The Dinosaurs of Country Junction

There's a chain of stores in eastern Pennsylvania called Country Junction. There are currently five locations: Lehighton (which I believe was the original), Wilkes-Barre, Quakertown, Wind Gap, and Hazleton. These stores - which collectively bill themselves as "The World's Largest General Store" - feature a happy jumble of furniture, home furnishings, tools, decorations, plumbing supplies, pet supplies, food, toys, lightbulbs, wall hangings, dinosaurs...

Yes. Dinosaurs.

I haven't been to the Lehighton location since the original building was destroyed by fire back in 2006. But I know back in the day that I would stroll through that shop I would stop to admire the dinosaur statues that were mixed in with their taxidermy animals and statues of Charlie Chaplin and the Blues Brothers, and the Tyrannosaurus head mounted next to assorted bison and water buffalo and other largish creatures.*

The Wilkes-Barre location, the only other Country Junction I have visited, also featured a great many dinosaurs, inside, outside, among the furniture, everywhere. Not all at once, but you could usually count on running into a Velociraptor or two somewhere in the store. At least, before it, too, was heavily damaged by fire on Thanksgiving Day in 2008.

That store has since reopened as a slightly less whimsical version of its former self. Gone are the velociraptors by the outside patio furniture, or even the access to the outside where the velociraptors stalked among the patio furniture. (Gone is the toy department, too, unless I missed it in my last visit.) But a few dinosaurs apparently stop by from time to time.

Back in January I photographed this fine fellow standing guard outside the front entrance.


It's a Triceratops - which, despite what you might have heard, is not getting excised from the dinosaur books. I can't vouch for the general accuracy of this representation, though I can tell you that the beak and horns probably didn't have that fossilized appearance on a living specimen.


The price tag informed anyone interested that they could purchase this dinosaur for the low, low price of $1900.00.

I can't remember if I have been back to the Wilkes-Barre Country Junction since that visit in January. But I stopped in at the end of July with one goal in mind: to find and photograph dinosaurs. I was thwarted in this effort by the pronounced lack of any dinosaurs...until I spotted this guy as I was leaving the store.


For the life of me I don't know what this is supposed to be. The neck made me think it was a sauropod of some sort, but the teeth make me think it's supposed to be a carnivore. A cartoonish Tyrannosaurus, maybe?


The inside of his mouth is wonderfully (if not necessarily accurately) detailed, from the ridged roof of his mouth to the oddly banded tongue. And in his mouth...


...is a price tag. This head-and-neck alone with set you back $1999.00 - $99 more than a complete Triceratops! Inflation, you know.

I hope there will be more dinosaurs visiting the Country Junction in the future. And I hope that if they do stroll by, I'll have my camera ready!



*I have no idea if these animals are the real deal or every bit as simulated as the dinosaurs.

They're not toys, dammit!

I've been reading up on a fascinating dinosaur called the Therizinosaurus lately. While it's known from just a few bones, including ridiculously oversized claws, some educated guesses have been made about its overall appearance based on the body plans of related dinosaurs. Safari Ltd. has a nice-looking model of it, though the sculpt actually seems to be based on more closely resemble this image of a Nothronychus.

Speaking of dinosaur toys models, I recently became antsy wondering when (or if) the Safari Prehistoric Sea Life Toob might come out. So I e-mailed their customer service department with a query. Four days later I received a response which read, in part:

The item is still in production and will not be available for distribution to store retailers until the middle of March.

Please see below some suggested retailers:

You may visit the following online retail sites:
http://www.safariltd.com/ (press the green button and it will direct you to Shopatron for retail purchases)
http://www.thebigzoo.com/
http://www.healthstonehobbies.com/ (Hmmmm, this looks like a bad link...I wonder if she meant http://www.healthstones.com/ ?)
http://www.store4knowledge.com/

Also the following large retailers carry our products:
Michaels Arts & Crafts
AC Moore
Learning Express
HobbyTown USA

Thank you for your interest in Safari’s products.

...which I though was pretty nice of them.

While we're on the subject of educational...stuff, the Everhart Museum in Scranton is currently exhibiting The Art of the Brick: Sculptures by Nathan Sawaya, featuring sculptures made out of Legos. I hope to get up there with my nephews, who are both big fans of Legos. They may find the rest of the museum pretty interesting, too.

And speaking of art, I recently had a memory bubble up of a blog post someone wrote a few years ago about cigarette vending machines being repurposed as vending machines for tiny works of art. While I found the website for the project - Art-o-mat®, "vending art and culture since 1997" - in less than a minute, I wasn't able to actually identify the original blog post. It was from perhaps five or six years ago, maybe longer, so the blog where I originally read this may no longer exist. I'll keep checking on the blogs of old blog-friends to see who might have posted this way back when.

Done

Well, my first night shift rotation in over fifteen years is over. I stopped on the way home to get gas - Sam's Club has its pumps open before 7:00 in the morning! - and then headed the rest of the way home. Made coffee (something I haven't done these past four days, not in the morning, at least), got a slice of pie, and sat down to listen to NPR's Morning Edition on the computer while checking out everybody's blog and Facebook updates. After a while my reading became woolgathering became hypnagogic experiences, and I'm now thinking maybe I should take a nap.

Friends on Facebook may recall my complaint the other day about headaches caused by the extremely bright blue LED indicator light on my right speaker. I want to have an indicator light, I just don't want it to burn through the back of my skull by way of my eyes. Various methods of dimming or masking this light were discussed. Then I came up with a simple and elegant solution...


...block the light with the tail of a Euoplocephalus! Why didn't I think of that sooner?

You'll notice a few other things in this photo: the right half of my new widescreen monitor, with a desktop background from The Stained Glass Project (see here for the specific image). Desk lamp with compact fluorescent light bulb - almost all of our lights are now CFL's; the light does not look as green as it photographs. Stapler. Ankylosaurus (labeled Euoplocephalus, though I'm pretty sure this is one of the more lightly-armored Ankylosauridae) and Triceratops, both dollar store dinosaurs (see here for another photo of these miniatures, and see here for the definitive online report on "Dollar Dinos.") Van Gogh's Fourteen Sunflowers. Part of a "bumper sticker" I made back in 2004 that reads "SAVE HUBBLE, SCRAP BUSH." The speaker, dinosaurs, and stapler are all on top of my HP DeskJet 842c printer. In the shadows in the foreground are a kitchen timer shaped like a chrome coffee pot (great for when you're cooking or baking while online - another dollar store item) and a coffee cup with a reproduction of a vintage ad for Yokohl Brand oranges featuring an old-style Donald Duck.

Update, 3/21/09: Out of the shadows

Now, I think I'll check a few more things online and then have a little lie down.