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12-02-04: Weird Stuffed Owl!
I'll try to keep it short.
A fondness for the utterly inexplicable is what compelled Ant to purchase today's offering. Apparently, he caught sight of the item in a department store a few days back (although his sister might have been the one who first spotted it) and immediately bought it.
What is it? Why, it's a stuffed toy owl, with a singularly grotesque (but indisputably deliberate*) deformity: its eyes are hanging out of its head, as if suspended by the optic nerve. Like a zombie, or some other mutilated dead thing.
* It's not broken or ripped or anything. The eyes are supposed to look this way, and can't be somehow set into a proper fixed position. They are perpetually loose and dangly.
Even if you don't consider the bugged-out eyes to be blatantly horrific and creepy, as Ant and I do (this thing was designed for small children, remember, and even includes a pouch on the front that you can use to sorta puppeteer the thing), you'll probably at least think it was a pretty bizarre design choice (and a very puzzling one at that, considering the animal in question; one of the first things anyone learns about owls, after all, is that their eyes are fixed in their sockets, and that they therefore have to turn their entire heads if they want to look around. This toy owl is like the complete opposite of that).
Also worthy of note: its eyes are filled with some kind of semi-viscous, clear liquid, giving them a strange, grossly organic look that has a tendency to remind me, at least, of pus or mucus or some other unfortunate fluid. Other than the eyes, though, it's a fairly typical stuffed owl, with whimsical ticking (it's covered in what look like leopard spots).
The only thing I can think of (and this is a bit of a long shot) is that the owl's designer views owls as wise and intelligent, but also as absent-minded and scatterbrained -- much like the stereotypical college professor -- and so designed his toy with protruding, crazy eyes in a clumsy attempt to get this scatterbrainish quality across. Just a guess.