I stopped for lunch in Garrettsville, Ohio today. It’s an interesting old town with strong historical links to President James A. Garfield. The village also has one of the best Subway sandwich shops I know of. So after an enjoyable lunch I did a little walk around the downtown area spotting several good photo-ops; one such opportunity was the back window of one of the main street shops. Certainly the window sash and frame could use some attention, but I loved the texture of the wood, the weathered paint, and the ancient brick and stone of the building. Spotting the carefully-placed little toy bunny through the old glass was wonderful.
toy
All posts tagged toy
As I sat munching my Egg McMuffin sans Canadian bacon, I saw a staff member removing the display containing the Museum toys and installing a display of Ice Age movie items. {Sigh!}
A few minutes later our clerk, Virginia, came to our table and presented me with my long sought-after Einstein figure, taken from the display that had been removed! Thank you so very much!
Breakfast, Quest, and cultural experiment complete, we left the eatery smiling.
To top it all off, a copy of The Plain Dealer newspaper was found at our table and She Who Must Be Obeyed made sure to give me the comic section. What should be on the first page of the comics but a single-panel Bill Whitehead "Free Range" cartoon featuring a caricature of the famous genius. Whoa! Pictured at a cocktail party, we see, under his "Hi, I'm A. Einstein" name tag, an imprint on his tee shirt reading "I'm With Stupids."
Out and about today I stopped by a McDonald's restaurant. Besides refreshment I wanted to see if I could purchase a promotional "bobblehead" Happy Meal toy, this one depicting Albert Einstein. I thought it would be fun to have one in each of my office spaces. Asking at the counter, "do you have the Einstein bobblehead toy?" I was met with blank stares. "It's the Happy Meal toy from that Night at the Museum movie… you know!" More blank faces from teen- and twenty-somethings. The counter folk stepped over to the box holding available toys and offered up choices between a mechanical dinosaur skeleton and a "space chimp." I politely declined and ordered my Coke and soft-serve ice cream — the fixings for an improvised float. Thing is, this isn't the first time or place I've had this experience whilst seeking the Einstein bobblehead. Admittedly it's been a long time since I was a kid. When I was a kid (and the Earth was young) Albert Einstein was the iconic genius. Everyone, even the Three Stooges, knew who Einstein was (yeah, a one-name personage) and that he stood for extraordinary intelligence. That despite the fact that hardly anyone knew what he was really getting at with that E=mc2 thingie. The equation itself became an icon for deep thought. Even today, in physics and astronomy, Albert Einstein stands tall and the shadows of his towering ideas cast forward waiting for science to catch up. But the "kids" at McDonald's don't know who he is, even when he's reduced to a toy figure in a movie. I'll bet if it was a Paris Hilton toy they'd know who it was. I think I'll curl up in a dark corner and weap.