Won’t you join us for some junking in Kansas City?

(The one on the right is my little sis.)

First, we’ll have some fortification. How about a mess of Ethiopian food?

Nothing like njera bloat to raise your game. Luckily, you’re with the Rudder sisters. We can scour an antique mall dragging our broken legs behind us and still come away with an unnecessary bargain or ten. It’s in our blood.

I love the randomness of crap. For instance, the sacred heart of eat-a-snax:

And this wall of tribal masks, which may be the raddest thing I’ve ever seen (and you must imagine me with my tongue out, throwing rock and roll devil horns, as I type that):

Speaking of horns, I was tempted by El Toro and his manly places:

His name is Chuck. As in the roast, I’m guessing:

Somehow mamacita here seems incomplete. Let’s see…beach hat, on. Lipstick, applied. Joey, enpouched. But where is her cigarette?

Perhaps it’s in her pocketbook.

How’d you like to share your bedroom with this happy couple? Brrrr:

Speaking of bedrooms, that’s for private time when the door is closed, you naughty, naughty monkey:

Archie gets a less jowly version of this look, where his forehead gets all pleated:

Movie tie-in! I found a wild thing, or maybe it’s Ferdinand the lonely bull:

The mall has three massive floors with a pretty good dreck-to-acceptable ratio. While it’s mostly filled with unwantables, there are a good number of modern oddments and midcentury delectables, with enough quirk to send me shivering. The upper floors are, ah, rustic, though, and the flooring’s a little airy for my taste:

That’s the first floor, as seen from the second floor, by the way…

Whew, quite an adventure, and we escaped for less than ten bucks each. Now we just need to make a quick stop here before we put our pajamas on:

Thanks for shopping!

If that’s the way you’re bent. Or make soup and take naps, if you swing the other way.

In any event, enjoy yourself and shake the past week like water off a dog.

Image via

Via

It’s day two of dogville here, and it takes a nation of millions a lap dog and a rock god to properly express the mood up in these parts.

Which is Grrrr, IN CASE YOU COULDN’T TELL.

What dog&rocker combo has got you covered today??

Via

It’s 99 degrees today and I’m draped across my office chair, feeling like a stunned mullet. And that’s inside, where the air is conditioned to an arctic degree. But the heat has a hold on us all; it pierces walls, dews brows, saps drive. I haven’t recovered from my trip out for lunch and Stella, oh Stella! The poor pup is stretched out on the hardwood looking like someone shot her dead:

It was the sun, y’all.

What’s the temperature where you are?

When I asked Elastic Heart what I should feature on this dizzyingly high-numbered ends-in-double-zeroes post, he said, “Archie, DUHZ! Isn’t he like 40% of the site?” Which must make this…(hold on, just doing some rough calculations on the back of my Chase Credit Card Important Change in Terms Notice)…Archie post #240:

Ta-Dah! Thanks for sticking around through all that dog. And just wait, we’ll be celebrating my first blogiversary in early June. (I’m partial to orchids and gin, if you’re stuck for a gift…)

More Archie, of course. He looks very Russian-suffering in this one; I imagine he’s the wastrel second son of a wealthy landowner, brooding over an ode to rawhide:

O chew! I can smell you anywhere!
I hide you, but you cannot hide from me!

…of going to the chiropractor. She kills aches and pains dead using only her ears. I really miss Dr. Brian in San Francisco, but Cricket helps me forget.

More dogbloggery from the underemployed…if only I could monetize Archie.

He’s coming:

And going:

Can you tell I searched for animals at Google’s LIFE Magazine archive?