JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Ever have an image or commercial burned in your brain for years and never found a way to prove that your mind isn't playing tricks on you? Until some random browsing on YouTube this weekend, I was almost convinced that Duke the Penguin was a figment of my imagination. Blame Toledo, Ohio for this brainworm. My suspicion is that I was waiting for other family members to finish trying on clothes at the Woodville Mall branch of Sears and watched a loop tape of a Duke ad several times to kill time. Five minutes is all I needed for this cool-lookin' dude to forever etch himself on my brain cells. These memories surface whenever I see the "Poochie" episode of The Simpsons , as Poochie and Duke share similar delusions of being "cool". Stevie Wonder utilizes a tune from the soundtrack of The Woman in Red for the public good. Lingering impression from childhood viewings: all the "no"s. Perhaps the drunk driver was driven to overindulgence that ...

One of the things I love about used items is finding traces of a previous owner. It gives a sense of history to the item. If you're lucky, you'll find out what that person was thinking while they used the item. Take my copy of Stevie Wonder's classic 1973 album, Innervisions , the one with Higher Ground and Living For The City . Picked it up in a $1 record bin in Detroit a few years ago. There are two spots on the jacket where an earlier owner wrote information on when they purchased it, each spot with the same information (symbols noted in square brackets): Jag 5. LP #440. [circle with a dot in the middle] in [Omega symbol] (30th of Omega; 21st of August, 1975). [crescent moon] in [one wavy line on top of another] (just minutes past full). [an "I" with an arrow pointing right through the middle] rising (when purchased, appox. 17:15 E.D.T.) What do the symbols mean? Was the owner heavily into astronomy, astrology or a faith? What were the 439 other ...