Today is my birthday. The last few minutes of it, anyway. I’m 34. It feels outrageously old.

As some of you know, I’m weird about birthdays. Actually, I’m much weirder about birthdays than I’ve ever let on. When it’s time to sing the birthday song to someone, I hide in the back and pretend to be distracted. When it’s time for other people to sing it to me, it’s sheer torment. Those twenty seconds feel like two hours. Of being on fire.

It’s been this way since my late teens. One year, I spent an entire night out with my closest friends, never once mentioning that it was my birthday. I’ve gone to tremendous lengths to keep it a secret. It isn’t just because I hate getting older, because even if I do, I’ve been an idiot about birthdays since I was practically still a child.

In more recent years, I’ve even gotten weird about birthday presents. The people who gotta give them to me “by law” will always struggle, because I will never even hint at what I might want. I don’t know where this comes from; it’s not like I have these issues at Christmastime.

Anyway, for the past few weeks, my might-as-well-be-wife was pushing me for gift ideas. My answers ranged from “I don’t know” to “I don’t need anything” to “I hate my birthday don’t you dare get me a present.” Even when she’d suggest totally practical things that I could totally use, I’d weasel my way out. “Nah, I’ll just use it once and forget about it.”

As a cake topper, I have a terrible poker face, and I’m the worst person to ever try to surprise. So if you think she should’ve just picked something on her own without any semblance of “permission,” trust me, she’s learned not to from experience.

A few nights back, she grilled me again. This time, she was serious. Maybe even teary. It finally hit the point where I could no longer be a cold jerk in good conscience. I hate it when things hit that point. I had to fess up.

“Well, there was this weird storage chest on Craigslist…”

Not the response she was expecting, I guarantee you that.

Behold, my birthday present. That weird chest from Craigslist. THE BEST CHEST.

We’d never bought or sold anything on Craigslist before. I’d heard too many horror stories about it. Even when I’ve seen listings for amazing things at unreal prices, I could never pull the trigger.

But this… this was different. That chest SPOKE to me. Each side has a different piece of art, and the whole thing is just so incredible and bizarre and perfectly up my alley. I had to have it.

Since this was my birthday present, she wanted to pick it up alone. That was a no-go for me. I’ve been brought up to believe that everyone on Craigslist is a psychopathic murderer with a secret torture chamber. So I went along for the ride. Turns out, the owner/artist was a perfectly nice and normal guy, with a cool car to boot. He even gave us a severe discount.

He’d worked on the chest bit by bit for more than a year. Bless his heart: It was even more incredible in person. This thing is just so insanely me.

Below is a closer look at the various scenes, and if you don’t come out of this believing that this really is the best chest, leave Dino Drac and never come back. Read More…

In today’s video, the Vintage Vending series continues with a trip to Las Vegas:

Though you might expect a “Las Vegas” prize assortment to have everything to do with casinos and vacations, this one doesn’t. No, this one comes with a plastic machine gun.

…but it’s not like such deviations were uncommon with vending machine sets, which so often established a theme and then did very little to support it. In this case, I’m fine with that. I’m not going to complain about guns and robots when the alternative was some lame temporary tattoo that said “JACKPOT.” I play the fool, but I ain’t one.

Remember when I wrote about Bigg Mixx? I think we should turn that into a series. A series about mad mascots. There are many bewilderingly beautiful brand mascots deserving of short tributes and crudely assembled image collages, and it is my intention to give them what’s owed!

…let’s start with this guy. “Trump.”

Even if you don’t immediately recognize him, I can all but guarantee that you’ve seen Trump before. He’s Monster.com’s mascot, and if you can’t figure out the connection between an online job database and a bizarre, frog-like mutant, you’ve overlooked the obvious explanation: Trump is a monster. Read More…