Usefully Useless

Several months ago I showed you some items I'd found at thrift stores for a dollar or less. I have an eye for the kind of oddball thing that maybe only I can appreciate. I call them the usefully useless, which means that they are kind of orphan objects. They stand out to me, but have no real use except maybe one, if even that. Every time I look at them I think, "I oughtta get rid of that useless crap." But then I think, "Someday I might make use of it."

It's probably the same reasoning that caused me to pick up the item I call Hippie Boy. It's a bookend, unfortunately just one of a pair. I kept my eyes open for years looking for Hippie Boy's mate. I didn't know whether he'd been part of a pair with a Hippie Girl or another Hippie Boy. No matter. I never found either one. Hippie Boy is a caricature of a college student, circa 1970 or so. He has long orange hair and an orange mariner's beard. He's about 19 or 20 years old, wearing a flowered shirt and sandals. He even has glasses with the eyeballs painted on. Over the years as memories fade the image of a hippie has replaced what hippies or even college students really looked like in those days. The one thing I found about Hippie Boy that seemed close to my recollections of the era is that his feet are dirty. They weren't when I bought the item in the 1980s for a dollar. They got that way from sitting on my dusty shelf holding some books against a wall. I remember that about hippies: barefoot or sandaled, a lot of them had really dirty feet.Click on the pictures for full-size images.

The other item is what I call the Tattooed Poodle. He's a bank, but for some strange reason, known only to the designer, he's decorated with some really strange marks. I like him. He sits on a shelf with about 15¢ in change inside him to make him useful.The last item is my favorite. It's a hand carving, a woman with a broomstick stuck up her butt. She's about 18" tall with the handle. In looking at the item, which I picked up several years ago in a thrift store in Logan, Utah, for $1.00, I think I know where the unknown Gepetto started carving, and maybe his impetus to carve a woman. There are marks on the wood that look like nipples. One on the right protrudes, the one on the left is inverted, but he probably looked at a piece of wood, said, "Hey, that looks like boobs!" and got out his pocketknife. You can see he even crudely made some dress folds with a wood burner tool. The bonnetted lady has a big nose and a sharp-toothed smile. When my wife looked at it with her usual look of, "What the hell do you want that ugly thing for?" she asked, "What do you think it's used for?"
I looked at it and said, "It's a hubby-bopper. Like a rolling pin." I made a pantomime of bouncing it off my skull. "Guy comes in late, wife grabs the hubby-bopper to let him know he's gone wrong." Luckily my wife's never used the hubby-bopper on me. It's heavy. It'd hurt. Thank god that for now it remains a useless object.

Ciao for now.