I wondered about the descriptor. I almost said ‘random’, but I don’t particularly like ‘random’ being used in that way. What I meant was more like ‘Why the hell would anyone have one of those?’
Back in about 1975 my girlfriend received a package from her aunt in Kansas. We were in southeastern Idaho at the time. We found in the package a desiccated salamander that had somehow crawled in the package before it got mailed. I had it sitting on my bookshelf for many years. Eventually the tail broke off. Now it’s in a box of keepsakes in the crawl space. Last time I saw it it was a dull gray-green color.
Speaking of mummified, we now have a mummified satsuma orange in our kitchen. It’s about 2 1/2 years old. When guests come over we have them rub the orange for luck.
Well I have a bunch of trilobite fossils, some I bought and some I dug myself from a quarry in Nevada, so I don’t consider it particularly unusual. But if that’s the weirdest thing you got, roll with it.
Well I have a
chunk of the Berlin Wall.
an antique bugle from the 7th Cav
Two little figures that were purchased in Japan in the 50’s that are made of the tusk of some animal.
Actually a lot of little figures that I took from my mother’s home after she died so I have a bunch of ‘old lady figurines’.
Not that strange, but we have a few animal skulls: two deer, a raccoon (I think), a dog, and a tiny delicate bird skull.
Stranger, not in appearance but in circumstance, is the pair of figurines we have. About three inches tall, ceramic, they depict a small boy and girl in winter clothes that look like they were attached together at one time. One was found a few feet under the ground when my husband’s parents were digging to put in a new septic tank in their front yard. The other was found a year or so later in our back yard, again a few feet down, when digging to put in utilities for our new house. Granted, the properties are next to each other, but it still seems a bit unreal that given the whole of each property, the figurines just happened to be where we dug.
I forgot I do have one rather bizarre item. (At least, I thought so when I first saw it) An electric pizza cutter. The Regal Pizza Pal Electric Pizza Cutter. Not so much that it is electric, (but really, how hard is it to cut pizza that you need more power to do it?) but how it works. You’d think it’d work like a circular saw, but no, it is shaped like a regular rotary pizza cutter, but goes in and out, and angled not so much as to make the cutter roll, but more so it punches the pizza! I’m sure it depends on the angle you hold it while cutting, but the picture on the box doesn’t help at all.
Washboard - it was intended as a musical instrument
Plastic pith helmet - purchased for a LARP-kind of thing
Antique tailcoat - it was my great uncle’s
Until recently, I had jars and jars of traditional Chinese medicine concoctions. My mom went through a phase where she dabbled in Chinese medicine and nagged me to try it to solve some of my minor “problems” - being too bony despite hearty appetite, not having a good enough complexion, etc. She introduced me to this TCM doctor who wrote out a prescription that I took to a Chinese herbalist. Now, there are “normal” ingredients like ginseng and mushrooms and stuff like that. But there are also lots of bizarre ones like seahorses, geckos, lizards, and earthworms. I don’t really want to know what’s in mine…
Do you tell people he was buried in it?