Ho Ho Ha Ha Hee Hee

If I’d spent much more time in this room they would be coming to take me away -   Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.

This is the (world’s largest) carousel with 20,000 lights and 270 animals.  And not one horse.  Found at The House on the Rock, of course of course.

I’m so glad I finally started a YouTube account.  But so sorry I didn’t take a video of the slightly smaller but way creepier doll carousel upstairs from this one.

more of the House here

The House on the Rock

I almost don’t want to write about the amazing, magnificent, awe-inspiring House on the Rock as nothing I can say will possibly do it justice.  It is astonishing, awesome, fascinating, incredible, marvelous, prodigious, shocking, stunning, surprising, unbelievable and wonderful. 

Hey Everybody!  Especially you, Jessie -  Add this to your Must See Before I Die list.  If you have one.  If not, start one.

Although we spent over 3 hours roaming the twisty corridors, I only took 15 pictures.  It almost seemed wrong to take pictures.  And why bother since one couldn’t possibly document it all without going insane.

Here’s a small sample of the delights of the house upon the rock …

Heritage of the Sea

More creepy dolls than you can shake a stick at.

The Dying Drunkard

And some things for the ladies.

 

And finally, the house is filled with elaborate displays of musical instruments playing intricately designed musical pieces.

 Our senses were so overstimulated that we couldn’t even listen to the radio for an hour afterwords – I was glad to have 50 miles of Wisconsin backroads to navigate and contemplate.   There was too much, too much, too much.

A few more pictures here … but see it with your own eyes.

How do I invest in the giant robots?

I think it is not difficult to see that in another twenty, or even ten years we the people are going to be overrun with the garbage we have created in the past century.  We will be at once buried in kipple and suffering a shortage of new materials.  The people best positioned to profit from this miserable situation will be those with the foresight to prepare for a future where recycling is an economic necessity. 

There will be companies that dig through the pits of landfills sorting decades of garbage for recyclable metals and other materials.  Recently, I saw a PBS special on Chinese workers that do nothing but sift through new garbage in China – hundreds of women sorting endless conveyor belts of trash.  It’s dirty, possibly toxic work and although it’s not happening on a worldwide scale yet, it will be.  As resources and materials become more scarce the profitability of such ventures will increase.  Consider the added effectiveness of using giant robots instead of women in latex gloves and it’s not hard to see how the garbage collector of the future will be one of the wealthy elite few enjoying the last open green spaces on Earth.

Unlike drilling and mining, which becomes more expensive and less profitable with increased depths, sorting through garbage will actually become more profitable as one excavates down through the decades back to when stuff was actually made to last (as any grandpa will tell you).  Of course, you have to get through the 1980s layer of Cabbage Patch Kids, but after that it’s nothing but gold in the form of vintage twenty-pound toasters and waffle irons.

So where do I sign up?  Who needs my investment dollars?  Who has the vision, dedication and entrepreneurial spirit to tackle the nation’s garbage pits AND the engineering know-how to design the giant robots?  I have $250 and I’m ready to make it happen.