Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Dummies and the jungle

So we started off our day in Cincinnati the day by going to Jungle Jim's, the biggest, bestest and most entertaining grocery store in the whole wide world.


When you walk in, the first thing you see in a large Campbell Soup can swinging from a large, well, swing attached to the ceiling. And man that soup can looks happy. He also sings the Campbell Soup song every 15 minutes, as do displays of a bear dressed as Elvis, Lucky the Lucky Charms leprechaun and his cereal minions and Scooby Doo. (Too bad for all you reading this blog, but photography was strictly verboten!) These giraffes are outside, so whew, no one yelled, "Stop taking photos!" at us.



There is an international food section spanning from Great Britain to Asia and Holland to Mexico. There is even an aisle dedicated to hot sauce! Each aisle has themed characters hanging above the different countries. Great Britain has the Sherwood Forrest and Robin Hood. There is a fish market with a beach theme and live crabs in a tank for the pickin'. It's totally awesome!

Here are Laurel and Hardy discussing the amazing practicalities of shopping carts.


Tommy Bear loves his stroop waffles! An amazing Dutch treat of thin waffles held together by sweet molasses.

Delicious fresh sushi we purchased for lunch.



Next on our stop (really back tracking back to Kentucky) is the Vent Haven ventriloquist museum in Fort Mitchell, Ky. Let me tell you, it's not as creepy as you think. Actually it wasn't creepy at all, just awesome. Dummies aren't as scary when there's hundreds of them all staring at you at the same time. Unfortunately, we weren't able to take pictures to publish inside the museum because of copyright mumbo jumbo or something.
But here's the sign with a painting of a dummy, but if that and the photos of the museum brochure and of Marcie and Amanda posing in front of the museum doesn't do it for you (and really, it shouldn't), check out the story NPR did a couple years ago. Click here to go to NPR and check out their story and photos: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5544315
And here's William Shakespeare Berger (yes, that really was his name). He started collecting the dummies in 1910, and although he died in the 1972, his collection lives on at Vent Haven. There's more than 700 figures at Vent Haven, many dating back to the 1700s.

The museum is also home to the annual ConVENTion, the only international convention dedicated to ventriloquists and their dummies. We missed the convention by a few weeks. Poop.


* Note: We are very, very, very (did we mention very?) tired right now. Hope to be funny again in a post coming to you soon.

2 comments:

mamaann said...

so proud you toured a grocery store.i have raised you right! and, stay away from those truckers!

Jenni said...

OMG! I am addicted to those dutch caramel waffles!! And I found out today the 7-11 kitty-corner from my work stocks them!!!