ENRON'S ODDITIES - A CELEBRATION OF PROCRASTINATION

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I hate to say it my friends, but the drought of impressive projects that Good Rubbish has been mired in for the past month (dating back to when I finished my two tiered coffee table of death) will continue for yet another week. Good news is on the horizon though, as my month long streak of being completely and utterly unable to find cheap lumber around town came to an end today when I successfully nabbed a 60x30 slap of choice plywood for the pittance of 50 cents at my friendly neighborhood Home Despot. With this fine piece of wood I shall be able to do things, and also stuff, that shall produce stuff, and things as well, but most importantly provocative Good Rubbish posts, and these posts shall make you feel eternally warm, like a buttered cinnamon roll surrounded by human skin. Mmm... delicious...

Anyway, to pass the time between now and then I thought I'd post a couple of oddities that I've come across during my many travels across America's bloated craposphere. These tidbits aren't particularly funny, or interesting, or enlightening, or even worthwhile, but they are something, and as I see it that's better than nothing, or at the very least equal to it.



So a while back I picked up the speakers pictured above from a guy who was willing to give me his old record turntable for the low low price of "free". I'd already done about 200 (or three, if you want to be an ass about it) different speaker projects, so I really had no interest in bringing more speakers into my life, let alone boring ones like these, but it's always been awfully tough for me to turn down anything that some poor old man is offering for free. For the record, this is why I don't hang out at homosexual soup kitchens anymore.

Now, at the outset I was under the impression that these speakers were completely and utterly unremarkable, but I would soon learn that this was not the case in the slightest - in fact, they were absolute marvels of suckiness.

The first thing I noticed that made these speakers different from all the others I had seen was that their protective screen coverings were stapled on to the cabinets instead of being easily detachable. I found this quite odd and entirely impractical, but undeterred, I got out a flat head screwdriver and forcibly pried off the speaker covers (this was more difficult than it sounds, those things were REALLY on there) until I was left with this thoroughly unimpressive display of speaker-ish nonsense:



Anything in this picture jumping out to you as being decidedly wrong? Yeah, the purplish gray particle board is ugly, I know, but do you notice anything else? Lemme take you in for a closer look:



That's the top speaker cone on the cabinet I just pictured. It's a piece of shit, but it's capable of producing sounds. It's about 3 inches deep, and is made out of rubber, plastic, metal, and flexible fibers. While not thrilling, it serves a purpose in this world, albeit a modest one.



That's the bottom "speaker" on the cabinet I just pictured. It's a piece of shit, and it's designed to do absolutely nothing other than trick people into believing that their bottom of the line speaker set has 2 working speakers in it when in fact it only has one. It's about 0 inches deep, and is made out of cardboard, paper, more cardboard, and pure horse shit. It makes me want to beat whomever designed these speakers over the head with a claw hammer, which coincidentally is about the only way that the existence of this piece of crap could result in the production of a sound. Even the dumpster behind my house didn't care for these things, though it had to live with them for far longer than I did.

My second (and final, for the time being) tale of Rubbish oddities isn't prefaced by an interesting story, nor is it bookended with spectacularly witty zingers, but it does come with some interesting photographs, so that's... you know, something. Right? Sure.

A few months ago the elder McHanslaws decreed that the yards in the front and back of their property were to be torn up, stripped of their sprinkler systems, cultivated, and fitted with new plants and walkways. Furthermore, it was made quite clear that the whole of this work was to be completed by born-in McHanslaw laborers, meaning that I've been sporadically laboring over this undertaking for quite some time now (I attribute some of my failings in producing new Rubbish materials to this project, though laziness as always is the primary contributor). At some point, once the whole landscaping fiasco has come to a conclusion (likely 9 or 10 years from now), I'll produce a full post on the massive project, but for now please enjoy the following:

While removing the sprinkler system from the family's back yard, father McHanslaw came across this unusual convergence of sprinkler hosing and tree root. It's not really that astounding, but considering that I'm hurting for material right now I feel that it's worth sharing, just like that box turtle I brought to class in first grade. His name was Harvey, I drewed an H on his back with nail polish all by myself!







Kinda neat, huh? Yeah, emphasis on the kinda, I know. Regardless, I was pretty impressed that the sprinkler system still worked with this root constricting it so much, but I guess it's like that old saying about sprinkler systems and roots, isn't it? You know the one I'm talking about.

That's it for today folks. Hopefully I'll produce something that's earnestly worth reading/looking at next week, but if not you can rest assured that I'll create something that wholeheartedly sucks. That safety blanket is always there for you, trust in it.