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ellarienThe campus bookstore is spacious, and it carries many things besides books: university apparel, of course, stationery and art supplies, dorm-room bits and pieces and expensive purses/totes/backpacks, DVDs and mobile phones and a few mostly seasonal toys and games. They also have ... strange things. Expensive strange things, mostly; foot-tall parrots sculptured in semi-precious stones, bronze eagles, colorful Oaxacan wood carvings. I bought one of the eagles myself in a moment of weakness when I'd just had a large pay raise, but I don't know who, if anyone, buys most of these things.
The last year or so, they've been carrying the collectible "painted ponies", both in tabletop and tree-ornament size. Those have a certain kitschy poetry to them; the life-sized versions that did a tour of the local malls a few years back were actually quite impressive. The cows and wiener dogs are similar in concept -- figurines in colorful thematic costume/decorations -- but jokier in execution; three-dimensional cartoons that raise a transient smile, and I'm not sure what to make of the wolves, though I think those are supposed to be more in the poetic line. Now they've been joined by small, rather fat, penguins, definitely cartoonish. I suppose someone must want to own a shelf-full of such things, but why? To my jaundiced eye, they're a funny-once, if that, and thereafter a dust-trap. I like to get a story with my discretionary spending, not just a one-liner, or if not that, something that will occupy my hands and spare brain-circuits while I make up my own stories.
The last year or so, they've been carrying the collectible "painted ponies", both in tabletop and tree-ornament size. Those have a certain kitschy poetry to them; the life-sized versions that did a tour of the local malls a few years back were actually quite impressive. The cows and wiener dogs are similar in concept -- figurines in colorful thematic costume/decorations -- but jokier in execution; three-dimensional cartoons that raise a transient smile, and I'm not sure what to make of the wolves, though I think those are supposed to be more in the poetic line. Now they've been joined by small, rather fat, penguins, definitely cartoonish. I suppose someone must want to own a shelf-full of such things, but why? To my jaundiced eye, they're a funny-once, if that, and thereafter a dust-trap. I like to get a story with my discretionary spending, not just a one-liner, or if not that, something that will occupy my hands and spare brain-circuits while I make up my own stories.
