Black Gate

While my appearance on these pages has been rather sporadic of late, regular readers of Black Gate will have noted the debut of a new BG blogger, Gabe Dybing, who has been doing some filling in for my weekly slot. I had intended to give him a formal introduction at the start of the new year, but instead we just had him jump right in, and he hit the ground running with a series of reflections on Leiberian Sword & Sorcery. Now that you all know him and an introduction at this point would be superfluous, let me instead announce that he is moving from pinch hitter to starting line-up beginning this Wednesday. Welcome to the roster, Gabe!

Meantime, I have been busy setting up my Inner Sanctum (also sometimes referred to as The Dungeon, since it is in my basement). Gabe has been visiting my rural abode about once a month lately, so he has seen it go from a musty room full of unpacked boxes to a slightly less musty museum and workspace housing my collection of vintage toys, games, books, and comics. It’s not exactly the Ackermansion — but it could pass for a room in the Ackermansion!

Some folks have expressed curiosity about what my collection looks like, and while these pictures represent only a fraction of it, I thought I’d share a few here (click on pics for larger versions — you’ll need to in order to spot all the toys and pop-cult ephemera), as well as slipping in a shameless plug for the business side of this venture.

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On Friday night, as the light waned and the sky turned the color of mildewed pumpkins, that familiar holy chant began resounding up and down the streets: “Trick or Treat!”

Wee supplicants bedecked in strange garb began their door-to-door pilgrimages to receive the benediction of sugared confections by the handfuls.

Hallowe’en partly descends from All Hallows’ Eve (on its good Catholic mother side — the one who married some pagan dude and their offspring got really weird and started bobbing for apples and wearing William Shatner masks). All Hallows’ Eve was once a prologue to All Saints’ Day. Not many recall that that one nowadays. By dint of Hallowe’en falling on Friday this year, many bars, restaurants, and homes expanded their Hallowe’en celebrations to encompass Saturday, creating the irony of All Hallows’ Eve not only overshadowing, but completely usurping the day of the saints.

The time of feasts and holy days is nigh upon us. Now our most cherished holidays both secular and religious come in quick succession: after Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving and Christmas before the lull of the long, gray winter.

After a couple dull months, a certain bow-wielding matchmaker sneaks in to liven things up a little. He is soon followed by those green-bedecked, Guinness-swigging leprechauns who are ambassadors of a saint who drove snakes out of a place that never had any snakes.

Valentine and Patrick won’t miss losing All Saints’ Day since they each have their own, but they — one a third-century Roman martyr and the other a fifth-century Romano-British missionary — might well wonder how they became the de facto saints of heart-shaped candy and risqué greeting cards on the one hand and green beer on the other. Along with a certain fourth-century Greek bishop named Nikolaos, they could form a support group for saints whose legends bear little resemblance to their actual lives, while also making their names among the most well-known on the planet.

Not that it matters to most of us. The holy days and the names attached to them were always more-or-less excuses to do what humans have been doing (or wanting to do and feeling really guilty about it) throughout history: looking for reasons to get together and celebrate and dress in silly clothes. If there is a benevolent God, that Prime Mover may well wonder why we feel such a strong need to have an excuse.

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I may have just succeeded in posting the most incongruous title in Black Gate online history, but it does make perfect sense: read on, and I will present a mystery of the Orient, an enigma from eBay, a conundrum on the commode!

As you can see over on the right side of your screen, a tiny man peeps out from under the lid of my toilet’s holding tank asking “Hello?”

In my nine years of eBay hunting, I have come across many strange things: shrunken heads, souls for sale, magic spells (guaranteed to work). I have chronicled some of those finds here at Black Gate. But this one caught my eye, not because of the rather run-of-the-mill object, but the price.

When he arrived in my mailbox, a sticky decal neatly folded into a small, padded manila envelope, I found myself asking very much the same thing: “Hello?” as in “Hello, what have we here?” Even though I had, indeed, ordered him, I was still somewhat baffled that he should arrive at all.

The reason for my bewilderment is that he was shipped from China; he cost 89 cents; shipping was FREE.

I couldn’t tell you what I was searching for when this came up, but there it was. The item was listed as follows:

Toilet Monster Hello Bathroom Decal Funny Creative Vinyl Sticker Wall Art Funny.

And if you know me, you know there are some key trigger words in that there spray of language that would grab my attention.

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