I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve recently developed a very distinct interest in all things culinary. Maybe aspiring to experience a vast variety of cuisine isn’t the best pursuit for someone who suffers from lactose intolerance and very possibly IBS, but I’ve just about had it with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Don’t get me wrong - I love the stuff, but there’s a vast world out there, and I want to eat the hell out of it. I’m already notorious for my love of sushi and consumption of most things that swim, but I can’t help but regret that there are animals that I’ve not yet tasted.

Unrepentant carnivorism aside, it’s long been a secret dream of mine to not only get my very own kitchen for this exploration, but display a vast array of hot sauce bottles along one wall of it. It wasn’t until my grandfather started growing peppers and grinding them up into his own special hot pepper flakes that I even developed a taste for spicy things, but the desire for hot sauce bottles predates that. Mostly, I think I’m attracted to them because the labels on really good hot sauces look like they could just as well be printed on the back of Hell’s Angels jackets and use a lot of profanity in their titles. [Click to enlarge, and visit Sweat 'N' Spice for more!]

See how attractive that is?

The vast subculture of people who pursue hot foods is probably no surprise, but the sheer breadth of the pursuit and available products is fascinating. Any dedicated heatseeker will tell you about the Scoville scale, which measures the heat of any given consumable. Varieties of peppers fall at different places along this scale, which tops out at about 16 million units. For comparison, your average jalapeño is about 8000 units, and anything near the top of the scale will usually come with a disclaimer and multiple health warnings. While the hottest of sauces can potentially cause damage to the stomach lining with repeated use, any tastebuds that you damage should replace themselves after a few weeks.

The variety of possible sauces (and more importantly, their labels) probably first presented themselves to me in the gourmet aisle of Marshalls, of all places. You know, back next to the sofa pillows and dusty bottles of boysenberry jam, all reds and oranges, images of skeletons and devils and heads with fire shooting from their mouths and if you’re lucky, a naked chick. If you’re unlucky, there are plenty of ‘ass’ references and tremendously off-color phraseology, but it’s all part of the package.

It’s a fairly inexpensive hobby, unless you’re looking to explore Blair’s Reserve, commonly regarded as the hottest available product on the planet - an artfully packaged pure extract, in glass and wax. Like a fine wine, these are collectible and rare, made more desirable by being signed and numbered - and roughly $300 for a tiny vial of crystals. This seems to be the true apex of classy peppers, but you can easily find quick reviews of any number of hot sauces all over the internet. Fire Girl’s offering of custom-labeled bottles of hot sauce seems to open up the possibilities to an endless degree, but the sauce inside remains the same. The question arises, should I collect these for their labels, or to foist upon attendees at the debaucherous, inebriated parties that I’ll surely have one day? Alas, such parties would require the aforementioned kitchen, a predilection for alcohol, and more than two friends. Those days are distant, yet.

Health and bodily risks aside, a kitchen full of demons, fire and death would certainly be a thing to behold on a purely aesthetic level, and doubly on the palate. Do you have a favorite hot sauce? An extra awesome label for my kitchen? Comment down below!

When I first learned of the hobby of marble collectingI was surprised – I had no idea that a marble could be a collector’s item. How could one even tell them apart, I wondered. A passionate collector and dealer of marbles informed me, though, that there are indeed differences among marbles and the challenge of learning to recognize the different types of marbles is part of the fun of collecting them.

A form of marbles were around in ancient Rome, but it was in Venice in the 1700s that the glass marbles we are familiar with today were first developed. While it’s usually glass marbles that are collected, antique porcelain and clay marbles can be a valuable addition to a collection as well.

There are several books and online guides available to help a novice marble collector to tell the marbles apart (see the links below). Learning to identify marbles can be difficult, and it generally takes a good amount of study to be able to discern the small differences in patterns and colors between marbles. It is well worth the effort, however. Marble collecting is an area where a well-prepared, knowledgeable collector can find rare items for pennies. Quite often collectibles dealers who don’t specialize in marbles will fill a large plastic baggie with marbles and sell it for a couple of dollars, and it’s not unusual to discover a valuable marble in among the worthless ones.

Because marbles are made of glass, they are easy to damaged and should be stored carefully. Keeping collectible marbles bundled up together in a bag or jar can lead to scratches and chipping, which will significantly decrease the value of the marbles. There are special storage/display cases with a separate compartment for each marble, or simply wrapping each marble individually before storing will do the trick.

Related Links:

Land of Marbles identification guide

Alan’s Marble Collection identification guide

Here’s a list of guidelines for buying marbles online

Once black Americana was a collectibles area reserved for blacks ‘of a certain age’, including celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Spike Lee, and Whoopie Goldberg, who wished to chronicle and document the struggles of their race, or historians of many colors. One collector told Pamela Wiggins why she collects and decorates her home with black Americana items: “I had to ask why she’d be interested in owning something so offensive… She wanted to own all types of Black Americana because they were a reflection of her cultural heritage. Her ancestors dealt with more hardships than she would, thankfully, ever know. But acknowledging these difficulties and triumphs through her varied collection reflected an important aspect of her lineage when incorporated into her home’s decor.”

But now younger African-Americans and others are buying these items and reproductions to decorate their homes. Some without the same motivations.

According to Howard Dodson, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “There are two kinds of collectors of black Americana: those who are interested in collecting as a financial investment and those with a passion for finding ‘the missing pages of history.’”

Black Americana certainly is a wise investment. In an area where much was destroyed because it was offensive, ugly and degrading — destroyed as we Americans tried to purge the proof of our racism — authentic items are rapidly increasing in value. (It is also said that many African-Americans bought lots of racist items in the 1970’s and then promptly destroyed it all.)

Even reproductions have more value than you might think as collectors want to get their hands on something.

However, along with the usual concerns that valuable documentation of our history is not being properly saved, there is the question: Should Black Americana Be Bought & Sold?

There is also some concern that part of the drive in purchasing black Americana is pimpin’ black culture. That this adoption of old images and negative stereo-types is being glamorized in a perverse way. Like hip-hop’s bad ‘rap’ (pun intended), collecting black Americana is sweeping the nation in a concerning way.

Perhaps most concerning to me, a white woman of a certain age, is the number of white folks who are buying reproductions of black lawn jockeys.

Yes, white people with black lawn jockeys. In 2006 (and 2007 too, I guess).

Some claim it is to validate and honor Jocko Graves, the son of a free black soldier named Thomas Graves, who fought with George Washington. The story goes that Washington assigned the youth to safely remain on the Pennsylvania shore with the horses while they crossed the Delaware. Jocko was also to keep a lantern burning so George and the soldiers would know where to return after battle. When Washington and his army returned they discovered Jocko had frozen to death — still holding the horses and the lit lantern.

The story continues that Washington was so moved by Jocko’s devotion that he commissioned a statue in Jocko’s honor. Titled “Faithful Groomsman” the statue stood at Mount Vernon in honor of the young patriot.

This story is, at least in part, presented by Waymon LeFall who has written a children’s book, “The Legend of Jocko, Hero of the American Revolution”, as what he calls “a missing piece of African American history”. LeFall says that “lawn jockeys are not racist reminders of the days of slavery but monuments to an African American hero.”

But Professor Kenneth Goings, chairman of African-American and African Studies at Ohio State University and the author of the 1995 book “Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping”, says this legend isn’t true. And in an October interview with ‘The Daily Journal’ Goings says the lawn jockeys are “very, very much racist symbols” and says that he’s amazed people can believe anything else. He continued to say black lawn jockeys are part of the Old South mythology: “They are meant to evoke that Old South, grand plantation, “Gone With the Wind” mythology, and I’m not sure they can evoke anything else.”

As a white woman perhaps I shouldn’t say anything on the subject of such racist symbols and what they mean… Afterall, I don’t want a man telling me (or the world) how to feel about witchhunts and symbols of misogyny. But ‘I do declare’, the black lawn jockey shouldn’t be on any white person’s property.

If you aren’t black and you collect black Americana, at least keep it within your home where it can have the context of your explanation — that it is for historical reasons, family ties, belief in Jocko’s patriotism, or whatever non-racist interest you have.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely appreciate the intentions in preserving the vanishing American history — and interest in the black experience. (I do the same in the name of feminism.) But if you’re white and have a black lawn jockey, don’t expect anyone else to know you believe in Jocko or that you’re a history buff. Don’t expect them to visit you to find out what your reason is.

Every year, it seems like I have an annual ‘get my life the hell together’ rush before yet another year comes and goes and chokes me half to death with the cold, skeletal hands of failure. This usually involves a massive cleaning of my living spaces, apologizing to slighted persons (both deserving and undeserving), and putting incriminating digital files onto DVDs, which are far easier to hide under the bed.

In this frantic cleaning, I usually unearth scores of things that I once passionately collected and have somehow forgotten about, usually behind more recent piles of passionately collected items. This year, I found two precious samples of real Multimoog meat tacked to my wall. Thankfully, somehow blessed with that beef jerky-like gift of immortality, it had not gone bad. Perhaps because this meat was, in fact, foam rubber.

What, I’m sure you’re asking, is a Multimoog?

Well, it’s about 550 meters tall, inherently evil, and before its demise, it wrestled space bugs and kung fu soup cans. Such is the world of Kaiju Big Battel, the traveling pseudo-Japanese monster movie wrestling extravaganza, created by Boston’s own Studio Kaiju. Kaiju Big Battel is essentially the reason that foam rubber was invented, since nothing greater could possibly be achieved with the substance. It has reached its pinnacle in Battel. Intricately crafted monsters battle in arenas throughout the world, executing dazzling moves and exhibiting terrifying superpowers, and when the dust clears from the toppled metropolitan areas, one monster emerges victorious. Or sometimes, it has babies. With Kaiju, the mating ritual is kind of ambiguous.

Alas, in such violent conflagrations and flagrancies, not all monsters survive! Should a monster fall in battle, the Kaiju Regulatory Commission sees to it that the monster’s adoring fans are not left without a memento of that monster’s stellar career. The deceased creature is systematically dissected into hundreds of small pieces and made available for purchase, along with certificates of authenticity, a small biography, and an indication of which monster piece you’ve just added to your morose collection. A morbid artifact, yes, but to own a genuine piece of your hero’s flesh is a rare opportunity. You didn’t see them doing this with Andre the Giant, but you just might find me casketside with a carving knife when Lou Albano leaves this mortal plane. I’ll be testing a theory. A theory that totally has nothing to do with an army of tiny Lou Albano / porcupine hybrids, so stop reading my top secret notebooks.

Me, I’m the proud owner of both an arm and torso slice of Multimoog. Also available are pieces of Midori no Kaiju and the more recently slain and sold-out Sky Deviler, all located in the Kaiju Mall, alongside a plethora of t-shirts, stickers and all manner of propaganda, including real Battels caught on video. A battle-scarred section of monster costume meat is a great addition to a growing collection of screen-used props.

Is it a part of a pop cultural phenomenon? Is it a reason to build an enormous monster foot-proof bomb shelter? Is it performance art gone awry? Is it a religion, a way of life, a cult?

All of the above.

The image of a sleepy eyed toddler in footie pajamas dragging a scruffy, well loved teddy bear by the ear has become such a symbol of childhood, and yet teddy bears have only been around for a hundred years.

As the story goes, in 1902 President Teddy Roosevelt was on a hunting trip and hadn’t been able to shoot anything. To help him out, his hosts caught and tied up a bear for him to shoot, but Roosevelt said “Spare the bear,” and refused to shoot the helpless animal. The Washington Post published a cartoon depicting the moment with the caption “Spare the bear!” That same month Morris Michtom, a Brooklyn candy store owner, came up with a soft, jointed bear that he called “Teddy’s Bear” and displayed it along with the now-famous cartoon. The response to his little bear was so overwhelming that Michtom closed his candy store and opened a toy store, the Ideal Novelty and Toy company, which is still doing business today.

At around the same time in Germany, Richard Steiff devised a similar plush,jointed bear. Because the first Michtom and Steiff bears are the earliest examples, they are the most valuable to collectors.