NOVELTIES

More fun than a canned ham, this flip-top storage tin has a train set inside, with a plastic steam engine, tender, boxcar and caboose, as well as a 12-piece track that forms a 10" x 22" oval. Tin and train car colors may vary. You add a "AA" battery and you're the engineer. 

Pop one of these roughly 1-1/4" dia stones into the toe of a sock, smash it with a hammer, and be the first person ever to see your real-as-Nature-makes-it geode!! Ninety percent of them have the familiar beautiful white crystals inside. Formed by volcanic action, they are found all over the world, but ours are from Mexico. There is no way to tell from the outside if they have crystal centers, but we will send you two just to raise your odds, and we haven't had a dud yet in our stores!! Much much more fun and satisfaction than buying one already cracked.

This hard-plastic ducky is like a rubber ducky, but with a pull-back mechanism that makes it roll on its own. Who doesn’t love a pull-back duck? In authentic rubber-ducky yellow with (2) rubber wheels on the bottom, independent suspension and no fuel required. No batteries, either. This thing basically drives itself. Let’s see a rubber ducky do that.

is best done with the sacred mother of all novelty items, the original Whoopee Cushion. Marlon Brando owned one. Of course he did, they're both American classics, except the cushion was born in Toronto. Ours is the classic 8" version.

And we say that with a history of silly that’s virtually unmatched. You slip on this pair of lens-less glasses with the tiny bucket and ball on a string attached, and try, while looking like a demented chipmunk, to swing the little ball on its cord and drop it into the cup. With the classic styled black glasses, blue basket and orange ball, you will be filmed on a smart phone, it will be put on social media, and you will be famous for it for the rest of your life. Best to order a couple so you’re not alone.

Does anyone need to be told what a Slinky(tm) toy is?? Okay, it is a very slack spring, 2-7/8" dia x 2-1/2" long, compressed. It will stretch out to about 5 or 6 feet long without deforming. That's the boring part. The interesting part is that it "follows" itself. Slosh it from hand to hand. Put in on the top step of stairs, flip the end down a step, and watch it walk down stairs, or down an incline. Believe us, no childhood (or adulthood) is complete without an original steel Slinky(tm). It was hard for us to find it, but we are glad we did. You should be too.

Or the Swanee whistle. Whatever you call it, this little slide whistle (just consider it the smallest trombone in the universe) has an outsized musical history. No elevator has ever fallen in a cartoon without its accompaniment, and no jug band is complete without one, but Louis Armstrong also played one on his Hot Five recordings, and Ravel even required one in an opera score. In assorted plastic colors with a steel slide, 6-7/8" long x 1/2" dia.

You're buying the drinks and this wacky, yet debonair, bird with a top hat and plastic base (7" tall OA) can't get his fill of water. Get him started, and he dips his beak into your glass repeatedly. How? Fluid inside his glass body condenses from the evaporative cooling of the water off the bird's beak, making it top heavy and dunking it back into the water. The condensate rejoins the liquid pool in the bird's bulb, and he tips up again. Process continues indefinitely. It works, but it's not any more than moderately well made, and not any more than moderately priced. WARNING! The fluid and dye inside the bird can permanently stain, and the bird's glass body can easily be broken. Children are fascinated by the bobbing bird, and the educational possibilities are great. But they should watch him, not fondle him!! Manufacturer warning states this item is not intended for children 8 and under. 

THE American classic novelty item (even ahead of the whoopee cushion and rubber vomit, we think) is a set of chattering choppers. Auto-dentures. Invented by Eddy Goldfarb in 1949, a man who made the Toy Industry Hall of Fame ahead of Milton Bradley, these are, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of gagdom, the ne plus ultra of spring-driven frivolity. Ours are 2-1/2" dia, with a wind-up key.

2" flywheel in a well-made metal frame. The trick is the same as it has been for 100 years. Wind the string through the spindle, pull it firmly to set the flywheel spinning, and perform effortless balancing magic on pencil tips, string tightropes, and the like. We tend to forget that bicycles and aircraft navigation both rely heavily on gyroscopic principles. It's never too early to tell the kids. Besides, it's fun.

For Zivko the robot Click here

Decidedly clever little gizmo reminiscent of our ever popular tornado tube. It consists of a plastic sleeve into which one screws two empty 2-liter soda bottles. Inserted into the connecting tube are clear plastic "straws", one extending toward the bottom of each bottle. Fill one bottle 3/4" full of water, colored if you like, invert the duo, and watch water spew from the top end of the top "straw". It is all because of the vacuum created as the water drains from one bottle to the other and is a great physics demo item. It looks as though the water defies gravity. Instructions/description are on the package.

It could have been called an Alabama Buzzer after Alabama Vest, the man who invented it. Or a Clegghorn, after Thaddeus Von Clegg, the clock master who fabricated the first one. But the hand-crafted 4-3/4" long steel instrument was a simple amusement, and the 1840s were a simple time. So it's simply a kazoo.

Another oldie but goodie. Approximately 6" tall evacuated clear glass bulb mounted in a black stand, 3" in diameter at the top. A four bladed vane is balanced on a needle inside the sphere. Because opposite surfaces of the vanes are black and white, incident radiant energy is absorbed or reflected to a different degree. The result is a spinning vane. The brighter the light, the faster it spins. Simple, but compelling. Brief explanatory instruction sheet included.

There's optical science and high school physics, and then there's making pretty colors with this little 4-1/2" x about 1" acrylic prism. It makes the same rainbows that the beveled edges on the glass in the French doors to your grandmother's living room used to make on the floor in the afternoon while she was making supper. If you had a grandmother with French doors with beveled glass, who made you supper. If not, you'd better buy this prism or you won't have anything to remember after she's gone.

Geology for those with short attention spans? The original Magic Rocks®, of course! Mix the solution in a jar of water, drop in the pebbles, and watch them grow into a forest of multi-color stalagmites. Growth starts in 10 minutes, is impressive in 30 minutes, and complete (up to 4" tall) in 2 hours. Extra credit if you can make it grow stalactites by gluing the pebbles to the bottom of a jar, then pouring the solution in and turning it upside down. Who knows? Maybe it will work. Comes with a set of marine decals to decorate the jar. Definitely not for use with living fish. For ages 10 and up.

Yes, we have The Amazing Live Sea Monkey® aquarium kit, just like the ones from the comic books. The (9) piece ocean zoo includes brine shrimp eggs, growth food, water purifier, plus an official plastic feeding spoon, 32-page handbook, life insurance policy, growth guarantee, and the plastic aquarium with built-in magnifiers for viewing your little friends, and a vented cover. We'll pick the aquarium color that best matches your decor. Great gift for those budding young marine biologists. Ages 6+.

From France comes this fun mechanical plastic bird that really flies by flapping its wings. It is about 8" long and has a wingspan of 16" tip to tip. Snap the wings in place, wind up the rubberband drive and toss it gently into the air on its maiden flight. It flies up to fifty yards with a satisfying fluttering sound. 

Introducing the Aeromax 2000. This update of the classic parachute toy has mesh under the canopy instead of lines, so it's tangle-free. Big 20" chute floats the little 3-1/2" tall trooper gently to the ground. In assorted colors, which we'll pick because we have really good color sense.