Popular This Week: Things with Ears

These three items with ears sold in the past three days, one-two-three, just like that, on my eBay:

L to R: 
-Ironstone sugar bowl from Yorkshire, 1840s
-Fluffy dog "Baba-ra", by Kamar, 1967
-1970s fondue pot, the sort I imagine Mary Richards would've used if Starsky & Hutch had come to dinner [good prompt for a fic!]

Oh. No, I have to take that back about Mary Richards--per the Mary Tyler Moore Show's fondue scene on youtube, she used one of those stinky sterno pots. (Really, these electric ones are much better--no smell.)

I must have absorbed a lot of 70's design from the MTM Show, which my family watched every week when I was a kid, because it wasn't from my parents, who weren't at all into the era's style, and neither was I---all that orange, all that polyester...
I appreciate it now, but I still wouldn't want to live with it 
. . . she says, sitting on her orange couch--(but it's more of a 50s orange).

I didn't like the MTM show much--it was my sister's favorite--but remember when you just watched whatever halfway decent was on TV, cause that's all there was? 

I'm enjoying eBay a lot. 
Mostly I like the scrounging and researching, but I like the selling too: 
after almost two months, I've made a profit of $175. 
That makes it a hobby that pays for itself, essentially. 

The Shape of Boiling Eggs

I've spent the profits on stuffed animals, but I've got a backlog to work on now, so I haven't bought any in a while.
My most recent purchase is a glass Pyrex stove-top coffee pot.

I'd almost bought such a pot at Goodwill for $6 but decided it would be a nostalgia buy––memories of my mother making Folger's coffee in one––and not something I'd really use. And I didn't want to try to sell it because it's heavy and breakable, which I don't like dealing with.

But then I went to see the movie The Shape of Water, and director Guillermo del Toro must have been in love with these coffee pots because he over-lingers, more than once, on eggs boiling in one.

The hero (Sally Hawkins), offers one of her boiled eggs:

AND THEN I HAD TO HAVE ONE! A coffee pot. (Also, some hard-boiled eggs. . . . If I hadn't just not bought such a pot, would I have felt the same?)

So, instead of spending $6, I spent $29 w/shipping (the shipping is what kicks you on eBay).

The sets and props, like the pot, are what I liked best in The Shape of Water. Otherwise, it's a nice but rather flat story.

In what is basically a fix-it fanwork of The Creature of the Black Lagoon (fix-it: where a fan retells a story to get it to come out the way they want), del Toro weirdly left out the crucial ingredient that makes monster movies work: 
arousing the audience's pathos for the monster.

Del Toro's monster is human––played by the wonderful Michael Shannon––but he's only ever bad. 
You feel not one ounce of sympathy for him. 

That makes him a one-note character, and, overall, I found the movie boring. 
Lovely and sweet, but too psychologically simplistic.

But the eggs boiling in the Pyrex pot!!! 
That was not boring.
That was even worth it. 

This is mine. >