Be careful when you put on your shoes. Venomous clog-nymphs are everywhere.

Actually, probably not, this really isn’t about Michael Jackson, though it certainly begins with Michael Jackson.

And it’s waaaay too easy to let the Michael Jackson jokes flow like a mighty river. No, Michael just contextualizes this.

For more context, this IS from the Blue Hanger, that great burial ground where Goodwill sends its crappiest crap to the compost heap. As far as I can tell, crap is thrown, hot-potato style, from store to store–sometimes you can follow a single piece of horrible pottery to three different store locations, even coming full circle to its original home. When something is deemed unsellable–and it’s AMAZING what Goodwill can sell–it’s sent to the Blue Hanger, loaded unceremoniously into a bin, and sold for next to nothing.

So, an incomplete Michael Jackson puzzle-poster, from his mid-80′s glory days when his skin was pretty close to his original color, and Bubbles hadn’t become a running joke yet. On that note, I never heard about the llama. You know, I think I’d respect him, even fear him, that much more if the llama had been the running joke.

Anyway, this is not the time to mock the dead. Particularly on Memorial Day. No, this is really about satanic blue butterflies.

I remember this list. It’s like the list from Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman methodically picked off her foes from the bottom up. Whoever it is just recently marked Rusty off their list–with a star, which I can only infer means “all his family, loved ones, and everyone he holds dear,” and has been working methodically ever since Kevin and…ah…Romain? Ramum?

No clue. All that we do know is that Mad Dog is the Leader. Whether this means that Mad Dog is the last one to feed to the evil blue butterfly god to appease his endless anger, or that Eddie and Mike are the last ones living on Mad Dog’s personal hit list, no-one can say. But I wouldn’t want to be Mike right now.

Found at North Austin Blue Hanger on McNeil

Hard to get a good shot of this, because of the large size of the picture. But with the high-rez shots from my Canon 300 and exhaustive analysis by the BITS (Bureau of Investigating Thrift Stores, they STILL haven’t replied to my application) we can only conclude that this is an authentic, unedited photograph.

That’s right. Girl Power is actually a powerful energy source, and under the right circumstances girls emit a visible radiation that can cause severe mutations. After being used as a source of Girl Power for Justin Bieber’s 2009 “Urban Behavior” tour, the subject of this photo was visibly showing the tells of extended bangle-wearing, accessorizing, travelling in small animated flocks, and nearly toxic levels of early adolescence.

Use of Girl Power at Bieber’s three month “My World” tour will be limited to his American tour dates, as Canada is investigating the mutagenic waste by-products of this dangerous, endlessly renewable and strangely pink energy source.

Found at Savers, Burnet Road, Austin

Thank god it’s not free to rampage through housewares, there’s enough broken stuff in the brick-a-broke aisle already.

I don’t know how widespread the institution of DIY Craft Studios is. I’d hope that it remained in the South, home of all things tacky. These are the studios where the walls are lined with six or eight identical Dora the Explorers, waiting for you to lovingly apply your own paint and spend $9/hour for the privilege. Not a BAD institution, it’s a nice way for a family to get together and share in the general concept of arting.

Sometimes, though, mom and dad insist their high school son comes along–the one that they have to drag out of his crammed, adolescent boy-scented sty of a bedroom, bombarded by complaints. And it’s a damned good thing they did, posting a pic like this is a hell of a lot easier than actually writing something.

But I think Mr. Devilbear is actually a sincere work of crafting. Something just went dreadfully wrong.

…but the little things, they added up. Like a widow’s peak. I don’t care how pink you make it, giving a perfectly innocent bear a hairdo that screams “Drag Queen Dracula at the Senior Center” does NOT make it endearing or charming. And let’s discuss the eyes. Are they strange birdlike growths of feathers? The telltale markings of a budding luchador? Not a clue. Overall the effect is not so much “Bear need love, give hug?” but “Bear need blood, Gragrggharr!”

Again, it’s a good thing that he’s behind bars.

Odd thing on this one–despite being a horrid little lump of home-brew inspiration that you couldn’t get $2.99 for, this scary little bugger was in the auction cage, where USUALLY they shove the stuff that’s special and unusual. I’ll grant, it’s unusual. Maybe they plan to blackmail the artist to jack up the bidding.

Okay, just one more.

Oh yeah.

This next guy is a sincere attempt at hand-crafted artwork, I don’t doubt that. Or, a poster child of Redneck Science gone Horribly, Fatally Wrong.

If you listen closely, you can here him. “Please,” he says. “Test the lamp. Plug it in and finish the job.”

Or not. Maybe after a couple of rounds of bargain basement electroshock therapy, maybe the world’s looking pretty good, and all he needs is a sweet, sweet jolt of the old power strip. Alternating current takes the pain away.

Poor guy! But then, I’m not sure be that much better off if someone replaced my spinal column with a lamp-stand.

Heh. You have to excuse the drool, he got a little pithed last night.

Hellbear found at Goodwill in South Austin, near Stassney and Manchaca. Pithed Lamp Bear found at Goodwill on Metric and 183. Ah, Research Goodwill. You’re so good to me.

Avast, ye great shell-faced dogs, steer the ship leeward, and smartly now! Thar be cowries on them thar shores!

Oh gods, now I’m going to have nightmares about ghastly pirates with bleeding serrated mouths, floating around on a half a clam like a warped alternate dimension’s version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.But with skull-faced shell headed radish-like sailors necrotizing periodontitis

Okay, seriously Key West, WTF? I hope, hope HOPE HOPE, that this was some kid’s pet project. Shell art is an impressively tragic medium, but this brings it to an impossible nadir, and I do not know if I’ll be able to recover my faith in late 60s handicraft. You’ve ruined me for cowries forever, Key West. Mary, mother of God.

There is the smallest chance that this is actually representational art.

Someone who’s been to Key West tell me–do horrid shell-demons putter around the bay in a half-conch, like witches riding in an eggshell, along the shoals of massive spiralling pillars of shell-encrusted reef? DO THEY? And when they do, do they take their official, licensed Key West oars?

In their defense, they might be trying to get away from the faceless mu-mu-demon behind them, paddling as fast as their tiny little univalve mollusk carapaces can carry them. Row! Row faster! It’s got a fruity beverage and it wants our faces!

Key West is a frightening place :(

It bothers me that I don’t know what this is. It LOOKS innocent, the butterflies help a bit with that, but it clearly has a handle for easy removal, and that’s going to cost it the benefit of the doubt. Soulful green eyes notwithstanding.

At least it seems to be dressed. Thank god for small blessings, its maker saw fit to wrap in in a skin-tight thing-thong. Or maybe when it turns blue, you know it’s time to find out what that guy’s name was.

Perhaps it’s some exotic, semi-aware flower? The butterflies prepare to crawl into its mouth to pollinate it. Or is that bees? Bees seem like they’d be too smart to play this thing’s mind game. They’d see the green safety handle and say “Nope, we don’t know where it’s been. Plus, it’s clearly waiting to eat us.” Butterflies have MUCH smaller brains (scientific fact). Or perhaps it creates them, vomits them forth like Randy Newman coughs up banal little ditties which flutter around him and adhere to his hideous skin-tight sky-blue thong, daring to sneak back into his lascivious mouth, leaving delicate tracks of pollen across his plump, full lips like a passionate verse of the Song of Songs in intimate braille.

*coughs*

Actually, we do have a small clue as to its origins, its intent, perhaps its ultimate destination. An online review of the “product” says thusly:

Collect “em! Trade “em! Six styles. Fun Fuzzy hair Hook you Favorite Kookys Pens!

None of which actually helps me understand its intent, or relieves my lingering fear that it might sneak out of its box at night and do me some sort of comedically painful harm. Ah whimsy, ah veiled threat, thy name is Preshüs.

Assistance League of Austin Thrift Store

Option 1: Avant-weird cubist interpretation of a Bissell Upright.

Option 2: A cat bowl for the psychedelic king-cat and his super-cool entourage, brilliantly conceived to give the impression of a catnip-trip to us lesser humans.

Though I think cats are color-blind. Lucky them.

Option 3: A pop-art cubist fusion of a device which can only be used to compress day-glo alligators into a more manageable size.

Unable to process this level of raw, high school art class-driven artistic freedom, I very much want to give this a function. The wood-block base with dowel, gentle downward slope of the fulcrum, the bowl, and the strange white catch-block could easily form the base of a pet food dispenser, though I’m pretty sure it’d scare the dogs. Even if we filled it with chopped steak and cat poop, they’d back away growling.

I’m sure of it, we tested the theory with one of the attendants.

What do you see in it? There’s a sort of a tail, and a serrated edge, a rather froggy part, a jarring right angle. Maybe it’s a surfing cane toad. Maybe it’s the pyramids, with the Nile river stretching into the distance to be devoured by the sprawling industrial blight of the city. Maybe it’s God.

(As a footnote, our executive producer refused to wear it as a hat, even when I promised I didn’t have my camera with me.)

Goodwill, Metric and 183, Austin

Sometimes, you just have to throw your hands in the air and say, “I don’t know. If it’s not neon pizza, I have no idea.”

This is one of those times, though certainly not the onlyone of those times. The next time you have to pick the toppings for the office pizza party, answer with confidence, “gummi worms, chocolate syrup, and a single robin’s heart.” Sort of a Salvador Dali, Yoko Ono special. If you have your doubts, just ask for robin’s hearts on half. They’re not everybody’s favorite.

I’ve looked at this one from several different angles, and none of them make sense. From one angle, it looks a bit like some sort of strange allegory for the fall of Nazi Germany. From another angle, a ceramic tribute to victory over the Smallpox virus. From a third, weltschmerz.

The round thing…it’s important somehow. It brings it from the realm of the strange to the strangely organic. Like a tiny pomegranate lost in the small intestines during a radium treatment, or something you really don’t want to see on a CAT scan. “I’m sorry, it’s bad news…you have a squiggly blue ceramic pizza in your corpus callosum. It’s inoperable. We’ll have to put it on clearance and hope for the best.”

…As for this second piece, my world can easily handle squiggly blue biohazard pizzas, but this is frankly noneuclidian arts and crafts at their most suspect.

This MAY be the world’s oldest artificial heart. If that was the case, they could have marked the price a bit higher.

If a five-year-old tried to make a clay bagpipe, but only after having an ADHD moment whilest sculpting Howard the Duck, you just mightend up with this charming little blasphemy. And even though mom said that it was special and YOU were special–and you were special!–she still gave it to Goodwill. Probably took a good tax write-off for it, too. Your artistic passion, her $10 deductible. Be proud.

If this was soft and rubber and made a honking sound, it would be the best toy ever. As it is, a sad moment of ceramic futility. Pity it, oh whimsy that could have been.

Blue Pizza found at Goodwill on Metric and 183, Lumptrumpet found at Goodwill, 2222 and Lamar, Austin.

It’s just common sense that most clowns are going to be hand-made by talented amateurs. No-one goes pro and makes whimsical clown miniatures, right? Don’t disillusion me on this one. I want to believe in a rational universe. If someone leans back, looks into the sky, and says, “I’ve got it, business plan: sell clowns,” you’d really hope their father or their accountant would Have Words.

Anyway, clowns.

What fun things could you put in a basket made from a clown’s head? Maybe a bottle of…something opaque…to drink away the whimsy? A thank-you note? Potpourri? Ashes of your loved one? Hope?

This might not have made the cut except for how brutal the head extraction process must have been. No-one killed the clown quietly in their sleep (it’s the best way, really). Probably didn’t use any of the normal humane methods of clown disposal. Nope, this was strictly brute force. Scrapes and bruises attest to the brutal, yet comical, final moments.

Though the big question comes down to “was the victim still alive when they replaced his ears with daisies?”

Even if we are to ignore the artistic medium of “basket made of ceramic head,” and assume that this is a clown in the Woeful Hobo mode, he’d still be a pretty hard-core hobo. How many clowns are dedicated enough to apply full sclera make-up?

Moving on…

We’ve got this reject from the cast-call for the all-clown version of Manos: The Hands of Fate. Or perhaps some strange mascot from a martial arts college with an unusually well-developed sense of irony–I’ve been looking at this guy for years, and have yet to work out the neon dots on his high, bald head. Maybe they’re from the snipers. Oh, yes.

My alternate theory: It’s actually an early rejected concept figure from ET: The Extraterrestrial. Evidence: Bold 80s color scheme, bald, wrinkly, and one glowing finger. IMHO, it’s a compelling theory. But Spielberg went with the coprokinetic puppet. You can’t go too wrong targeting the lowest common denominator.

You may not believe it, but there was actually a fadin the local thrifts for neon clowns in 2007. Terrifying. But the “artist” doing clowns of Papier-mâché and whimsical floral-print gift-wrap pants brings back the fondest memories, and won a special place in my heart.

Because we couldn’t afford jeans.

Since the original ThriftHorror Livejournal Communitybegan with a tender, intimate moment between a sinister bear with a plastic head and a pliable kewpie (no, really), it would be a tragedy if this incarnation of ThriftHorror began with anything, shall we say, less than tasteful.

So in celebration of the conception of this new project, giant stuffed sperm.

Okay, maybe it’s a speech bubble, or an anthropomorphized cloud with friendly, imploring eyes, but really, I’m seeing giant plush spermatazoa here. It’s like Lambchop meets Eraserhead. If I brought it home, I could try to force it into the eight foot beanbag chair to witness the birth of a new god. A new fuzzy god.

Of course, like all good novelty oversized plush gametes, this one is reversible.

Thank god for options!

So, there you are. Fluffy stuffed reproductive cells with big, open, friendly eyes. Take one home, scare the dog, embarrass grandma. Welcome to ThriftHorror.

From Goodwill, Parmer west of I35, north austin.