ZOMG there’s a Facebook page promoting locally owned restaurants in my region that deliver or do carryout, and earlier today, someone posted a picture of something like this! Granted, it was actually a burrito, but close enough. Unfortunately, he said it wasn’t very good, and proceeded to get piled on by people who told him to take his negative review to Yelp.
I thought Sambo’s turned into Denny’s? Maybe that’s only how it happened in my neck of the woods.