On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 04:36:54 GMT, Bruce Palmer
wrote:

And there are so _many_ of them! A medium-sized one at the SV Center, a
bigger one at the Astronaut HOF, and the big kahuna right inside the
entrance to the main Visitor Center. There might also be one at the
Gantry Observation "Tower" but I'm not sure. I remember going there
back in the late '80s and spent a fortune in the gift shop. This time I
didn't even want to touch anything.

....There's two at JSC in Space Center Disney, and one in the smaller
cafeteria near Building 1. The two at SCD are different, as one caters
more to the expensive items. The bigger one, however, tends to have
really nice closeout specials from time to time. That's how I walked
out with some two dozen 2x worm logo polos in '00 that were my size
for ~$5.00 a pop, and two 3x ones at $4.00 for some odd reason.

....And then there were the really neat meatball shot glasses that I
picked up a set of 12 for $3.50/ea, and the deal they cut me on a set
of seven "failure is not an option!" t-shirts I got for a friend and
her six kids. The good part is that they still have them. The bad part
is that they *ALL* outgrew them. Including her.

Nevertheless, I bought a mouse pad with the Meatball on it (made in
China). It's shot already and it's only 3 months old. My Beavis and
Butthead mouse pad is still kicking at 5+ years.

....Yeah, the mousepads now are made out of a really chintzy rubber,
but the one I got in '96 was still going strong before I switched to
one that worked better with the different slippads on the bottom of
this Logitech wireless mouse.

....The one thing I wish they still had at the gift shops were the
recycled Major Matt Mason dolls. The cafeteria shop gal I talked to
back in '99 said that they had those still sitting around until about
'96 or thereabouts and they weren't moving until one day some guy came
in and bought the entire case of a hundred or so that were left. She
didn't even have a clue until a few weeks later when some JSC employee
came in asking about them because he'd found out they were MMM dolls
in cheap boxes, and he'd just given his grandson his kid's MMM toys as
hand-me-downs.

Gah.

OM

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