I have a working trip toy again!

At the same Christmas party where I ran into ectophylla and scored an interview to my present job, I also went home with a copy of the collected essays of Jonathan Swift (rawk!) and this green, wiggly toy. It's so hard to describe it that I had not been able to figure out who makes it.

It looks like a Fraggle's hair went Rasta. It has dozens of bright green, squishy tendrils radiating from a base. When it works correctly, they don't stick to each other and you can play with the thing for hours. It feels weird in your hands but it is perfect for getting hung up on.

I brought it to Arisia, where everyone that came into the Internet Room played with it. I tried to wash it at one point and found that while it was now clean, the tendrils stuck together and it felt more like playing with a bolus of spaghetti. Fun was lost.

I couldn't figure out why it was suddenly cohesive out to heck. I tried looking online for its manufacturer because it had no trademark on it. I could not even describe it well. So it sat on my dresser for months.

The other day I think tkitch mentioned "well, is it like a Wacky Wall Walker?" It's like that, only significantly larger and heftier. "You clean those with dish soap," he replied. I had washed it, but mostly with bar soap.

I tried washing it in dish soap and set it in the dish rack to dry. It still clumped. Then I thought, "wait, soap makes water lose its surface tension so it stays watery. What if I simply wring the thing in dish soap and water but I don't rinse it off?"

Damn if that didn't work! Now I have a clean toy and I can play with it all over again. It still has no name, but I dig it.

-something not geeky which I did today, Dante