So I bought this painting of the Cutty Sark in a charity shop for 50p. And on the back it’s got this placard - pretty cool, right? Obviously it’s staying
Obviously the frame is a little busted and it can’t hang but that’s a 10 minute fix.
So I remove the card first thing to save for later and —
It’s a fucking menu. And apparently a really fancy one - it got French words. I’m laughing my ass off because some guy cut out a description of the Cutty Sark from a restaurant menu and stuck it to the back of a painting of said ship. At this point I’m having a blast and joking that “Oh, what’s next, the painting itself is gonna be from the dessert menu, I bet!”
IT WAS THE FUCKING WINE MENU. And this has to be ancient because £1.25 for a bottle of wine?? 20p for a glass?!
So quite a few decades ago some guy stole a menu, took it home, then cut out the painting of The Cutty Sark and it’s description and framed it to presumably hang on their wall. And now it is in my home, on my mantle and whenever I have guests over they’ll go “Oh what a nice picture of a ship!” But they won’t know. Only I will know that it is in fact the front piece of a wine menu. Like. The process behind how this came to be.
I’m keeping this forever.
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I've got a new design on Threadless! And just in time for their Labor Day sale! $12 t-shirts and up to 40% off all other items!!!
https://byrdierose.threadless.com/collections/book-wyrm
Do you have a habit of devouring anything you read? Do you have a fiery passion for stories? Is your library card singed? You might just have a case of Book Wyrms! Feel fabulous feeding your fantastical desires with this fine fashion statement!
This design is a part of Threadless's Doodlecore challenge - you can vote for these designs here!
https://www.threadless.com/doodlecore/
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EPIC NEWS!!! After going to like 5 thrift stores with no luck, I accidentally found a vintage toy store and brought home Baby Moondancer with all her lil accessories 🥺
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Hell yeah! Had an awesome find at a thrift shop today - A 1929 Southwestern Bell Telephone technical manual and installation guide for phones of the era.
Maybe you're asking why I think this is awesome? Haha. That makes sense - Well, first of all, I -live- vintage stuff. Antiques, old books, weird ephemera of the past. This definitely fits in with all of that, and has a gorgeous, punched leather cover with the gold stamping. Such a slick piece of history.
Second, I'm an old computer nerd cat. Back in the early '90s, I was a phone phreak - a phone hacker back before mobile phones and even alphanumeric pagers were a thing. It was in these days that "Ma Bell" (Southwestern Bell) was a big Queen on the scene, in her prime.
What were common phreaker practices back in the day? Well, it was all about exploration and curiosity. We would wardial (using our home landline connections and modems to dial a huge list of numbers in a row to try and find systems on the other end rather than regular phones - I'd leave it on all day and come back with a shorter list of various systems to dial in and play around on), we would build blue (and other color) boxes from RadioShack parts to use payphones to make free calls and do all sorts of rad tricks, we would prank folks that deserved it or use said tricks to disrupt schools and business, we would navigate voicemail systems and change automatic messages, and we would generate credit card numbers (which was incredibly easy back in the day) to make free calls to our first girlfriends in Canada. Well, that last one was mostly a me thing, haha.
Basically, payphones and early phone systems were a wonderful, incredible playground for me and I have SO many fond memories of these times. To have a book like this in my hands feels like I just looked inside the Ark of the Covenant and instead of melting my face off, it just glowed real bright and whistled a 2600hz tone sweetly into my ears.
This has so many cool photos like the ones above, and lots of radical technical diagrams, too.
As a bonus, there are hand-typed notes from a division head telephone engineer that wrote about systems they were building in Galveston, TX in the '60s:
Anyways, this is such a cool relic and I'll probably not be able to bring myself to sell it.
Did you know I wrote a verse about being a phreaker for a song with Nerdcore legend YTCracker wayyyyyy back in 2010? Well, now you do. You can hear that here (I'm the second dude, of course):
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The fact Mr Arrow's toy comes with his "faulty" life line and all that DOESN"T STRIKE anyone as MORBID? at thrift? his defining moment was... his CAUSE OF DEATH?
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