Today’s guest post comes from Clyde in Mankato.
As I have explained before, for my wife Christmas is a six-month season. She often buys gifts in the summer, stores them away, and then rediscovers them, usually under our bed, often after Christmas. Last week she found two objects of clouded origin and unknown purpose.
Her initial recollection of when and where she purchased the objects led me down the wrong path in trying to discover what they are. So I put the photo up on Facebook and asked for explanations, encouraging the submission of smart-ass answers. My son re-posted in his Facebook page, from where, as I expected, came the answer. He has many professionally-creative Facebook friends of wide background and interests.
One of the answers, from one of my friends, was in Japanese. I do not know if Kazuki was right or not. Maybe. My two favorite smart-ass answers were 1) a Zanfir flute/pipe and 2) this link from one of my son’s friends.
This evening I will explain what they are. I bet during the day someone will correctly identify them. They are, by the way, nifty little devices. If you know the answer, you know the answer.
What mysterious objects have you run across in your life?
Trail Baboon 
Good morning. I must have come across many mysterious objects over the years. This morning I can only think of one. There is an unusual construction at the edge of a wide area of Minnehaha Creek not far from our house. It serves as a dock which you can stand on and where you could get in and out of small boats. Setting on top of the dock is a set of steps with a railing. The steps face the creek and don’t lead to any thing.
Those steps must be used for some kind of activity. I can’t picture what it would be. If you backed a truck up to the steps you might be able to use them to unload the truck if it contained a small boat that you want to put in the water. However, there is no road of any kind leading to the steps.
I have no idea what those stick- like objects are in the picture you posted, Clyde. Thanks for bringing us your story about them. I will look forward to finding out what they are latter today.
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Dale knows, and uses them.
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What would Dale do with those sticks? Are they somehow used in a radio studio? Maybe they can be used to prod people who aren’t reading their lines or taking care something that needs to be done to put on a broad-cast.
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Dale uses them? I’m guessing they are some kind of hair comb.
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Yes! The kind that require no hair!
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From the photo, they look like candles as there are wicks on each. Maybe try burning them? Maybe really old fashioned candles from a long ago past? Or, maybe their true appearance couldn’t appear in your photo? Or, maybe they’re fancy chop sticks? Or, maybe they’re just a couple of wood sticks with no purpose whatsoever (other than to confuse people who are scratching their heads wondering what they are)
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I should have said that the outer white shell is stiff plastic and the inner yellow rod is more pliant plastic.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Chopsticks are the only thing I can think of that the long skinny things are. However, scale is indeterminable, so maybe they are large enough to be vacuum cleaner tubes? Or are they the plastic tubing that you can surround electrical cords in to hide them?
I personally have a large collection of electrical cords and remotes which belong to….what appliance? And why do we keep them?
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Good point re scale. Should have put in a ruler. One foot long.
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Remotes and power blocks for what? But I cannot throw them out, what if, you know . . . And then it happened to me last week. I was going to use something–now what was it–and the power block was not with it. AND, this is the scary part, I had labeled that one power block. Success. But I am not going to become a concrete-sequential over it.
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Te common mystery at this time lf year is “For whom did I buy this present?”
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Ha – I know that mystery, have it going on here and now!
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Those chop stick lookalikes are for sealing opened bags of chips – I think. Don’t know how well they work. They may well be more work than they’re worth, especially if you have arthritic hands.
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On foil-lined chip bags like my wife buys, my hands hurt too much to use them, as do Sandy’s. But on cereal bags or regular chip bags, they are slick, easy and do seal the bag.
Sandy told me that she had bought them in an art store for our crafty grand daughter. Thus I was assuming instructional knitting needles or something. I am now sure that she bought them at the kitchen store St. Peter.
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Funnily enough, I was given something that looks very similar to contain my double-pointed knitting needles while they loaded with an in progress sock that is making no progress
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The mystery object in my life at the moment is a bird I keep seeing around my apartment. But according to my bird books, it does not exist. The bird that often bops around eating seeds near my window/door is like no bird in my two books of Oregon birds. Trying to identify local birds is all part of my assimilating to my new world. I have seen very few birds to date. I was thrilled to identify a varied thrush, and to ID it I had to buy two expensive books about western birds. Maybe I need to buy another book to identify this little drab guy.
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A bird-watched expert friend of mine, long-time naturalist at Gooseberry Park, says you are not really watching if you don’t regularly see birds you cannot identify. If you ask in the woods what a little bird is, that is not a chickadee, he says “confusing fall warbler.”
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And then there are all the LBJs – little brown jobs.
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Fall warblers are confusing. They swoop through our area briefly and then aren’t seen for another year. Then there are the warbling virios. They are hard to identifry, too. You need to hear them warble to tell what they are.
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That is vireos and identify.
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We have multiple unidentifiable objects in the freezer. Husband has the sense to label things like ” Desperation Chicken” or ” heavy duty Dauphinette Borscht” (borscht recipe from Dauphin, a really Ukrainian town in western Manitoba). I always assume I will remember what things are, but I never do and I never learn my lesson. I wonder if those sticks are orthopedic aids for putting on socks, but Dale isn’t so decrepit to need such things, so probably not.
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My ex-partner and sneaky SOB used to give folders on his computer names like “Nitty-Gritty 01″ up to maybe #35. Then he would give the next set of folders a name like”Hot for the Moment” and then “Immediate.” Each set of folders would have many files with the same name because he was always reworking them. ERRRRRR!!
But finding by date was hard because he would open a file make some changes in that file, then remember to save it in another folder. For awhile we had computers that would save any changes in a later version in earlier versions. And very often the change to a file would be a very few words scattered through it. ERRRRRRR!!
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I’m wondering what “desperation chicken” might be.
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I think it was a chicken casserole with lots of leftovers thrown together when he didn’t have a lot of time to cook and I was out of town. It was quite good.
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i thinking i would pass
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Nothing ventured, no weight gained . . . .
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The heavy duty borscht interests me strangely…..
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My wife is an intuitive random who to become the very successful secretary she was in the late 60’s taught herself to be an extreme sequential. Over the years she has drifted back into random beyond random. Now with memory issues added in, where things are is a struggle. Somewhere she has two pair of good winter gloves. Neither pair is in an obvious place.
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I just learned from my nieces and nephews last week ‘I think I left my gloves in there’ is a euphemism for ‘let’s go to the bar’. Once a week or so someone will say ‘I think I left my hat / gloves / shoes in _ _ _ _ ‘
Makes a good reason to go out.
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What a fine uncle you are.
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Haha– thanks. I try. 🙂
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i see the slit in the exterior tube and assume the tube is to slide ofer something like fabrid and the pin gets placed to lock it in i wanted thenm to be 6 feet tall so you could do a fabric fence or 2 1/2 inces tall so they could be a hair doo dad. if they are a foot long they are for holding newspapers or the like but then they should be 3 feet long. i have had fun figuring out what stuff is in estate sales or garage sales or to use and a found object in an art project. figuring out what an antique corn shucker once was a fun one.
i used to love the old machines to do nothing that was a comic strip when my dad was a kid rube goldberg machines
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Besides the afore-mentioned gifts (who was that for?), I occasionaly find a single plastic thingamabob, will turn it over and around, reach back into the dim recesses of memory, and finally ask Husband if he knows what the heck this is for. If I can find one that hasn’t been tossed, I’ll describe later.
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Best one of these I’ve seen in a long time!
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Meant to put this under The Page Turner.
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Smart phones, DVDs, Tivo (or is that “Tebo”??), cameras, computers, DlSH TV, GPS’s, answering machines, sound bars, l pods, lights showing up on my car’s dashboard, onion slicer, electric can openers, oven settings, DVRs. There’s more, but you get the idea?
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I revel in old kitchen and needlework tools.
Those facebook things that say “like if you remember these” make me crabby. Lots (not all) of them are in current usage at my house.
Clyde, I very much want your mystery items to be slide whistles, but the long slit tells me that is wrong.
Back when we used to watch Ask This Old House, the boy’s favorite part was called What is it?
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My reaction, exactly, to those FB posts, mig.
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PJ had it right and tim got close. You slide the two sides of the top of an open bag of chips or cereal or the like over the yellow part and inside the white part.
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On the farm we were always digging up some rusty piece of something or other.
I was always amazed by my Dad because I could take him this rust beat up, bent, *thing* covered with dirt and he’d say ‘That’s a corner brace from the old corn wagon we had.’ Or ‘That’s a sprocket from the potato digger that fell apart in that field.’
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Bet he was just making stuff up.
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Wow, I didn’t know this one, Holly.
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Unlabeled cassette and VHS tapes. Decorative jars and cannisters filled with various kinds of powders or dried plant material that are probably consumables of some sort. Seeds. Increasingly, lists that I wrote to myself that I no longer understand. Or sometimes they are little sketches with measurements.
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