Thursday, October 26, 2006

"Help me! Help me!"

My compulsion to organize intruded today. Again. I received a gift of five Halloween-themed Pez candy dispensers. Each package contained a dispenser and two packets of the much-maligned candy. Lemon and grape. All five. Five lemons. Five grapes. What happened to the randomness of Pez candy? Where was the strawberry? The orange? The quite tasty cherry? Grape are my least favorite. I'd say I just don't like them, but I do eat them. I don't throw away candy. I loaded lemon into the black cat, and grape into the remaining four. I'll make myself eat the grape ones before I get to the really good ones. If you don't eat your vegetables, you won't get any dessert. I also like to save the shrimp in stir-fry dishes for last. Back to my compulsion. On a shelf in my cubicle sweet cubicle sits my modest Pez dispenser collection. There are now 61 of them. They run the gamut from the Simpsons to Hello Kitty, and are not grouped together in any real order. A layer of dust throughout. Tumbledust bunnies drift gently among the dispenser stumps with the circulating air currents of the office. The dispensers stand like dominoes. If one goes down, they all go down. What I want to do is to organize them. Put the Star Wars ones together. The Looney Toons too. And so on. I could also take the opportunity to really dust the shelf. While I'm at it, I could catalog the collection. I could create metadata to describe the whole thing, from the sub-sets, for example, the Flintstones, down to the individual dispensers (Fred, Barney, Dino). First I would like to get a master checklist of Pez dispensers. I love checklists. Goes back to my baseball card-collecting days. A few searches on Google served only to compound my dilemma. There seems to be no single authoritative list. The ones I did find, upon cursory examination, were clearly wanting. Or still under construction. Perpetually, one would surmise. I am going to do something. I just don't know what. Yet. By the way, Dear Reader, my favorite Pez dispenser is the Fly head. I think of the movie of the same name. The original one, with Vincent Price. Not the re-make. Do you remember how it ends?

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