- Glow-in-the-dark stuff. Specifically, the semi-articulated glow-in-the-dark skeletal pirate that I got from a box of Cap'n Crunch in 1978, but I like all glow-in-the-dark things. Luminous green plastic reminds me of being a child, pulling the bedsheets over my head at night to surround myself with as much cavelikle darkness as possible, using my invisible hand to make whatever glowing thing I happened to have hover before me in the black. The best kind of glow-in-the-dark things were things that I didn't know glowed in the dark until I happened to catch sight of them at night. I had a Micronaut Pharoid which, I discovered, had a glow-in-the-dark chest plate. Occasionally I would be disappointed by something made of a plastic which had the tell-tale tint of glowing plastic when the lights were on, but did not actually glow when they were off.
- Pancake mix. This isn't a childhood memory: I bought a box of the stuff during my cycling tour across the U.S. in 2006. It seemed a great luxury to mix simple powder with water at my campsite and cook up a batch to fuel my morning's ride. They weren't fantastic pancakes. But when I cooked them over my little white gas Dragonfly stove, slathered them with cheap maple-like syrup, and ate them in front of my tent with a plastic fork, they became a small portion of stable home during my four months of nomadic and often lonely travel.
- The Fujifilm Go. It's a portable X-ray machine with a big, friendly logo on its side. It runs on Windows XP, has a touchscreen, and can transmit images over WiFi. I saw one in the corridor outside of X-ray #2 at the hospital last week while waiting for my mother to get X-rays of her hip, which it turned out she had dislocated by trying to pick up the cat. The Go seemed like a cool piece of high technology on wheels with a smiley face on it. Later, I read the brochure and found that it was, in fact, just that. It's got silent dual motor drive and bops around with its 15-kilowatt telescopic X-ray tube, ready to irradiate you and show you your insides. If I had one, I'd roll it everywhere and X-ray all sorts of people and objects and would most likely do very naughty things with it.
There. Now you know about these three things. I encourage you! Think of three things of your own this week and spend some time digging them.
I love glow-in-the-dark stuff too! I still love it. For years I kept a small plastic lizard on the base of my bed-side lamp. After reading, I would turn out light, and there he would be, all charged up and glowing.
Thanks for taking me back...