Traditional Knives and Toys

5K Qs said:
My wife has been working on-and-off for several years on converting a large room in our basement into a "sewing room". Many years ago, it served as a playroom for our daughter, and many of her old toys have been stored down there for decades, I suppose. My wife is at a stage of her project during which she wants to get rid of many of those old toys, so I've been doing some toy-washing lately to prep some toys for donation. I thought I'd take photos of some of those toys with some of my knives for this thread. Here's one that I find a little bit disturbing, just because I've always thought that "hard body" baby dolls like the one below are kind of creepy - kind of worry about giving them access to a knife! :eek:o_O

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- GT
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LOL! :D They ARE creepy! 😁 There's a small shop in Leeds, which sells them. The window and interior are absolutely crammed with expensive creepy dolls. A couple of years back, sitflyer sitflyer mentioned he found these sort of dolls really creepy, so I sent him their catalogue! 🤣 Sorry Duane! 😁;):thumbsup:
 
Jack Black said:
LOL! :D They ARE creepy! 😁 There's a small shop in Leeds, which sells them. The window and interior are absolutely crammed with expensive creepy dolls. A couple of years back, sitflyer sitflyer mentioned he found these sort of dolls really creepy, so I sent him their catalogue! 🤣 Sorry Duane! 😁;):thumbsup:
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I remember that, yes, that catalog freaked me out! IIRC they are almost too lifelike in appearance...don't know why they raise the hairs on my back.
 
Jack Black said:
LOL! :D They ARE creepy! 😁 There's a small shop in Leeds, which sells them. The window and interior are absolutely crammed with expensive creepy dolls. A couple of years back, sitflyer sitflyer mentioned he found these sort of dolls really creepy, so I sent him their catalogue! 🤣 Sorry Duane! 😁;):thumbsup:
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One aspect of creepiness that I had forgotten is that the doll is capable of 360˚ rotation of shoulder joint, head, and waist. This allows for some Exorcist-style poses!

- GT
 
5K Qs said:
One aspect of creepiness that I had forgotten is that the doll is capable of 360˚ rotation of shoulder joint, head, and waist. This allows for some Exorcist-style poses!

- GT
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That's scary! 🤣 I was in town today, quite close to that shop, and I remembered they sell something, possibly even creepier than the realistic dolls! :eek: They are baby chimp dolls, wearing clothes! :eek: What sick mind thinks this stuff up?! o_O The weirdest thing is that they are expensive, and mainly bought by adults! 😕
 
Jack Black said:
That's scary! 🤣 I was in town today, quite close to that shop, and I remembered they sell something, possibly even creepier than the realistic dolls! :eek: They are baby chimp dolls, wearing clothes! :eek: What sick mind thinks this stuff up?! o_O The weirdest thing is that they are expensive, and mainly bought by adults! 😕
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Are the chimps dressed to represent various occupations, like a baby chimp dentist, a baby chimp cop, a baby chimp nurse, a baby chimp princess, etc.? That WOULD be quite creepy, certainly! :eek:

Here's "the elephant in the room" in a discussion of knives and toys:
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- GT
 
5K Qs said:
Are the chimps dressed to represent various occupations, like a baby chimp dentist, a baby chimp cop, a baby chimp nurse, a baby chimp princess, etc.? That WOULD be quite creepy, certainly! :eek:

Here's "the elephant in the room" in a discussion of knives and toys:



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- GT
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No, I think they're just dressed up in baby clothes, but I always try not to look at them if I have to pass that shop! 😱😁 LOL! 😁 That reminds me of when my eldest was young. When we had visitors, we'd always notice that folks would sit there fiddling with her baby toys! 😁
 
Someone bought me this bath duck back :D ;)

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A Mora with a traditional toy horse of the kind that Swedish woodsmen would carve when away from the family at work. Both the Morakniv and the Dalahäst (Dalecarlia horse) are traditionally tied to the small city of Mora in Dalecarlia, Sweden. Lots of Dalecarlia horses have been carved by fathers working in the forests, at charcoal piles et c. The traditional “kurbits” painting is a later 19th century invention.

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Jack Black said:
That reminds me of when my eldest was young. When we had visitors, we'd always notice that folks would sit there fiddling with her baby toys! 😁
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I'll admit that I'm fascinated by some baby toys. :rolleyes:🤓
One of my favorites is a set of nestable/stackable cups like this; I think this particular brand is called "Measure-Up Cups":
meas.up.cups.jpeg

They can be nested inside one another (as on the left in the pic), or turned upside down and stacked as a tower (as on the right); hours of fun!
If you imagine taking the 3 smallest cups and adding them into the "nest" on the left, there seems to be a color pattern from the smallest cup to the largest: blue, red, yellow, green, repeated twice over the 8 smallest cups. But the 4 largest cups have the colors blue, red (so far, so good), green??, blue?? I found this quite offensive, but then my wife discovered (after my photo) another set of these cups, and it turns out the 2 biggest cups from each set had been switched somehow, and now we have two PERFECT sets including a thrice-repeated color pattern in each (but different sequence of colors between the 2 sets).

- GT
 
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Here's another of my daughter's toys from over 30 years ago, uncovered in the Big Basement Clean-up of this summer. I suppose it's an appropriate baby toy if all one does is take rings off the post or put rings on the post. But some of the uses to which it could be put seem awfully sophisticated for a baby to be able to handle. For example:
1) I've tried using it as a Ring Toss game, and it's incredibly challenging to toss those rings onto the post from any distance greater than about 1.5".

2) Just out of curiosity, I've wondered how many different arrangements of the rings on the post are possible. But a baby would have to exhibit a surprisingly advanced mastery of systematic processes and counting, or a precocious knowledge of introductory combinatorics principles from mathematics, to determine that there are 7! = 5040 different arrangements of all 7 rings on the post between base and red"capstone").

3) If you had a couple of extra "empty" posts, you could demonstrate the "Towers of Hanoi" problem, in which the goal is to figure out the minimal number of "legal moves" needed to transfer all of the rings (not counting the "capstone" again) from one post to another, if a legal move consists of taking the top ring off of one post and putting it onto one of the other two posts on which all of the rings are larger than the one being moved. I think the answer is (2^7) - 1 = 127 moves, but I'd appreciate someone checking for me. (ETA: Oops! I just checked out some simple cases with fewer rings, and I think my original result has one more move than necessary, so I'm changing from 2^7 = 128 to (2^7) - 1 = 127.)

ringstack.jpeg

- GT
 
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