Thinkin' of a master plan.

When you’re a little kid having money is great.

Because you know that the only thing that money is going to be spent on is pure unadulterated pleasure. You’ve got no bills to pay, no mortgage, no debt. That crisp dollar bill or handful of change is going to be spent on toys and candy and nothing else.

Millions of dollars is spent every year on useless plastic shit like this that will be fit for the garbage in less than 2 weeks.

Sure you could try to save your money. You know, so you can buy that even bigger more expensive piece of plastic shit that your parents won’t buy for you. But you won’t last, you’ll cave. I remember when I first laid eyes on Robie the Robot at Radio Shack in Oakville Place.

I had to have him. The only problem was he cost something like $300. I believe my current net worth at the time was around $7. I went home that night determined to save up enough money to buy him. Visions of Robbie bringing me Cokes and calling other kids on our street Fuck face danced in my head as affixed a piece of masking tape to a jam jar and wrote Robie Fund on it. 3 weeks later that jar was empty and I was the proud new owner of a Zoid or something

Wind me up and watch me suck.

See that’s the problem with being a little kid. Sure your entire income is disposable but you basically have no income. You’re too young to work so your money making options are limited. Here’s how I made money as a kid.

Allowance.

I think my allowance started at about $1.50 a week and got all the way up to about $8.00. Not a lot of money but I didn’t really have to do anything for it. My parents never really gave me chores. Sometimes they’d tell me to clean my room but only when it got to a hazardous state of uncleanliness. Like Garfield’s room.

Also like Garfield, I shit in a box in the laundry room.

One time my mom tore my whole room apart because there was this weird smell. She found a whole package of sliced deli ham rotting in a drawer. I was using it to feed my Star Wars figures. Another time a strange smell tipped my dad off to a jar of gasoline hidden under my bed. I may not have received my allowance that week.

Chores.

When I was a kid I did chores when I wanted extra money. I don’t know why my parents didn’t just give me the money. If you ask a 7 year old kid to rake the yard you’re just going to wind up with a really shitty looking yard still full of leaves and possibly a broken rake. I guess they wanted to teach me responsibility. I’d hardly call spending the $3 I earned on 90 seconds worth of Dragon’s Layer at 7-11 responsible.

Game 1: I died. What happened? Game 2: I died. What happened? Game 3: I died. What happened? Game 4: I died. What happened? Game 5: I died. What happened? Game 6: I died. What happened?

Money from relatives.

Lots of kids get money from relatives. The older relatives give it out as a kind of reward for coming to see them and the younger relatives give it out so that the kids will like them and it’s easier than actually paying attention to them or playing with them.

Hey kids, your Uncle Johnny’s here. Ummmm, ok. Here’s $5, see ya!

But when I was a kid all my relatives were in Scotland. I still got birthday and Christmas money from them and when we went there to visit it was like being a high roller in Vegas but I couldn’t really rely on them on a weekly basis.

Tricking dumber kids into giving me their money.

I actually learned this from my sister. She used to ask me if I wanted to play restaurant. Then she’d pretend to be the waitress and make me a peanut butter sandwich and try to charge me for it. It always ended up with me refusing and a fight. Maybe I should try that at restaurants now.

What do you mean I have to pay for it?! I thought you made it for me! I thought you were being nice!

There was this girl Melanie that lived around the corner that was really dumb. She would trade a dime for 4 pennies because she thought she was getting more. She was also afraid of the dark so if you could trick her into going into the garage you could shut her in there with the lights out and not let her out until she slid change under the garage door.

Tricking dumb adults into giving me their money.

A lemon aide stand, a crappy play performed on the front lawn or in my case charging to look at robots built from house bricks with an air mattress pump in a bucket of water that was supposed to be them talking. All of these are good ways to fleece money from neighborhood adults. The key to it is whatever your business endeavor/theatrical display/technological house brick marvel is it should be pathetic. The more pathetic the better. For some reason adults find pathetic things kids do cute.

Collecting bottles.

This was a major source of income for me. When I was a kid pop manly came in 1 liter glass bottles and when you returned the empty bottle to the grocery store you got money back. I can’t remember how much but I do remember being so obsessed with the Karate Champ game in the Appleby Mall that my parents had to hide all the pop because I would chug it or dump it out just to take the bottles back.

I easily wasted enough money to buy a couple of Nintendos on this stupid game.

Even better than pop bottles though was beer bottles. My house backed on to a creek and a wooded area and every weekend in the summer a bunch of 80s rocker dudes and their chicks would head into the woods with a bunch of 24s and party. Sometimes I’d see a couple of them going up there early to stash their beer or I’d see one of the older ones coming out of the beer store when I was there with my dad. I remember one time I saw this one guy come out of the beer store with a case and he had a 10 speed bike with the handle bars flipped up so he could stack his 24 on there and use the case handles to steer. He and all the rest looked like this:

On Saturday and Sunday mornings a friend and I would get up early to survey the wreckage of the night before’s rockathon bush party and collect all the empties. Sometimes we’d find a few full ones and bring them back to our dads. Sometimes we’d find money too. One time we went up there and there was a dude still laying there passed out. We thought he was dead and ran screaming back to our parents. But when we took them back up there he was gone.

File Photo: Gold mine!

On a good morning we could make almost 5 bucks each!

And if we’d known what this was back then, probably a hell of a lot more.

So what do kid’s today do for money? Damned if I know. Probably teach computer courses or something. Who cares any way. Modern kids suck. They don’t go outside and they can’t eat peanuts. I’m going to go make a peanut butter sandwich and mail my sister a nickel. Smell ya later.

It came from Videoflicks.

Kids, gather around the monitor here for a minute. What’s that, you’ve already been here for 7 hours? Well that’s good. But put your mouses down. Or is it mice? I don’t know. Fuck! JUST GO TO BED!! No, no, come back. Uncle Johnny Creepy wants to talk to you for a second. He wants to talk to you about the olden days. You like movies don’t you Billy? Of course you do. How do you watch your movies? On your laptop, yes. On your HD TV, that’s right too Jenny. And where do you get your movies? From the computer, yes where else? From the grocery store, sad but true Dakota. Well let me tell you where Uncle Johnny got his movies from when he was a little boy. From a magical wondrous place called the video store.

Once upon a time in 1983 my parents bought a Betamax VCR . I was almost 7 years old and it looked like this.

It cost way more than it was worth. (Maybe it was the wood paneling). Back then there weren’t many video stores in Burlington. But the people at the electronics store were kind enough to rent us a movie. It was Superman.

Superman was the first movie I ever watched on a VCR and thanks to the little remote attached to a cord,

I was able to pause the movie at the exact point when baby superman lifted up the car and you could see his wang.

It was like this but full frontal with wang but you still couldn’t really see the wang because of all the squiggly lines when I paused it. Wang.

Not long after we got our Betamax a store called Videoflicks opened right up the street. This was great because the electronic store only had about 4 movies and I think one was a work out tape.



I loved the video store. I used to spend ages looking at all the boxes, trying to pick a movie. And then my dad would get angry and yell at me to, Just pick one! Then I’d pick an R rated movie and he’d tell me no and I’d have to put it back and start all over again. All those boxes on the shelf. Weird movies that I’d never seen and never heard of. Want to see some of my favorites? No? Well too bad! I’m going to show you anyway.

The Party Animal.

This was the box that they had at Videoflicks. That’s Timothy Carhart shrunk down on a leash tied to a woman’s leg partying. Here’s another good box for it.

Bonus: Real naked boob on the back!

I always wanted to see this movie and my parents would never let me rent it. They said it was too mature for me. Turns out they were wrong.



Ok, they were right.



Bustin’ Loose

I liked this box because it had guys wearing masks. When I was a kid I’d watch anything if there were guys in masks in it. My parents wouldn’t let me rent this one either. But once my dad got so tired of waiting for me to pick a movie he just grabbed Brewster’s Millions off the shelf and said, You’re watching this. Let’s go! It was an ok movie, considering it didn’t have any guys in masks in it.



Ghoulies

He’s coming out of the toilet! What’s not to like. That there is comedic gold when you’re 8 years old. The toilet! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Deathstalker

I totally rented this based on the box. I wanted to see that big ogre guy. As it turned out he sucked.



In fact the whole movie sucked. Except for the part where the wizard guy turns a dude into a chick.



Chopping Mall

Not only does this movie have a great name but it’s also got a shopping bag full of body parts on the front. This is also a very good example of how the box art never matches the movie. The robots in the movie never had hands like that.



See. Totally different hands. I can’t remember why she wasn’t wearing pants but that’s what you get when you give mall security robots lasers.

Up the Creek

For some reason I was allowed to rent this. (I think I finally broke my dad.)And it was awesome! Up the Creek has got boobs and exploding toilets, Chuck the Wonder Dog and snooty, preppy ivy league jerk-offs. I’ve been trying forever to get it on DVD but I can’t seem to find it. I think it’s because they can’t get the rights to all the music that’s in it. If that’s the case, screw you Cheap Trick!



Ishtar

I used to look at this box for this movie at Bandito video on Fairview all the time. I never wanted to rent it but people said it was the worst movie ever made and for some reason that intrigued me.

Frankenhooker

This box I saw in Jumbo Video when I was a little older. Jumbo video was great. Their horror section was set up like a dungeon and they gave out free popcorn! The other Jumbo video over on Brant St. also had one of those porn sections with the saloon doors. Frankenhooker is one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s about a scientist who accidently cuts his wife’s head off so he decides to make her a new body. He invents super crack and gives to hookers. It’s so powerful that when they smoke it, the hookers explode. The scientist then collects all the best hooker parts to make his wife’s body out of. But when he brings her to life she becomes Frankenhooker and when she has sex with a guy, the guy explodes. Check out the quote from Bill Murry on the box: If you see one movie this year it should be Frankenhooker.



Well, I’m kind of tired now. I think I’m going to lay down and dream of Videoflicks, Bandito video and Jumbo video. Hey, did I ever tell you the story about the Zeedonk at the Appleby mall? They had this petting zoo that came once a year to the Appleby mall and one year they had a zeedonk (part zebra part donkey). Well the zeedonk kept biting kids so they had to take him out of the petting zoo. I guess they didn’t have anywhere else to put him so the put him in the abandoned Jumbo Video store. So you’d be walking past and you’d look in and there were all these racks of old video tapes and then a pile of hay and a zeedonk standing there. It was awesome. Now got to bed!

Hee Haw Go to bed! Hee Haw Go to bed! Hee Haw!

Ask the Magic Internet a Stupid Question No. 0005

Oh wise and powerful internet. I kneel before you and lay at your feet (or wheels or wires or whatever the fuck you have) this offering of floppy disks.

I only ask that in return you bring forth the answer to this question that has troubled me for so long.

Question 5: Whatever happened to white dog poop?

I know this question and its subject has been the butt of many a retro joke by modern comics. Sarah Silverman wrote a song about it. Will Ferrell was forced to lick it in Step Brothers.



And I’m sure Dane Cook has got about two hours of material on it. And I think Good Luck Chuck might have been made out of it.

But all that aside, what DID happen to white dog poop? I remember seeing it all the time when I was a kid. It was weird and white and if you tried to get it on the end of a stick to chase someone with it, you couldn’t. It was hard and it would just crumble. Sometimes the guy across the street from my house would be mowing his lawn and he’d run over a piece and you’d hear this clanking noise and then it would fly out the side of the mower like a bullet, skid across the road and explode against the curb. It was the only thing funnier than watching him run over the electric mower cord. He should have got a Jacobsen.



Or a sheep.

But now it’s all gone. What happened to it? Was it only made by a certain breed that no longer exists? Did aliens discover that it’s an excellent alternative fuel source and come down and take it all? Maybe King Haggard (there’s a name you kind of have to grow into) moved on to destroying it after he finally killed the last Unicorn?

This movie was essentially 92 minutes of animated van art.

Appease me Magic Internet. Unleash your Red Bull to hunt down the elusive white dog poop. Or at least tell me the story of its demise.

Beep. Click. Clack. Booooop. (new wave album sound, eh) Zuuurp. Zip. Ding!

Magic Internet Answer: Munch, munch. Mmmm, I love floppy disks. I haven’t had one in sooo long. I think this one had Choplifter on it. Thanks Johnny. Now, the answer to your question has two parts. The first part deals with the changes to ingredients in dog food and the changes to dogs’ diets over the years. 30 years ago many dog owners purchased real bones from the butcher for their dogs to eat or chew on.

But supermarkets eventually changed the way most people buy meat and pet food companies realized that most people thought real bones were gross. So they started making fake ones out of things like rawhide.

Oops, not that kind of rawhide. This kind:

File Photo: Mmmmm.

You see the subtraction of real bones in dogs’ diets and the decrease in bone meal in dog food means that today’s dogs are ingesting a lot less calcium then the dogs of the 70s and 80s. It’s this calcium that gave old dog logs their white colour and chalky consistency.

But wait, you say. It’s not white when it comes out the dog’s butt. How does it get that way? It takes time for white dog poop to become white. Essentially all of the organic matter in the poop needs to be consumed, leaving behind the calcium. Much like a body decomposes until there’s only a skeleton left behind.

I say chaps. I’m feeling like white dog shit today. I think perchance I might be dead.

And that brings us to the second part of your answer. Some dogs today may still be consuming diets rich in calcium but dog owners and city cleanup crews are much more diligent in the removal K-9 paydays and thus said turds are not left around long enough to turn white. Please allow Al Jaffee to elaborate.

So there is the snappy answer to your stupid question. Now if you’ll excuse me all this talk about dogs retro rump cigars has left me feeling a tad queasy. Uh oh, oh no!

RAAAAALLLLLLPPPHHHH!

Burp. Hmm, I feel much better. Oh and here’s a freebie that you might get a kick out of considering today’s question. You wondered earlier about the nature of my feet. Well today I’m wearing. Drum roll please…

Vintage white loafers! Rim shot!

Get it?

Why are you shaking your head?

Garage Sale! 69 Creepshow Ave. Cordless Drill, Weights, Samantha Fox Poster, Scud Mags, Used Coffin and much, much more!

Hot enough for ya?

It’s like 30 degrees Celsius outside! And you know what all this hot weather means? Summer time and garage sale season kicking into gear!

Now I don’t hit the garage sales the way I used to. That’s because for one, I live in the city. Most of the garage sales here are less garage sale and more sweaty crackhead shaking beside a blanket containing a selection of unpawnable/ broken items and DVDs that used to belong to my neighbors.

The cordless drill? Oh yea it works just fine. But you see it can’t be crushed up and injected or smoked so I really have no use for it. Five dollars!!

And secondly, thanks to E-bay and Craigslist garage sales are going the way of  Vallue Village. You just can’t find all the great things you used to.

Things like:

Those gold plastic weights.

The only thing these weights are good for now is weighing down the body of someone you killed or killing your lawn a month after you put them on your curb with a sign saying free. But there was a time when the suburban failed Adonis thought he could actually get money for them. They were often coupled with the chest expander.

Bonus if it was a really hairy guy selling it and there were hairs in the springs

And grip strengtheners.

Bonus if they were the gold executive model that wannabe 80s power suits kept on their desk for intimidation.

Archery sets.

When I was a kid every other garage sale had one of these up for grabs. I got a great one with a huge hunting bow, a quiver full of arrows and a homemade target on wheels for something like $15. I drew pictures of people I didn’t like and taped them to the front of the target. This was a big step up from throwing darts at the nipples of the topless Samantha Fox poster I won at the Appleby Mall fair.

f Samantha Fox could sing half as good as she could grow tits, she’d be top of the charts. – Some old copy of Viz Magazine.

Old Playboy & Penthouse magazines

Look at the article topics. Was anyone really that dedicated to being a scum bag?

It always amazed me how many of these fat truck drivers and bearded bikers were selling their old scud magazines at their garage sales. These men had no shame.

Ohhh, yep. Had a lot of good times masturbating to those… a LOT of gooood times. Hate to see ‘em go. 75 cents each or 3 for $2. 50 cents for the ones missing centerfolds.

Power Wheels

Look at the little girl acting just like her dumb bitch trophy wife mom. Kids, they’re like little people.

I used to see these at garage sales all the time. Rich parents would buy them for their kids not realizing that the rechargeable battery only had like 20 minutes of juice. I don’t know how many times I saw some frazzled dad dragging a Power Wheels back from the park with his shrieking kid under one arm. I was never allowed to get one at the garage sales because my dad had also seen those dads and because the dumb rich parents always wanted too much for it.

10 Cents?! I paid over $800 for that piece of shit!!!

Partially painted D&D miniatures.

Usually being sold by a guy like this.

Who had maybe grown up and found better things to do wit his weekend.

I remember purchasing a few to accentuate my growing army man collection. If the 101st thought the battle of the bulge was tough, wait till they find out Hitler has acquired two Orcs and a giant spider!

Pantyhose dolls.

I’m not really sure what the deal was with these things but there were lots of them at garage sales. Maybe the old women in my neighborhood couldn’t bear to part with their used pantyhose after having to ration them so much during World War II. (Did you know that women used to rub gravy on their legs to make it look like they were wearing nylons back then?) Who knows for sure? I bought a pantyhose doll at a garage sale and it was a little old man with a long grey beard and when you lifted the beard it had a dick and balls under it! I can’t believe those never caught on. Another pantyhose based item you got a lot of was jars full of little asses called Pickled Bums.

Something that I’m sure exists for real at the  Chinese Wal-Mart.

Toys that would be worth a lot now if someone didn’t fuck them all up.

You know what I’m talking about. You pull up to the garage sale in the back of your parents car and you see that AT- AT Walker on the table but when you run out of the car to buy it, it’s all messed up, missing all the parts and full of dirt.

Or the Smash-Up Derby cars that some kid’s anal-retentive mom pain stakingly glued all the pieces together so they don’t smash up any more.

The kid across the street from me’s mom actually did this

Don't forget the Cabbage Patch Doll Naked and covered in pen.

My Cabbage Patch doll was called Ralph Damien until I sent in the name change papers and had it legally changed to Thrash Damien. I always thought that Xavier Roberts signature on the doll’s ass would make a good tattoo for some 80s obsessed girl to get (or a girl that looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid).

And low and behold someone has gone and done it.

Good for you. Good luck explaining that to your grandchildren.

Good for you. Good luck explaining that to your grandchildren.


Well you see kids… there were these dolls… and 15 years later Granny got really drunk and…

you know what, never mind. Why would Granny be showing the kids her ass in the first place?

And finally the box of miscellaneous G.I. Joe parts (For those faint of heart avert your eyes).

Yes those flimsy cardboard mass graves that contained the corpses of so many fallen Joes. Twisted and tortured by some sadistic child until their legs wobbled and their rubber torso bands snapped. The final eulogy engraved in magic marker on their tombstone:

Whole Box $1.

I morn them and curse their tormentors but not without my own feelings of guilt. For the last time I saw my Duke Howzer figure he was sailing over Appleby creek attached to 4 bottle rockets. His body will never be found.

Yo…..

Joe.

Yeah garage sales may not be what they used to be but what is these days? I still get excited on a Saturday morning when I see that sign.

And you can still manage to find something good from time to time.

So come on all you human vultures. Strap your fanny packs on and get hunting.

P.S. A special mention has to go to some of the people that make garage sales great. They are as follows.

The woman who says, Oh you just take it for free, it’s yours. when she sees a kid’s meager handful of change.

The man who says, If you want him, make me an offer. when his dog greets people at his garage sale. He will say this 76 times in one morning.

The kid who snatches toys out of peoples’ hands and screams That's not for sale! then runs into his room with it. He will do this 26 times in one morning.

The crazy couple that show up to an 8am garage sale at 6 am.

The even crazier couple that rope off their garage sale so that no one can visit it until their start time of 9am