1. Easter Bunny Test – My wife and I spent Easter in Orlando with my parents and my sister’s family, which included my two nephews. I spent most of Saturday engaged in training exercises with the boys, getting them ready for Sunday’s big egg hunt. After awhile, we noticed that eggs started mysteriously appearing in the birdhouse. After this had happened a few more times, most of us were in agreement that the Easter Bunny was onto our training exercises and wanted to let us know that he was watching us. My nephew Logan, however, took a more practical view of the situation and suspected one of us of being the Easter Bunny. He developed this test to try and suss the Easter Bunny out of the family of suspects he’d grown to trust:
For those of you who can’t read the image:
Test chart of being an easter bunny
Test 1 hop 30 times.
Test 2 don’t make a sound
Test 3 don’t let anyone see you.
Test 4 never be found in a game of hide and seek
Test 5 never get tired of hoping
Test 6 like all children
Test 7 hop all the time
warning: if you fail 3 or over tests you may not be the easter bunny
for what it’s worth, we were all found “not easter bunny”. It remains a mystery to this day…
2. 80s Nick poster – Ages ago, Branded in the 80s shared this amazing early-era branding poster for Nickelodeon. I just noticed it recently! How many characters do you remember?
I remember when Reggie Jackson had a sports show!
3. Sun Ra: Zip a Dee Do Dah – If you’re not familiar with Sun Ra and the Arkestra yet, you should be. This guy’s got a pretty interesting career, a great mythos, and he puts together a good jazz band. They can play straightforward jazz with turn-on-a-dime precision, or veer off into lo(ooo)ng avant-garde journeys into space, depending on which album (or track!) you’re listening to.
Anyway, here’s him and the Arkestra performing Zip a Dee Doo Dah.
and for kicks here’s one of my favorite tracks:
4. Snoopy Sno Cone Machine- I was reminded of this thing earlier this week. We had a Snoopy Sno Cone machine growing up, and it was a pretty great way to wear children out for very little payoff. You had to insert ice cubes into a chute in the top and turn a crank to shred it up into sno-cone ice. If you did this for about 30 minutes, you had enough to fill one of those small dentist’s office cups with ice. You could then squirt it with orange juice or something using the included Snoopy syrup dispenser, which would melt the ice and somewhat negate the past half hour of work. Then you could eat it.
But it looked cool, and I guess a tenth of a sno cone is better than none.
5. Flying Pig – Wow, what a lineup! Hey hey hey!