Bumping into the Lucky Golden Poo, Again - 2010-01-22 16:33:26
<<< Previous - Jon Cooks Sous Vide, Sort Of | Next - The New Apple Tablet Thingee - Jon and I Discuss >>>Thanks to the Metafilter thread on
Snow Sculptures, I was reminded about
Lucky Gold Poo:
"The product you saw is called Kin no Unko (The Golden Poo), a name that plays on the fact that the Japanese word for poop (unko) starts with the same "oon" sound as a completely unrelated word that means "luck." Japanese enjoy this kind of pun - traditional storytelling is full of them - which may help explain why more than 2.5 million of the lucky little loads have sold in the last seven years.
..."There are more gods in the Shinto religion than it is possible to count, and they reside just about everywhere, inhabiting natural things like trees, rocks and waterfalls," he said. "Bodily functions are very important - think what a problem it would be if a person couldn't defecate or urinate properly - so it's natural that people worshipped deities linked to these functions."
...Mitsuhashi, who is in his 60s, remembers his parents burying a pair of god figures, one male and one female, under the privy in his childhood home."
The quote is from Professor Takeshi Mitsuhashi, department of Shinto Studies, Kokugakuin University in Tokyo. What's interesting to me is that, in the rest of the article I linked, this isn't really a product with a long history, but more of a recent fad.
I have to admit that, being one for weird items, I have indeed chanced on this product before. ...But somehow I can't remember where - I'd like to blame
Archie McPhee, but can't seem to find it in their catalog. However there's still in time to catch the
Mr. Snot tshirt!
Golden Poop Charms
Some more images of what they look like - I think the little ones are made to be attached to your cell phone.
Various Poo Charms in an Asian catalog website
If you scroll down you'll see that some of the poo charms feature the poo as if it is caught in a catcher's mit.
I would like to take this moment to apologize to my sister and brother in law in case Jon suddenly thinks this is a good toy to send their son in celebration of toilet training. I'm totally not taking the blame for this one. I'm blaming MetaFilter! I'm also blaming MeFi for any future Google weirdness I'll be getting thanks to this post.
Ah ha!
Here it is! Apparently I can blame
ThinkGeek for my exposure to the Lucky Poo. Somehow I think Jon may have pointed it out, but that may just be a desire to point at Jon when something silly like this appears and say "no, it's him, he did it!"
Meanwhile here are some really great
snow sculpture photos at a festival in China that I'd love to visit someday- photos in The Big Picture, via
that MeFi thread that started all this. Also via that thread I learned about
The Grass Mud Horse.
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