Flea market extravaganza!

I can't help but feel that "flea market extravaganza" is redundant, because when is a flea market NOT an extravaganza?  Like saying PIN number or ATM machine.  The thing is the thing, y'know?  The word is part of the name, it's not like you have to say the last part of the phrase at all because

[PARAGRAPH OF PEDANTRY REDACTED]

Anyway.

We went to a giant (extravagant?) flea market a couple weekends ago, to find new things for the shop and possibly for ourselves.  We picked up a bunch of sweet vintage skeleton keys for ya'll, an old test tube rack, and another microscope.  We saw, oh, about $300 worth of antique books that we wanted, and that's probably lowballing it.  This one in particular was fetching:

WE CAN HAZ?

As a matter of fact, no, we could not haz, because we could not locate the booth person it belonged to for the life of us.  So, they lost a sale.  And frankly they were lucky we didn't just walk off with it but we have MORALS or something so we restrained ourselves.

 We also saw some skulls:

The one behind my arm is a cougar skull, the other two magnificent specimens are bear skulls.  Bear skulls, in our experience, tend to run at around $100 or so, and these were about that much.  I guess that's actually not a bad price for an f'ing bear skull, but as yet neither Rachel nor myself have been able to commit the money to getting one for ourselves.  We have discussed going dutch and sharing custody of the skull in some sort of 6 months on, 6 months thing, but I believe bear skulls for each of us is a likely eventuality, at some point in the nebulous, far off future.  Because sharing custody of a skull would be weird, obvs.


Oh, and then there was this:

I mean, what the hell.  What is the deal with freaky-ass teddy bears at antique markets?  Compare this with another teddy I saw at an antique mall in Pennsylvania last year:

Quid pro quo, Clarice

I can't even.

How about ending this with some lovely vintage tins to look at so you can scour images of disturbing children's toys from your brain!

Yeah, those are pretty.

Keep an eye out on the shop, we'll be adding some new curiosity collections in the next week or two, and if you're into vintage science-y stuff, we've got some exciting test microscope and test tube type things coming down the pipe.  So stay tuned: same bat time, same bat channel!