Recession Slowed by Gains in Absurd Collectables

he economic hit taken by the US in the wake of Sept 11th has largely been wiped away by huge growth in the absurd collectables market, according to Harvey Rosenblum, president of the National Association for Business Economics.

"While the market for more traditional items, like home computers or appliances, is still weak, new markets for products like misprinted dog food bags and celebrity nerf ball fuzz have been driving the economy for months. A nation shaken by terrorism has been economically buoyed by its passion for truly useless shit," commented Rosenblum on Monday.

Useless collectables have long been a factor in the national economy, with a strong demand for Thomas Kincade paintings, beanie babies and dot-com stocks helping to pull America through the recession in the early 90's. But the recent surge has been unlike anything this country has seen before.

"Americans have realized that any new computer they buy is just going to seem as slow at their old one in two months, and a new Chevy's going to break down just as often as their old one, but original mint-condition promotional materials from the short-lived Wintergreen Nerds candy line are going to be something they can pass on to their grandchildren," said Frank Nettle, editor of Trendy Obsession magazine.

In spite of numerous public statements from the Franklin Mint reminding the public that if it's not hand-numbered and cast in pewter, it's not a collectable, the current collecting trend has moved beyond the traditional "bullshit painted on plates" market, branching out beyond porcelain figurines and glass elephants into the unknown realm beyond. The latest frontier of collecting is as varied as the American people themselves, whose collections range from the intensely personal to the just plain bizarre.

Asked why he began collecting caps from different brands of ranch dressing over fifteen years ago, Arlo Turtle of Angel Falls, TX replied: "it seemed as good as the next thing." Angie DuBank of Peoria, IL collects pictures of places where Annette Benning has had her hair cut, while Ted Middlebaum owns over 35 ticket stubs from the original screening of Porky's in Las Vegas. Beatrice Fraumbalt, who collects address labels from old TV guides, explains: "It's not about what something means to you, or where it came from. Or even what it costs. Or if your grandchildren look forward to inheriting your collection when you die. It's about keeping the Space Invaders from finding out where you live and laying eggs in your preserves."

Modern collectors range from a budget-conscious gatherer of little green army figures like Tank Reynolds ("I've got a soldier in every position except the one where the guy's tip-toeing, presumably into a Hamburg cat show, which is thought to be a crawling figure who was miscast in the molding process during the factory fire in 1971") to a high-roller like Chelton McNesh, who owns an extensive collection of Visa cards with low account numbers. Though the collection is his pride and joy, McNesh still peppers every conversation with bitter references to "the Honus Wagner of all Visa collectables, card number 4500-0000-0000-0001" thought to be owned by a Saudi collector. Though just how many Saudis the man owns can only be guessed at this time.

"A person's collection reflects a bit of who they are and where their passions lie," said Lillith Barnes, owner of the world's largest collection of things that have been pulled out of Ted Kennedy's ass. "Obviously I'm a political junkie at heart," explained Barnes, gesturing toward a display case containing an electric toothbrush, one improbably large shoehorn, a Holly Hobby Doll, a bicycle inner tube and a set of three matching Happy Apples.

Oftentimes terrible miscues by major manufacturers are offset by the profits gleaned from marketing aborted runs of products as limited-edition collectables. "Sure, I know they make a lot of jokes about New Coke and how it flopped. But what nobody ever tells you is that we're still making the stuff and selling it on eBay," confided Bernard Manhouse, head of Research and Development for Coca-Cola. That same collector's mentality has allowed Chevrolet to turn a profit on the ill-fated Looney Tunes Corvette, and helped cut the losses related to the similarly misguided Muppets-endorsed Wok-a-Wok-a-Wok from Kitchenade.

The collecting trend which has gripped the nation has spread even to the commune offices, where repeated attempts have been made to steal Rok Finger's shoes, the same pair he has been wearing nonstop since 1953.

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"God and I have an understanding. I don't argue He doesn't exist and he won't argue it about me."

You know how some people are really smart but they're no good at tests? I'm like that—no good at tests. I'm not good at remembering stuff or thinking of things real fast either, and I'm not really good at coming up with ideas of my own or knowing things that people just sort of know. But I'm really bad at tests.

Some people call it test anxiety, like where you get really worried about how you're going to do and forget all the stuff you know. But that's not it. I mean, if I knew the stuff and forgot it, that would be bad enough, but I have no clue what they're talking about. One teacher tried to tell me I was dyslexic, but I told him I don't really go to church at all. I can't believe God would be such a dick, if He exists, and take away all my knowledge of everything just to be spiteful. If that's the way he's going to be about it, I'm never going to church. Just to be spiteful.

I have gone to church before, technically. You always hear about how a church is supposed to be a place where anybody is welcome at any time of day or night, no restrictions, but they're just hypocrites. Next time you're driving home Sunday morning with a little whiskey still sloshing around in your gut drive up the steps and into their doors while the dude, the what you call him, is giving his big God speech. See if you'll be welcome then. I can tell you first hand you won't.

Every once in a while I feel bad about what I've done, or what I am, or the box of Cracker Jacks I got that didn't have no surprise in it, but it's not like I need someone to tell me it's God's plan or something dumb to make me feel better. It doesn't make any more sense to me that God thinks it's funny there's no prize in my snacks exactly when I'm in the mood for a lick-on tattoo.

Just for laughs I went to a church once and the church guy there told me they were full. It didn't sound full, that's what I told him. He said it wasn't full, but they were closed for the holidays, and he didn't want to hurt my feelings. Then he pushed me off the steps and ran back inside. I could hear him locking the doors and him and his friends were laughing. What do you call them? Monks?

I guess I could take better tests if I read books and such. I tried reading the Bible but all that "begat" stuff really pissed me off. They introduce like a hundred and something characters in the first few pages. I'm not much of a reader, but I can tell you that's the kind of bad writing that can keep your screenplay from being produced. I still read about five pages of it, two columns on each, and then nobody ever tested me on it. So you can see why I don't ever want to read a book again just because they say there's going to be a test on it. You never know, they're probably lying.

Nine out of ten times they aren't, yeah. Maybe even ninety-nine out of 100. But reading, you know… it's boring.

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While most people question from time to time the history of this or the history of that, few ever dislodge their heads from the collective bunghole long enough to ponder the history of history itself. How did we remember the past in the past, and why? The answer may rip your head off and crap down your throat.

The first histories on record were verbal, stories passed down from generation to generation like the one about the time uncle Henry beaned that hooker with a croquet mallet. This system worked fairly well for centuries, in spite of the complete lack of accuracy inherent in passing along history through a gigantic game of "telephone." Stories morphed over time until they bore no resemblance whatsoever to the originals, usually picking up fire-breathing dragons, large-breasted women and leprechauns along the way.

Then came pictographs, first in prehistoric, then in Egyptian times. These didn't help at all, and actually set the cause of history back 500 years because most people drew like shit. The ancient Sumerians actually believed that their ancestors rode around on giant dogs, just because their ancestors were so lousy at drawing horses.

Eventually, history yielded to the forces of progress and drawings were phased out in favor of songs. This ended up being only a marginal improvement, however, when it turned out that most people were lousy at writing songs as well. Most of the recorded history of ancient France has to do with cold-hearted women who up and left their men. In all likelihood, great wars were fought, technologies advanced, and other hard-to-rhyme subjects of note came up during this era, but we'll always have to guess at the details since no one could come up with any catchy songs commemorating these events.

Song-recorded history also posed the problem of popularity, as people often knew a great deal about the history behind songs they liked and wanted to hear again and again, but very little about the lame or sappy songs they thought blew. As a result, children in China in the 18th century B.C. knew everything there was to know about the time Willie Finch nailed his pecker to a tree, but next to nothing about the fall of the Xia dynasty. The dynasty's fall certainly made its way into a fair number of songs, but since the best of these was the bloated, pretentious "Tall Fall," the children never really had a chance.

Of course, similar problems exist today, since most American schoolchildren are at a loss to explain the purpose of the Bill of Rights, but have completely memorized the Meow Mix commercial and are quite familiar with Snoop Dogg's favorite sexual position.

By 1700 B.C. writing had been invented, which helped matters greatly except in areas afflicted by messy handwriting. Most of the history of Persia pre-600 B.C. remains a mystery due to the sloppy, lackadaisical hand of the day. Early writing was merely a streamlined version of pictographs strung together in sentences like "Me you seagulls two dogs fucking house buffalo."

Even after writing-down had become the widely accepted standard for historical recording, there still remained the question of how to store what had been written for the ages. The early practice of tattooing historical texts onto fat people gave way after it was realized that these corpulent canvases were literally taking history with them to their graves, and paper was adopted around 12oo B.C. But this helped matters little as historians discovered that books are heavy, and usually get lost every time you move. Also, paper was considered a delicacy by deer and the undereducated, so keeping starving people and wildlife out of your library became a full-time occupation.

Finally, someone realized you could just write history on a slip of paper, drop it into a bottle, and huck it into the ocean, at which point someone would eventually find it and learn about history. This solved several problems since deer can't operate bottle openers and starving people don't float. This practice exploded soon after the invention of the bottle in China in 12 A.D. The bottle was originally created as a musical instrument, before first being used to hold beverages in 13 A.D., after an extremely drunk man accidentally drank the spit collected at the bottom of a bottle-player's instrument after a particularly spirited performance. In spite of this experience, people somehow still decided to use bottles for drinking.

The first "message in a bottle" was invented after an unnamed Chinese man, who for some reason was carrying his grocery list in his mouth, accidentally dropped it into a half-full bottle of beer and couldn't get it back out. In frustration, he hurled the bottle into the ocean, where it remained until washing up on shore two years later. The man who found it, Yung Si-Bong, took his discovery as a message from God that he should go out into the world and find two-dozen eggs and a quart of goat milk. He told friends and family the story of his message from God, and before the day was done, the entire village was hucking message-filled bottles into the sea, hoping to hilariously fool morons like Yung Si-Bong.

Gradually, historians would migrate back to books, after the entire Pacific Ocean became clogged with bottles around 200 A.D. and swimmers had to wear chain mail to keep from being torn to shreds by all the broken glass, which incidentally contributed to China's 100% drowning rate in those days. But the main driving factor in the move back to book-written history was the development of new inks that didn't smell like a dying frog's balls. China's original inks were made from a blend of soot from pine smoke and fish-egg lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and wolverine musk. Around 230 A.D., the Chinese discovered that you could make ink out of soot alone, and that all the other ingredients had been thrown in originally just to get them out of the house.

Sadly, paper wouldn't make its debut in Europe until the fifteenth century, when Europeans were finally able to end the laborious practice of finger-painting their history on the walls with baked monkey feces. The Europeans were at first resistant to give up their shit-smearing ways, but quickly relented when they discovered that paper is delicious.

In modern days, thanks to the advent of the Internet, we've done away with paper altogether and have returned to the ways of our forefathers with a verbal history tradition, usually carried on something like "I read on the Internet that they've still got Napoleon's dong in a jar inside somebody's freezer in Hoboken." But you know what they say about being doomed to repeat history. I'm just kidding, I know you don't.

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