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Inexplicable Ephemera (Miscellaneous Stuff / Items Found)

Well, yeah. That's the tricky thing about it. I'm obviously not a Muslim, and I'm not a Christian either. But at least the New Testament makes sense. The Koran reads like it was written by James Joyce or something. I'm finding it really hard to get a grip on it.
 
Found a few years back in Edinburgh, behind a seat in a venue where I was working:

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Kilt, waved sporran (I think), goggles (possibly), Ichthyosaur?

I suspect that sometimes the best fun is to be had in the not knowing.
 
Kilt, waved sporran (I think), goggles (possibly), Ichthyosaur?

I suspect that sometimes the best fun is to be had in the not knowing.

I inverted this but was unable to save it.
It's an old glass oil lamp that is being waved. I think the kilt is actually an apron, but yes, they are goggles. And it looks like an actual fossil rather than an image, a slab of stone but yes an Ichthyosaur.
 
Ah yes - see it now; I thought the dark bits were maybe the tassles on the front of a sporran but the wire handle is pretty obvious when you look at it.
 
They were pulling down an old dog racing track near me when i was a kid and as the diggers were working we were on the mounds that they were creating and i found one of the old pop bottles that had a marble in so you only drank a certain amount at a time and an old white pipe with what i think is a kings head as the big bit where you stuffed the tabacco. I saw some of the old pop bottles in a window in Matlock i think they were being sold for about £2.50
 
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The pipe construction was similar to these, and i do not think the image on the front had a crown on.

The bottle was like this
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Back when I was cycling around doing community care work, I found an old bottle poking out of an old embankment .. I took it home, cleaned it up and it had 'Cromer Dairy' written on it. Cromer hasn't had a dairy for perhaps 50 years so, maybe longer. I reckoned I could probably sell it for at least a fiver. Then I dropped it like a twat.
 
On the subject of found bottles. I found this first one when I was a teenager in some local woods. I was walking along a well-trodden path when my foot struck something sticking out of the dry clay. I dug it up, cleaned it and still have it for some reason. That’s genuine lucky white heather inside it, picked in the Highlands by my own hand and not bought from a Gypsy.

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The second bottle I found under quite sad circumstances as I was digging a grave for a cat in the back garden. It looks quite modern compared to the first one and is about three inches tall. It’s also not as blurry as that in real life, that’s my camera skills.

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I found one once at my parents old house. They were fortunate to have a few acres of land then and it was also sticking out of clay ... it was green, fully intact with a rotting cork still in place and the word "POISON" embossed onto the glass. I showed it to my Dad and he threw it away. The contents looked exactly like someone had puked into it. I still wish we could have bashed the cork out and just swilled it out instead but maybe he knew best.
 
Mines over at ma mums as well, so's the pipe, just wish i could find a pic of it, to be honest i was suprised it was in such good nick with all the JCBs trundling about
 
I’ve mentioned before some of the items I’ve found while renovating my flat. I’ve been thinking about this again recently, while replacing floorboards prior to sanding and varnishing the floor of the back room that I’ve been using as a storeroom/workshop for the last several years.

I found a quite large pickle jar with an unusually (more or less) intact label:

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Also, an odd arrangement - which consisted of a partly singed couple of pages from a newspaper (dated 1917), some beheaded lead soldiers, a single wooden cube with pictures on the faces, and a pasteboard fish! The newspaper was so desiccated that it fell apart in my fingers – but before it did I noticed that the most prominent article on the sheet was in regard to the loss of a British ship. As I said, this seemed like some sort of conscious arrangement, but that was probably my own desire to find a pattern (I’m sure if I was an archaeologist I’d use the phrase ‘ritual purposes’). At the time the fish, certainly, seemed somehow macabre – although in the pictures it looks more forlorn than sinister.

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And here an assortment of some older finds:

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What's the metal tool in the 2nd picture - was that part of the find?
 
Fantastic stuff @Spookdaddy !

Getting a date from that newspaper was top sleuthing :) can you give us a scale on the fish? Is it one of the fake ones they put in glass cases?
 
What's the metal tool in the 2nd picture - was that part of the find?

No, not part of the find. There's a pry-bar and a nail puller in that photo - used for lifting the boards. Also, a small torch; when I lift a board I always check any cable runs and pipes while I have the opportunity, and clean out the shite while I'm there.

...can you give us a scale on the fish? Is it one of the fake ones they put in glass cases?

That was my first instinct, but I'm not sure - it didn't seem quite well enough rendered for display (although, to be fair, it was quite a way past its sell-by). What was left of it was around 40cm long.
 
yes! more of this sort of thing!
 
"this way" and an arrow on all sides of somthing so that it's a circle?

How about a notice that says "look up!" for no reason at all?
For no reason other than to make people smile!
 
Even colour pencils? It's not only wood on the shavings.
Hmmm. Coloured pencils can have varying composition.
Cheap ones have a pigment bound with some kind of wax, a bit like crayons.
Expensive ones might be watercolour-based. So, pigments bound with watercolour medium.
So...yeah, probably not that bio-degradable.
 
I was listening to the latest Adam Buxton podcast and he made the point there's virtually nothing you can do for "fun" now without harming the environment, even surfing the net is reliant on massive servers throbbing away, some fuelled by coal. So we can add drawing pictures to that list.
 
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