Oh yes, the hair IS very realistic looking. Assuming you can suspend disbelief on the tiny black skeleton wearing a bowtie, a cowboy hat, and bridal garters on his wrists.
Because if you can do that, the hair just completes it.
The real travesty here is that a “Pimp” tag was not used. If ever there was an item that deserved it…that was literally the first word that popped into my head when I saw this.
My mom’s white (just like me! Weird!) and I’ve had people say, when they find out what she does: “Your mom’s black?” or my favorite- “Your mom likes rap?” haha fucking idiots.
I had a student once who told the class that when he was a small child he believed that your poop was the color of your skin, ie, that white people would poop beige.
OTOH, he was five years old when he believed this, and not selling anything on Etsy. Thanks be to God.
I had a colleague once who told me she believed, as a child, that people with green eyes saw the world with a green cast… Also not selling anything on Etsy. Apparently some people DO come to their senses.
Maybe they mean that it was made by an African American artist? Like arts and crafts that are made by “actual Navajo artisans” and such? But even then the crafts being sold usually have some kind of cultural significance that would require the use of the label. And I suppose there is the largely forgotten history of the black cowboys who moved out west after the end of slavery and… fuck it I don’t know. I can’t explain this shit. I give up.
True story-my sister was friends with a Doctor who told her once that when the time came for them to learn how to do human dissection in medical school, the first African-American corpse they got, the guy he was partnered with refused to believe the man was actually black because “His bones are white.” According to this moron, Mexicans had brown bones and people of oriental extraction had yellow bones (because that’s what they taught him in church). I gather he was ejected from the program not long afterwards when my sister’s friend told his superior what he believed.
So yes, there apparently ARE people out there that stupid.
I work in a medical office, I see Residence come and go and Doctors who can’t even get all the buttons on their lab coat straight. You can graduate from some Med schools with a C- or D average and be called Doctor… SCARY!
The Mormons used to (maybe still do?) believe that skin color is related to purity. An ex-Mormon related that his local leader would say how he had been to Guatemala and “could see their skin get lighter by the minute” as he preached to them.
I lived in rural Utah for about a dozen years. Let me assure you that there are LOTS of LDS who still believe that dark skin is cursed. And that’s only the beginning of a whole host of their wacky folk beliefs . . . .
Oooh, I’m reading a book about this! The first time Moroni gave him the plates he also gave him a pair of glasses to wear while translating the plates. To his buddy. His buddy lost the pages of the translation and then …for some reason I can’t remember…Moroni took the stuff away.
Then he made Joseph repent for a few years and do some stuff and then, when Moroni gave back the plates he didn’t give back the glasses, so Joseph had to translate by sitting next to the plates while sticking his face into a hat with a rock in it.
Growing up, my mom wouldn’t let me listen to our local radio station, which was incidentally called KISS 106.1 and played mostly modern music (still does), because of the association with that acronym. She wouldn’t have it when I tried to explain the band and the radio station were unrelated. Hm.
Yeah sorry, I’ve got to call bullshit on that story. It’s an urban legend that’s been going around for years, and it’s always a friend of a relative or a relative of a friend.
Who would put this on a Christmas tree? I mean aside from the African American steampunk- are the neighbors talking about me because there are no skeletons on my tree?
Granted, I would put this on a Christmas tree, but that’s because we also had a Hellboy action figure for a tree topper and a couple of unidentifiable toy animals (possibly moose) made out of fraying hot pink rabbit hair. Our tree is decorated in all manner of odds and ends and bad kitsch.
I’m with Lady Elizabeth Birdbite. I’m less perplexed by the Steampunk and the African American labels than I am about the seller trying to pass this shit off as a Xmas ornament.
AreYouGoingToEatThatPickle
July 14, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Growing up, my Grandparents brought offshore workers in from Jamaica to work on their farm. It always boggled my curiosity as to why their palms and nailbeds were the same colour as ours. Finally, I asked one of them and my naïve and sheltered mother almost had a heart attack and whisked me away before I got an answer, other than jolly Jamaican laughter.
That was the extent of my curiosity about the difference between black people and white people. I pretty much assumed that everything else was exactly the same.
And I was able to draw that conclusion at the age of 5.
We know a Fijiian lady. She was the first black person I ever saw (growing up in the rural Northwest, there weren’t many around). I’d never seen an afro before. I told her that I loved her hair because it looked like a bird’s nest. I think I was about 5 then, too. She just laughed.
When I was about 4 my fam went to visit my grandmother and I met a little African american girl who was neighbors with my Granny. We played with sidewalk chalk and had fun. I noticed she had an outie belly button and I had an innie. I was convinced as a little girl that black people have outies and white people had innies.
When I was four my parents put me into daycare. One of the ladies there was a black woman and Mom explained that people came in all shapes, sizes and colors and this was a “black lady”. Mom says I looked her up and down and said, “But Mommy, she’s not black—she’s brown!”
The one lady thought it was absolutely hysterical and that story made the rounds for quite a while.
July 14, 2012 at 4:39 pm
This level of stupidity makes me want to black out.
July 14, 2012 at 4:43 pm
I think this seller would prefer you say “African American” out.
July 14, 2012 at 6:27 pm
The new rainbow??
- Native American
- Fake Tanner
- Asian
- Sickly
- Frozen
- Bruised
If none present: African American
If all present: Caucasian
July 15, 2012 at 8:36 am
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July 15, 2012 at 2:26 pm
The original classification was craniological, not pigmentation-related. It mutated over time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#Origin_of_the_concept
July 14, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Oh yes, the hair IS very realistic looking. Assuming you can suspend disbelief on the tiny black skeleton wearing a bowtie, a cowboy hat, and bridal garters on his wrists.
Because if you can do that, the hair just completes it.
July 15, 2012 at 9:15 pm
I couldn’t find the hair. I’m not very good with puzzles.
July 16, 2012 at 9:35 am
There is a skelefro under the hat.
July 16, 2012 at 7:00 pm
Get a an African-american man excited and I’ll show you he has a black bone!!
July 14, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Gee, I’m amazed they missed Day of the Dead as a key-phrase. Or maybe they hate Mexicans. Santisima Muerte would not be amused.
July 14, 2012 at 5:01 pm
It’s probably because she used that tag in all the rest of her listings. Really.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/72535381/not-just-another-cake-topper
July 15, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Suggested new category: Things That Are Not Dia De Los Muertos.
Slapping that name on a mass-produced resin silhouette that you glued into settings is something of an insult to real folk artists of the holiday.
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/508676273-18-25mm-100pcs-MIX-COLOR-resin-Lady-Skull-Head-pendants-resin-flower-cameo-vintage-pendants-fashion-wholesalers.html
At 15c per piece, free shipping, that’s a helluva markup (even with the price of pot-metal findings considered).
July 14, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Well this is a little-known fact, but people of Spanish descent actually have chili sauce instead of blood.
Weird, I know!
July 15, 2012 at 5:22 pm
And Russians have vodka.
July 15, 2012 at 9:18 pm
And Regretsians have vodkavicodinnutellalatte.
July 16, 2012 at 9:06 am
The real travesty here is that a “Pimp” tag was not used. If ever there was an item that deserved it…that was literally the first word that popped into my head when I saw this.
July 14, 2012 at 5:01 pm
the charred skeleton of a fancy cowboy that may or may not have been african american.
i can’t wait to hang that on nanna’s tree this year.
July 14, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Does this person realize that African American’s skeletons are not dark?
My mother is a Professor of African American Studies, and this would really aggravate the fuck out of her. I’m gonna show her.
July 14, 2012 at 5:37 pm
My mom’s white (just like me! Weird!) and I’ve had people say, when they find out what she does: “Your mom’s black?” or my favorite- “Your mom likes rap?” haha fucking idiots.
July 15, 2012 at 8:38 am
She would probably prefer to call them “fucking crackers”.
July 14, 2012 at 5:58 pm
I had a student once who told the class that when he was a small child he believed that your poop was the color of your skin, ie, that white people would poop beige.
OTOH, he was five years old when he believed this, and not selling anything on Etsy. Thanks be to God.
July 16, 2012 at 5:52 pm
I had a colleague once who told me she believed, as a child, that people with green eyes saw the world with a green cast… Also not selling anything on Etsy. Apparently some people DO come to their senses.
July 14, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Maybe they mean that it was made by an African American artist? Like arts and crafts that are made by “actual Navajo artisans” and such? But even then the crafts being sold usually have some kind of cultural significance that would require the use of the label. And I suppose there is the largely forgotten history of the black cowboys who moved out west after the end of slavery and… fuck it I don’t know. I can’t explain this shit. I give up.
July 14, 2012 at 5:22 pm
True story-my sister was friends with a Doctor who told her once that when the time came for them to learn how to do human dissection in medical school, the first African-American corpse they got, the guy he was partnered with refused to believe the man was actually black because “His bones are white.” According to this moron, Mexicans had brown bones and people of oriental extraction had yellow bones (because that’s what they taught him in church). I gather he was ejected from the program not long afterwards when my sister’s friend told his superior what he believed.
So yes, there apparently ARE people out there that stupid.
July 14, 2012 at 6:02 pm
How did this guy make into med school in the first place?
July 15, 2012 at 2:30 am
You’d be amazed the people that they let into medical school. Thankfully, most of the really stupid ones get weeded out before they can do any damage.
July 15, 2012 at 6:48 am
I work in a medical office, I see Residence come and go and Doctors who can’t even get all the buttons on their lab coat straight. You can graduate from some Med schools with a C- or D average and be called Doctor… SCARY!
July 15, 2012 at 8:40 am
There’s a music video on youtube about it– “Just Pass”
July 15, 2012 at 6:21 pm
What do you call the guy that graduates last in his class from med school?
Doctor.
July 16, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Really, you can graduate with a D average? I thought even most undergrad programs required at least a C average to graduate?
July 15, 2012 at 3:20 pm
They usually end up practicing Homeopathy or selling Power Balance bracelets in the mall.
July 16, 2012 at 9:10 am
Or doing infomercial endorsements for weight loss drugs.
July 14, 2012 at 6:02 pm
At what kind of a church do they waste time on weird ideas about what color people’s bones are? Don’t they have, like Bible study or something to do?
What was this, the First Church of Bad Anatomy?
July 14, 2012 at 9:07 pm
The Mormons used to (maybe still do?) believe that skin color is related to purity. An ex-Mormon related that his local leader would say how he had been to Guatemala and “could see their skin get lighter by the minute” as he preached to them.
July 14, 2012 at 10:47 pm
Mormons believe (or at least they used to) that dark skin is the inherited “mark of Cain” that God put on Cain when he killed Abel.
I gather that this “belief” has gone the way of polygamy for the majority of Mormons. Retcon FTW, I guess.
July 15, 2012 at 2:12 am
I lived in rural Utah for about a dozen years. Let me assure you that there are LOTS of LDS who still believe that dark skin is cursed. And that’s only the beginning of a whole host of their wacky folk beliefs . . . .
July 15, 2012 at 6:53 am
What do you expect from a religion based off the idea that an angle named Moroni (Moron-I?) gave some dude golden plates.
July 15, 2012 at 6:30 pm
Oooh, I’m reading a book about this! The first time Moroni gave him the plates he also gave him a pair of glasses to wear while translating the plates. To his buddy. His buddy lost the pages of the translation and then …for some reason I can’t remember…Moroni took the stuff away.
Then he made Joseph repent for a few years and do some stuff and then, when Moroni gave back the plates he didn’t give back the glasses, so Joseph had to translate by sitting next to the plates while sticking his face into a hat with a rock in it.
July 15, 2012 at 2:29 am
I’m an ex-Mormon, and I have to say the official church name should really have “retcon” somewhere in there.
…Maybe replacing “Christ”. The Church of Jesus Retcon of Latter-day Saints.
July 15, 2012 at 7:33 am
Anyone else have the “Joseph Smith” song from South Park playing in their head now?
July 15, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.
October 19, 2012 at 8:27 am
…
I
they
what
how the
why
who
what in all
…
ASDFUSGFDFHGSGDFADFSVJKNVUGRYUGG872748-HEAD-HIT-KEAYBOARD-CHAINSAW-CHAINSAW-CHAINSAW-NOW
July 14, 2012 at 6:12 pm
Glitter Lung has a point: that is a bizarrely specific form of stupid. Needlessly specific, really. What the hell was wrong with that church?
July 14, 2012 at 7:15 pm
I would guess that would be the same church that taught their teens in the 70′s that the band KISS stood for Knights In Satan’s Service.
July 14, 2012 at 8:14 pm
I’ll take a lifetime of good ole’ fashioned free-floating Catholic guilt over even 10 minutes of that kind of stupid.
July 14, 2012 at 8:26 pm
KINGS in Satan’s Service, dammit!
July 14, 2012 at 8:52 pm
I believe it was Beavis that observed how cool that band was…for a bunch of mimes…
July 15, 2012 at 7:23 am
Growing up, my mom wouldn’t let me listen to our local radio station, which was incidentally called KISS 106.1 and played mostly modern music (still does), because of the association with that acronym. She wouldn’t have it when I tried to explain the band and the radio station were unrelated. Hm.
July 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm
Yeah sorry, I’ve got to call bullshit on that story. It’s an urban legend that’s been going around for years, and it’s always a friend of a relative or a relative of a friend.
July 15, 2012 at 2:43 pm
In that case, it balances out the “black people really name their kids Shithead and pronounce it Shah-teed” urban legend.
Let’s make up some more urban legends about racist idiots and spread them around!
July 16, 2012 at 5:08 pm
It’s not always a friend of a friend anymore. Thanks to the internet, I know several people who claim they personally went to school with Shithead.
July 14, 2012 at 5:27 pm
In an “Africa America” these are all the rage….
July 14, 2012 at 5:31 pm
This reminds me of Halloween at Studio 54.
July 15, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Good one. I went “Halloween at Chippendale’s”, myself.
July 14, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Who would put this on a Christmas tree? I mean aside from the African American steampunk- are the neighbors talking about me because there are no skeletons on my tree?
July 15, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Granted, I would put this on a Christmas tree, but that’s because we also had a Hellboy action figure for a tree topper and a couple of unidentifiable toy animals (possibly moose) made out of fraying hot pink rabbit hair. Our tree is decorated in all manner of odds and ends and bad kitsch.
July 15, 2012 at 2:18 pm
I like the idea of unidentifiable ornaments. “What are those?”
“Umm…moose? Elephants, possibly. Probably not an alligator, although you never know.”
July 15, 2012 at 2:47 pm
I would, if it were in a brass finish and had a monocle and bowler instead of a cowboy hat. You know, something actually steampunk.
July 14, 2012 at 6:31 pm
Magic Ike: The Dark Side of Male Stripping
July 15, 2012 at 9:24 pm
When I said “Take it all off!” I was really only thinking of clothes. Points for enthusiasm though.
July 16, 2012 at 9:15 am
These 2 comments win the internetz.
July 14, 2012 at 7:37 pm
I’m with Lady Elizabeth Birdbite. I’m less perplexed by the Steampunk and the African American labels than I am about the seller trying to pass this shit off as a Xmas ornament.
July 14, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Growing up, my Grandparents brought offshore workers in from Jamaica to work on their farm. It always boggled my curiosity as to why their palms and nailbeds were the same colour as ours. Finally, I asked one of them and my naïve and sheltered mother almost had a heart attack and whisked me away before I got an answer, other than jolly Jamaican laughter.
That was the extent of my curiosity about the difference between black people and white people. I pretty much assumed that everything else was exactly the same.
And I was able to draw that conclusion at the age of 5.
July 15, 2012 at 2:50 pm
We know a Fijiian lady. She was the first black person I ever saw (growing up in the rural Northwest, there weren’t many around). I’d never seen an afro before. I told her that I loved her hair because it looked like a bird’s nest. I think I was about 5 then, too. She just laughed.
July 15, 2012 at 3:52 pm
When I was about 4 my fam went to visit my grandmother and I met a little African american girl who was neighbors with my Granny. We played with sidewalk chalk and had fun. I noticed she had an outie belly button and I had an innie. I was convinced as a little girl that black people have outies and white people had innies.
July 15, 2012 at 5:15 pm
When I was four my parents put me into daycare. One of the ladies there was a black woman and Mom explained that people came in all shapes, sizes and colors and this was a “black lady”. Mom says I looked her up and down and said, “But Mommy, she’s not black—she’s brown!”
The one lady thought it was absolutely hysterical and that story made the rounds for quite a while.
July 14, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Poor little ol’ Spike Lee…
July 14, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Who shat J.R.
July 14, 2012 at 10:02 pm
I think this seller is gas-lighting us and that’s the Steampunk aspect.
July 15, 2012 at 7:47 am
“Gaslighting” really should be a tag on Etsy. It would save Helen a lot of time.
July 14, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Hank:Where the heck did they put African America?
Dean: I don’t know Hank, but it’s not on any of my charts.
July 14, 2012 at 10:12 pm
http://video.adultswim.com/the-venture-bros/african-america.html
July 14, 2012 at 10:30 pm
It actually says African “America.” Doesn’t that mean that all or parts of America itself is African?
Besides, how do you know that a skeleton is American, other than all those Clovis people and what not.
July 14, 2012 at 10:54 pm
So, I’m the only person who sees Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart in “Blazing Saddles,” lovingly recreated for your festive Dia de los Muertos tree?
Good! More sweet, sweet black sugar skulls for ME!
July 14, 2012 at 11:07 pm
I thought the SAME thing!! It’s as if Sheriff Bart had a heaping helping of FABULOUS! (jazzhands!!)
July 15, 2012 at 8:52 am
I love that movie forever.
July 15, 2012 at 5:29 pm
‘Scuse me while I whip this out.
July 16, 2012 at 9:37 am
That’s the first thing I thought of! Just found this clip –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I
July 14, 2012 at 11:20 pm
It looks like Memento mori for Willy The Pimp ™:
<img src="http://i49.tinypic.com/20g0bcz.jpg"
July 15, 2012 at 7:21 am
LOL Nothing represents African America like a black skeleton in a cowboy hat. LOL What is up with these people?
July 15, 2012 at 8:53 am
The way you said it really makes me sad. I wonder if this person seriously feels this way?
July 15, 2012 at 7:35 am
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
July 15, 2012 at 10:24 am
Well if you won’t hang it on your tree, you could hang it on your Steampunk Octopus…
July 15, 2012 at 4:26 pm
This doesn’t make it Steampunk?
July 15, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Since the seller’s going hogwild with stereotypes, the 6 1/2 inches is really not adding to the believability of the black skeleton.
July 15, 2012 at 9:42 pm
Ah, yes. The African-American Steampunk New-Age Gothic genre.
Black bones aside, there is simply no fucking image in existence that could accompany that set of keywords and not be complete bullshit.
July 16, 2012 at 9:34 am
“…no fucking image in existence that could accompany that set of keywords and not be complete bullshit.”
That sounds like a challenge to me!
July 16, 2012 at 12:53 pm