Holiday Presents Not to Get

So many sites will give advice about what to buy this year for your friends, loved ones and geeks this Holiday season. The Mike Lynch Cartoons blog will showcase the ones that should have hazard lights flashing around them. I'm your flagman, telling you to move along, move along, nothing good to buy here.

These items should have that Federation President guy from STAR TREK IV (above) saying, "Avoid the planet Earth at all costs -- but especially avoid these terrible gifts."


Under the heading of Strange Product Tie-ins, come this porcelain decanter in the shape of Mr. Spock. It was originally full of some odd liqueur. Now, if this was, let's say, the head of Montgomery Scott and it was filled with scotch, ooookay! Then, it would make sense. Thanks to John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV blog!
Above image taken from Nostalgia Central's Give-a-Show page.

Kenner's Give-a-Show Projector was a little red projector for kids that would show a series of slides on the wall. This was big time entertainment in the 1960s. Jon's Random Acts of Geekness blog shares one slide show a week with us. Here is the most recent one with Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear. It's terrible, in a Leonard Pinth-Garnell* way.



Booksteve's Library parses a 1950s ad for guns for kids for unintended sexual innuendo.


Johnny C.'s A-Hole-in-the-Head blog shares the above scary advertising photo (among other things) for Bernadine's Wigs from a June 9, 1971 Las Vegas souvenir newspaper. I think Toby of Bernadine's Wigs is the devil and if you buy a wig from him you MUST DO HIS BIDDING!

* Leonard Pinth-Garnell was an SNL character first played by Dan Aykroyd in 1977. Here are some of his memorable quotes from Answers.com:

• "Stunningly bad!"
• "Monumentally ill-advised!"
• "Perfectly awful!"
• "Couldn't be worse!"
• "Exquisitely awful!"
• "Astonishingly ill-chosen!"
• "Really bit the big one!"
• "Unrelentingly bad!"
• "There... That wasn't so good now, was it?"