In my office, I have a three-foot high inflatable alien named “Hippocrates” (from a minor L. Ron Hubbard novel). For a while, he was by the door with a magazine taped to his hands, but he’s been lurking on top of a file cabinet for some years now. I also have a sign on the wall (in official highway style) that says “Speed Limit: C.” I don’t know if those are the very weirdest things I own (I have a plastic bottle from Lourdes – or maybe some other weird Catholic destination, I can’t remember – filled with tap water somewhere at home), but thay’re what I can think of right now.
My brother has a rifle (don’t know what make) turned into a floor lamp. How’s that?
I’ve got a Zenith SuperSport 8086 with dual floppies. Still take it on the road too. I have to do all my spreadsheets in pieces until I get back to the office and convert them from Lotus to Excel.
For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of viewing a backwards clock, picture if you will: the “12” is in the normal place, but the “11” and “1” are in each other’s places, as are the “2” and “10”, the “9” and “3” … get the idea? Then the hands rotate COUNTER-CLOCKWISE around the dial.
The kicker is, it tell the correct time, but most people don’t actually read the numbers, just glance at the position of the hands. It’s quite fun watching people do a double-take when they see that things are not quite right with that clock.
My fifth grade report card, class picture, and student of the month awards - also a book that I wrote that year about an alien, with my teacher’s editorial comments.
A collection of toys that I have won out of claw machines. My fave at the moment is a Marvin the Martian, which is on my desk at work.
A two foot high almost round stuffed hedgehog that I talked my hubby into buying for me in Ireland. Getting it home on the plane was interesting.
All three of my daughter’s casts. She’s an uncoordinated little thing, she is.
I also have a Diabolo, though I didn’t know it was called that.
A little place that I go to for lunch has a backwards clock too. They have it set up so that when you are sitting at the bar you can see the clock in the big mirror behind the bottles. Since you are looking at it in a mirror, it looks like a normal clock. Pretty cool.
Well, let’s see:
A piece of heartwood from a lightning-felled tree
A steel bas-relief bust of Athena (useful as a prop when reciting The Raven
A homemade and remarkably realistic stuffed raven, for the same purpose
A slide rule
Any given physics toy: A radiometer, a plasma sphere, a Galileo thermometer, a coin vortex, etc.
A shilleileigh
A wall plaque with a couple of fish heads mounted on it
A painted clay sculpture of a giraffe/elephant hybrid, homemade
tubagirl, i have a 2-foot ceramic elephant too, and I don’t consider it weird in the least. Unfortunately, I do not currently have a tuba… All of mine were school loaners.
Uhh Grendel, if I were you II would get rid of the depleted uranium FAST. The Canadian military has had a big scandal about the health risks of inhaling DU during the gulf war. The results of DU poisoning aren’t pretty.
Ohh yeah, I have a glow in the dark ceramic skull, and an indian axe head.
A cudgel, if I remember correctly from my DarkLands days, a piece of wood in a basic cone shape, about two to three feet long and six to nine inches diameter, rounded at all points, and carved at the skinny end to fit a hand.
I have (somewhere) a little cube, about 2.5 inches to a side, each side covered with that laser holographic foil stuff in really cool patterns… and when you pick it up off the surface it is sitting on it shouts “Put me down!” or “Get your dirty hands offa me!” or “AAAAHHHH!!!”
My father had a bowling trophy that was also a clock. One day my friend and I found it and plugged it in, and the damned thing actually ran backwards! We gave it a good “thwack” and made it run forwards again.
Naturally, we experimented with it (not like THAT, you pervs!), and we found that if we got the cord really twisted up, it would run backwards. Straighten it out, and it would run forwards. Striking it with an open palm could “reset” it from backwards to forwards, but never the reverse.