Thursday, February 26, 2015

This Way to the Anders Museum!

Twenty years have passed since the glory days of the Anders Museum.

Back then, it was really a labor of love for the three of us: me, my brother, and some kid named Eric who lived down the street. Anders wasn’t actually Eric’s last name, but he’d given up his museum naming rights in exchange for the official title of “Lead Snake Wrangler,”  which was an irresistibly impressive title to a nine-year old.

And over the door of my parents’ garage, we put up a sign that read, “Museo de Anders,” which we thought was Latin but turned out to be Spanish. We charged the neighbors four bits to come inside.

Now, what that four bits bought you was a chance to have a peek at some of the coolest animals native to the Texas Gulf coast region.  We had snakes! We had toads! We had turtles of every kind: big red ear sliders and little red ear sliders, alligator snapping turtles, three-toed box turtles, and soft shells. You could also see a lizard, some garden spiders, Eric’s pet gerbil, and the bones of a cat we’d accidentally dug up in our back yard.

We painted the words “Follow this Kid to the Anders Museum” on a sandwich board, which was actually two boards connected by two short ropes. Then we hung this contraption around the neck of, well, of Eric, and we handed him a bell and made him walk up and down the street to attract new business. He cried and he cried about it because, you know, it was completely humiliating. But still, he went along with it, all for that sweet, sweet “Lead Snake Wrangler”  title.

I don’t remember how long this all lasted, exactly, but after a few months, business started falling off and then Mighty Mouth the snapping turtle died, and finally the three of us just sort of lost interest.

Our next venture was going door to door selling junk and stories. My brother offered a wide assortment of interesting bottles, seashells, and rocks for sale, while I offered the latest installment of my series, “The Adventures of Santa and Jesus.” It seemed like Santa and Jesus were always getting themselves into some new sort of mess.

All Eric did was push around the wheelbarrow with the junk and the stories in it. We let him keep the “Lead Snake Wrangler” title anyway because he already had the name tag and everything.

Some time went by and then it was this past Tuesday and my two new tarantulas arrived by FedEx at the house. My kids ran around from room to room squealing in delight at the sight of Enemies List, the Mexican orange-kneed tarantula, and the still-unnamed Goliath bird-eater.

They ran upstairs and they disappeared for a little while. The kids, not the spiders.

When they re-emerged, they presented me with their business plan for something they called… the Anders Museum.

The thing is, I’d never even told them the story about my old museum.

It makes me wonder what we Anders have against the use of the word “zoo.”

So this weekend, Houston will at long last see the Grand Reopening of the Anders Museum. It will cost you eight bits to come inside and will feature four cats, one dog, two turtles, seventeen tarantulas, ten scorpions, a grass snake and one ill-tempered amblypygid.

Maybe Eric’s still available to wear the sandwich board. 

44 comments:

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  2. Growing up, in the summer months, myself and my twin bother and sister had the "Three Kid Junk Wagon". Think Pawn Stars on a kids red wagon.

    On trash days we would make the trash can and dumpster rounds. Then sell to local businesses and neighbors. We made enough coin to go swimming 5 days a week

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    1. Wow! We were BOTH budding entrepreneurs then!

      I'm not sure kids even go outside anymore. But I don't know how to tell mine, "Do what i did: Go run around out in the street and play in other people's trash" or whatever.

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  3. Two questions.

    First: what's a bit? How do you pay a bit?

    Second: when is your arachnid menagerie going to feature <a href=" http://m.livescience.com/49957-new-species-peacock-spiders.html>these</a> two?

    I like the pictures you used to illustrate this. But I am awaiting the photos of you with the museum inmates. Don't disappoint us!

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    1. That link, damn it, should have been this. Damn cellphone.

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    2. I suspect "Skeletorus" is not named that because it "sort of looks like a skelton" but rather because it looks like Skeletor from Masters of the Universe.But I suppose it wouldn't be cool to drop a He-Man reference in the middle of a science article.

      And Sparklemuffin?! That's pretty cool.

      Plus, it's always interesting to see new species discovered...

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  4. Eight bits! Inflation has doubled!?! Hold on, how much is a bit? Bit coin!?! I don't understand bit coins! Awww man, my confusion is going to prevent me from attending the Anders Museum. Oh, and also the fact there's 17 things that I'm afraid of...of which I am afraid (sorry, didn't want to end on a preposition).

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    1. I looked up the term "bits" and it turns out it's mostly a Canadian term. "2 bits" is 25 cents, 4 bits is 50, etc.

      I mainly know the term from old men complaining about how much ice cream costs, and also my kids' quasi-cheerleading shout: "2 bits! / 4 bits! / 6 bits! A dollar! / All for the Anders / Stand up and holler!"

      The above cheer is normally yelled at the top of their little lungs while we're on a long car ride. While I have a hangover...

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  5. Nice! The term zoo is overrated. We have the internet now to advertise, so the sandwich board.has gone the way of the Dodo....unless you have one of those in your menagerie!!

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    1. We could also do what the "Buy & Sell Gold" shops in my neighborhood do: Find some guy who can stand near a busy intersection swinging around and twirling a giant cardboard arrow that points to... Well, it would be pointing to my house, I guess, so never mind. Internet it is.

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  6. "Two bits" is a Canadian term? News to me. Well, we do use that expression all the time, at least I do. Since eight bits are a dollar and in Canada we call our dollar coin a "loonie" (after an aquatic waterfowl), you could rename your zoo the Anders Loonie Museum. That might have a different connotation in the States, though.

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    1. All of the Anders end up being called Loonie eventually.

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  7. OMG!!! If I only were in traveling distance I'd come to the museum. With all those creatures ya might wanna consider adding a partridge in a pear tree.......just for the humor aspect. Just sayin.'

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    1. This made me look up the word "partridge," since I've never actually heard the word used outside of the holiday sing-along context. It's a type of pheasant.

      Seems like that would be easier to carry for than these damn three French hens.

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  8. "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar ...." a fiver was a fin and a sawbuck a ten .....
    omg I am so impressed that you belong to an amblypygid! they are the creatures of our nightmares. if you're in the market for a few argiopes, last summer I hand fed a big ol' female who took shelter between the porch glider and the barbecue grill; building a huge web (with accompanying suitor web - s'why WE used to call 'em writing spiders) and eventually depositing TWO huge egg sacs under one arm of the glider late last fall, before she herself fell victim to one of my own beloved Carolina Wren family. She loved wasps of all manner, this big black and yellow garden spider ..... Hornets, yellow jackets, horse flies and such - of which there is never a shortage here in Johnsonville during the summer. she handled the most dangerous of these deftly and very aggressively, wrapping them up quickly, and all the while sucking out their very life essence through the straw she has inserted. I usually pictured her humming while she did this chore several times a day as I flung whatever poor unfortunate stinging or biting insect I had whacked into the her web. last summer I bought two new electronic zapper mosquito racquets that will fuck a big ol' mahogany wasp UP, too!. Well fed this spider was ... and well loved too, apparently what with the two egg sacs. huge sacs. reckon if I mailed on a'them egg sacs NOW .... in an envelope ... reckon it'd make it through the postal system and to your zoo-seum before it opens? You'll be charged with providing wasps and horseflies and such for the 5,000 or so babies that would eventually emerge, of course. and housing. but I'll spring for the postage. How 'bout it? Y'interested?

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    1. Those spiders are so cool! They do all that work and then sit back and wait...

      If I wasn't already past capacity, I'd totally want some!

      It used to just be me and one tarantula around here. In the past couple months, I've picked up another 40 pets or so, who arrived with the kids and my convalescing ex-wife. I think even the mosquitoes around here are like, "This place is too packed already. We're out of here!"

      It is creepy as all hell to watch spiders eat. They basically fill up the food with goop and then drink them. The Goliath Bird-Eater is supposedly going to eat mice when it gets bigger, and I'm dying to see how it manages this soup thing when it's dealing with food with bones and hair.

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  9. Two Bits goes back to the days when there was a shortage of coinage and people would cut coins ,usually Spanish , into smaller pieces . Think Pieces of Eight .
    Why Spanish ? Firstly there were a lot of them and secondly it did our protestant British hearts good to chop up the likeness of an inbred catholic .

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    1. Woohoo! Glenn Kelley, schooling the rest of us for the win!

      Fortunately, we don't have a coinage shortage anymore - we can just keep minting and minting and printing and printing without any repercussions.

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  10. Your museum needs a couple of large praying manti (mantises?) and a woman to stand out front wearing a gold and white dress she swears is actually black and blue. (I don't understand the internet's fascination with this dress color meme... it's like a singer spelling her name SADE and pronouncing it SHAR-DAY)

    Where was I before I interrupted me?

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    1. Praying mantises are hardcore, man. Have you ever watched one of those things?

      Oh. Probably, given the whole nature photography thing and all.

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  11. Sandwich boards are so 1980. Today, he would be a sign spinner. Given the museum theme, he needs to be in a Spider-Man costume.

    Zoo doesn't begin to describe your collection. Clearly your kids are brilliant to think of the Mused d'Anders. (If you change the name to French you can raise the price to 6 bits.) I would be interested to hear their merchandising plans.

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    1. It's funny that you mention 1980, because most of my jokes sound like they are from about that year. Still, in my next post, when Tim Conway puts shoes on his knees and tries to golf looking he's 4 feet tall, it's timeless...

      And you'rte right, my kids have the competition from the real museums just a couple miles away. When I had mine, we were nowhere near anything like Houston's museums. So we're going to need something that the big museums don't have.

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    2. Sorry that was supposed to be Musee d'Anders. Not mused. Apparently my iPad has a more limited vocabulary than I do.

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    3. My iPad changes what I mean into all sorts of things I never meant but probably should have. I'm just going to start going with its suggestions and see where it leads...

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    1. It doesn't look like it. They had some of their friends and the neighbors come by yesterday and everyone just sort of showed up, usually with the kids dragging them by the arm.

      Today it's raining, so I think business is going to be slow. Thank God.

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  16. How are your scorpions doing? Do the tarantulas make them jealous?

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    1. The scorpions and tarantulas don't really know of each others' existence.

      Or rather, they never should have. This week, one of my new spiders introduced a parasite worm into my house, which made it to my other animals via the feed crickets and took out my favorite pets. I'm sort of in mourning at the moment.

      Damn it.

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  17. I'm all outta bits. What can I get for a pennyfarthing?

    I just have cats and dogs like a boring asshole, but I DO have some snails that are kinda fun to watch (actually no, no they're not).

    So do you handle these tarantulas or are these the sort of uh, exhibits that are best observed but not touched?

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    1. The spiders and scorpions don't really like to be handled. I'll handle the spiders on occasion, but they tolerate it, at best. They mostly like to sit there and do absolutely, positively NOTHING. They're like pet rocks with legs and bristles. And also fangs.

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    2. So what you're saying is that my snails are officially more "fun" to have? They like to be handled. And they like to (very, very slowly) motor all over the terrarium, wiggling their little eyes at everything.

      I mean, it's just nonstop thrills when you have tiny gastropods.

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    3. Actually, YES. The kids have had huge slugs, and they are more exciting than tarantulas. Tarantulas just look so cool and scary that people like them more, I guess.

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  23. Katy. Would you be interested in a few consignments to your museo? I'm thinking my Gram might make for a quite interesting exhibit. And I have a photo of a doe-eyed Hermit crab named Dee Dee whose sweet countenance reminds me of you.

    OK, maybe it's just her eyes. OK, and maybe Dee Dee would be better named as Derrik. My kids named the smelly little creature Dee Dee because of the soft-shelled crustatifor's proclivity for choosing only bright colored shells to inhabit. How do you sex a Hermit crab?

    I met an artist the other day who keeps French dining snails inside her orchid room. Keeps bird cuttle bone thingies birds need for their beaks for the snails to use. I asked if snails have beaks and was asked to leave. Artists can be quite sensitive if you ask me.

    Do you sell season passes? If so, please forward an application and payment form.

    Fuck Walmart anyway.

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    1. We had a disaster last week, as a parasitic worm decimated our tarantula population. It's been a rough week for the museum!

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