Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Weird Stuff in Boxes

Ray Bradbury claimed to have a room filled with various interesting and grotesque toys and detritus of that prompted him to start writing if he had writer's block. If that's how it works then I should be the writingest guy who ever lived, but I'm not, so I'm throwing some of it out. On doing some house-cleaning recently I found a box in which I had stored the following ingredients, which would seem best suited for some very enterprising witch's brew:

- 1 nutria rat paw from the Louisiana bayou
- 1 large cattle bone fragment from the Lava Beds in extreme NorCal (remains of cattle slaughtered by Modoc Indians during their rebellion)
- 1 piece of the loading dock from Yuengling brewery (don't sue me; it was tiny)
- 1 eagle talon* from Alaska
- 1 kodiak bear claw* from Alaska
- 4 coati teeth* from Paraguay
- A chunk of salt from Badwater Flat, Death Valley
- 1 smooth stone from the shores of Lake Tahoe
- assorted Apache tears (little obsidian fragments you find all over New Mexico)

What could you make with this? An Apache- and Modoc-powered curse against Yuengling so that their beer turns salty and various boreal or rainforest predators attack them? But that would be bad. On par with the Black Plague.

However, with the asterisked ones, you can make a cool necklace for your four-year-old first cousin once-removed's birthday. Which is what I am presently doing. As it turns out bear claws are pains in the ass to drill holes in.

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