A Place for My Stuff

Happy Halloween 2010!

 

RIP, Screamin' Jay!

 

Ask yourself, "Would I Put My Mouth On This Thing?"

When you dig up an old item that was designed to have your mouth put on it, ask yourself: "Would I put my mouth on this thing again?"  Maybe if it was a trumpet or some other thing worth cleaning. 

But this gnarley straw?

No. I don't want to try to rationalize this one.  Into the trash you go.

Bar codes and wingding codes

Even more oddities found during my last move:

1. Business card.  Unlike how most business cards are just picked up off a table or something, this was actually given to me by the guy named on the card.  I remember being at Ryles Jazz Club, probably seeing Niacin (and boy, I wish they would update that site.  Ditto for Billy Sheehan's.)  I got to share a table with 3 forty-something adults, two guys and a gal.  We were talking and it turned out that one of the guys was a drummer.  He gave me his card.  I think I only talked to him once or twice through the email, and basically I wasn't ready to jump into another band at that time.  Now wasn't that a great story?   There, now you know.

2. UPC stickers.  I think these were peeled from IBC rootbeer bottles.  The only time I remember needing rootbeer product UPCs for anything was about 20 years ago, to send away for Barq's Metal Bites cassette compilation.  And that was Barq's, not IBC.  I'm guessing I was saving these so that I could stick them on a can or bottle that I normally couldn't recycle on one of those can recycling machines.  So I'd get a whopping dime out of the deal.  I suppose I could try illegally printing them up and sticking them on other cans, but when you consider how much printer ink costs it would probably work out to be not much better.

3.  Strange Wingdings font selection.  Here's another item that had my memory gears turning.  I tink I do vaguely remember what it was.  I saw all of these keystrokes from the Wingdings font somewhere, either on a sign or a web site.  This was at one of my previous jobs.  I thought that maybe it was a code for something, like for example a few words that would look normal in a typical font, but of course would just look like a bunch of symbols in Wingdings.  So I "translated" it, and...it still didn't mean anything.  And thus there's really no reason to keep this thing.

Proof I Parked There

As I've said before, the car can be another clutter magnet.  More specifically, one type of item that seems to linger around is the paid stub for the parking garage or parking lot.

Why DO we hold on to these things?  Several reasons, I suppose.  Maybe we figure that if we paid so much for a damn parking spot, we're reluctant to throw away the one piece of evidence we get to take home.  Maybe we figure that we can secretly resuse them in the same lot in the future.  Though I doubt that would actually work.  Perhaps they're souvinirs.  Regardless, I seemed to acquire quite a variety of them.

The one you see above on the left is a painful memory.  When I first started working in the Boston area, I couldn't even get a parking space in my company's garage.  We were sharing it with other companies, and basically there was already a waiting list just to get a spot.  So I had to pay for a space in a nearby lot, every damn day.  And that was only if THEY weren't full.  They hand me one of these damn things to put in the windshield. 

On top of that, they started construction of a new building right behind the lot, which made it harder and harder to find a way to walk through.  You had to walk all the way around several blocks to get to work.  In the Boston winters, this was brutal.  At some point I made rough maps of the construciton site and tried to find other ways through.  And I wasn't the only one, judging from some of the cuts in the fencing.  I DID eventually get to upgrade to the garage though.

As for the "Diabetes Drive" piece, I really have no idea where this came from.  It's obviously designed to hang from the rear view mirror, but I just can't remember why I had this.  The closest I ever got to supporting a diabetes cause was buying bottles of Bret Michaels' Trop-a-Rocka Snapple (which I have to admit, tastes damn good).

Here's one I got from my friend who didn't have a car at the time, but since she was renting an apartment that meant I could use this temporary pass to park in the "residents only" section.  Too bad it expired in March 2001.

Crappy Art and Expired Coupons. Get them away from me!

My mother is an artist, and pretty much every relative on both my mother's and father's side of the family has been either an artist or a musician.  I did have a sincere interest in art when I was younger.  I won a few poster contests as a kid.  I was taking art classes in high school.  But I've long since lost interest in it.  I don't rule out the possibility of picking it up again.  But I did find some of my old artwork.  Some I liked, some I didn't like.  This was one of the latter ones.

I remember getting really frustrated that I couldn't get the strings right.  But as you can see, my teacher was glad I reworked it.  I really have no shame in throwing this away though.  If artwork is something I'm going to remembered for, then I don't want it to be THIS piece.  I know that some would find every art piece to be a one-of-a-kind and something you can't just throw away, but there's really no reason to keep this any more.  Get it away from me!

I also found some expired coupons.  I think every pack rat has dozens of these around.  We don't find them until it's too late.  But there's absolutely no reason to hang on to them once we do find them expired. Bye bye, Best Buy.

Make Your Own Fake Album Cover

Here's a creative challenge that somebody allegedly came up with on 4chan.  Create the front cover of a fictitious album from a fictitious band, by doing the following.

1) Go to Wikipedia and click on the link for a random page.  Look at the title of the article.  This is your band's name.

2) Now to to Wikiquote and click on their link for a random page.  Find the first quote listed on this page, and pick the last 3 to 5 words of it.  This will be the title of your album.

3) Next, go to Flickr and click on their link for interesting photos from the last 7 days.  The fifth photo in the list will be your album cover.

4) Finally, combine everything in Photoshop (or your picture editing program of choice) to make an album cover!

Here are some of the better ones I got. I admittedly added the vertical bar in the first one to make it look more like a gatefold LP.

On that fine summer day, some 20 years ago

So about 20 years ago when I was in high school, I was in a relationship with this girl, and her grandfather used to work at this engineering plant.  Normally the place was all surrounded by tall fences and barbed wire, but once a year they did a summer festival that was open to the employees and family.  My girlfriend took me.  They had tours, carnival stuff, a DJ (whom I got to play an Alice Cooper 45 that he had), and lots of stuff to pass out.  I got a huge bag of stuff that day: books, pamphlets, squeezie bottles, keychains, and who knows what else.

That bag stayed in my closet as a teenager.  Every once in a great, great while, I would find it, go through it, and eliminate some stuff.  This kept happening about every 5 years.  Boy, did that collection just linger on.  I finally got rid of the remainder of stuff once and for all.

Another thing I found were some brochures.  This wasn't the first time I found some useless brochures, and I know it won't be the last.  These are nice when you're on vacation and you'd like to see what else is in the area.  But most of these brochures I had were for places I either knew all too well know, didn't exist any more, or probably would never end up going anyway.  So long, brochures.

How about you?  Do you have brochures lingering around your home?  I bet you do.  If they have no sentimental value, and no other value to you for that matter, then consider getting rid of them.

Can You Find The Clutter in this Photo?

Instead of numbering the different pieces of crap I have in the photo, I'm just going to show the photo and list what's there.  More stuff that found a new home in my trash can:

1. Directions to Great Woods (which became the Tweeter Center, which became some other brand name) written by my father years ago.  Yes kids, I know you don't remember the days before GPS devices and Google Maps, let alone Mapquest.  Back in those days, we actually had to write directions down.  Of course, now I don't really need this piece of paper.
2. Directions to Toad's Place.  Same deal.
3. Directions to some other place.  Do I care?
4. Directions to Tom Lehrer's.  Tom Lehrer is an idol of mine.  Musician, comedian, mathematician, atheist, childfree, New Englander...what's not for me to like?  I do know where he lives, and I've written to him.  No reply.  Can't say I didn't try.  I did however drive by his house before, but I don't want to be some stalker and ring his doorbell, then try to explain who I am.
5. Feral House catalog.  I highly recommend the book "Big Dead Place".
6. Doctor Who Guide which I printed out when I finally started hunting down the episodes some 8 years ago.  Mission accomplished.
7. Colored Pencils which I had to buy back in high school for art class.  I think that was the last time I used them too.  Half of them are gone anyway.
8. Airline Boarding Pass from some vacation I took a few years ago.  I have plenty of other momentos from that trip.  I don't need this one.  Into my shredder you go.

Animal Hoarding: trying to BE a shelter instead of contacting one

I may have talked about this subject before, but it's worth mentioning again.  Living things can be be hoarded too. It's one thing to take in a stray cat or two, but there are some people out there who are simply taking in more pets than they can handle.  They do it because they think of themselves as animal lovers, but ironically that manifests itself as animal cruelty when you take in 200 cats and can't give them the environment they need.

The bottom line is that you simply can't keep the whole farm...literally!

Check out this article:

http://www.marconews.com/news/2010/oct/09/animal-hoarding-dangerous-emotional-issue/?partner=yahoo_feeds

 

Affect from Layups. Form a Puffy Castle... From Stuffy Palace.

Anagrams are sets of different words you can spell by using the same letters in a different arrangement. For example, rearrange the letters in "Axl Rose" and you get "Oral Sex". Lists of these used to be mass-forwarded on the internet a lot, back in the early 90s. This animated clip shows some of the more memorable ones:

So with the help of an on-line anagram generator, I thought I'd see what anagrams I could get with "A Place For My Stuff".  Aside from the ones I put in the subject line, here were a few others I liked:

• Taffy from capsule
• Some puffy fractal
• Fry lamp, suffocate
• Pry meatloaf cuffs
• Comfy palates ruff
• Scuff for playmate (certainly a result of tripping over my stuff)
• Cuffs for playmate (now that's more like it...)
• Fatal, mopey, scruff
• Stuffy compel afar
• Toffy carafe lumps
• suffer my coat flap
• Upscale taffy form
• From a puffy castle
• Soft, puffy caramel

Read a whole lot more here.

You can also go here to enter a word or phrase for yourself and find anagrams.  It's better than "Anagram Genius", which is one of the other anagram sites you can find on the 'net.