We're moving up in the world here at the Bone Room! We finally got ourselves a flickr account, where we will be uploading new creepy fun pictures from the shop on a regular basis. Check us out at The Bone Room Flickr
The woman came in looking VERY concerned. She looked around the shop for a minute, and in hushed tones explained that while she felt that the shop showed a great deal of respect for the specimens therein, the window display was causing her to have some mixed feelings. She felt that something in it was, quite simply, disrespectful.
As a shop that sells human remains, having something appear in this way to the public is a serious issue, so one of the girls promptly had the woman take her outside and show her the problem to see if she could correct it. After a quick rearrangement, the woman appeared greatly releived and went on her way. The rest of us crowded over to try and understand what exactly it was that had caused such dismay.
The problem at hand was our Easter display. We had mixed a bunch of baskets of various eggs (emu, rhea, ostrich, etc.) in amongst the items in the window, and the top of one basket was propped open and leaning against a fossil crinoid.
Yep. Our easter basket was disrepecting a crinoid. A crinoid, if you are wondering, is a fossil sea creature also known as a sea lily.
Our newest employee claims she once disrespected a crinoid in a bar and got a black eye, so we are very glad that we were able to settle this dispute peacefully.
Check out our first attempt at a how-to video! We would like to do a whole series of these, so let us know what you thin and what you would like to see in the future.
On a sunny day here in Berkeley, two girls, of the 14-year old trendified sort, enter the shop and proceed to point and squeal as such customers are wont to do.
Now, we see this everyday. Particular during the summer when cruising the Solano Ave. strip is a popular pastime. Some people just need to vocalize how gross everything and anything is. It's annoying, but not unexpected.
Finally, they approach the counter. One girl examines our extremely popular darwin-fish bumper stickers, a necessity for any Bone Room devotee.
As she turns to her friend, she casually asks, "Do you know what brand this is?"
Recently, we placed an ad in Antique Trader magazine in search of antique human skulls for the shop. In our minds, we pictured legions of folks dusting off Grandpa's old med-school skull and giving us a call. Instead, legions of folks decided to give us a call just to see who the Heck buys skulls, and offer us other peculiar objects. My favourite conversation went something like this (imagine Man on Phone with oldschool Kentucky twang):
Man on Phone: "So, what else you interested in?"
Me:"well, what do you have?"
Man on Phone:"I got a piece of candy."
Me: "Excuse me?"
Man on Phone: "It was my grandpa's. I put in it a case."
Me:"You have an antique piece of candy?"
Man on Phone:"I put my tongue on it one time. It was peppermint, sure as day."
This morning when I came in, I found a note on the counter. It was on a yellow piece of paper ripped from a notebook, scrawled hastily in an unfamiliar hand. It said "Kangaroo Eating Oranges in Denver".
Now, if only I knew what that meant, I would feel like Nancy Drew...
Yesterday a lady called the store and asked about Ducky, our albino Burmese python. I told her that he was a shop pet and not for sale, having been with us for all of his eighteen years. "That's all right", she said. "My name is Cathy. Will you tell him I called?". Unfortunately, I failed to ask if he had her number, and he has been unable to return the call.
About a week ago, there was an odd message on the anwsering machine. "Hello", said the message, "I have a tarantula in some sort of resin." Then the machine hung up. We thought it odd, but a week passed and we heard no more about it. Today the woman calls back quite upset, and repeats her statement. She has a tarantula in some sort of resin. But there's more- she doesn't think she can care for it properly. Diana asks her for a better description. It has green felt on the back, and a sticker with the name of the shop. Ah, it's a tarantula paperweight, one of the best-selling items in the store. It needs neither care nor feeding, explains Diana, it's dead. The distraught woman is so unconvinced that she decides to ship the paperweight back to us rather than risk caring for it improperly
A lady was in with her son the other day, looking into buying a human skull. She only wanted the upper part, and explained that she allready had a mandible. Then she looked at her son and he laughed as she explained that the mandible was "a bit chewed". I tried to imagine the family dog gnawing a human mandible until she elaborated: "his little sister, she's at that age...."
artistic