I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up

So, Coco and and I have been shopping at thrift stores since long before Macklemore donned his first flannel zebra jammies. In addition to offering up some cool stuff once in a while, places like Value Village are also treasure troves of the weird and wonderful, the strange and startling, the downright perplexing. Tchotchkes in particular can reveal an extent of taste, sensibility, and aesthetic heretofore unexplored by man: the realm beyond sad clowns and too-cute kittens. One could start a blog - or at least a Tumblr - just for the spectacularly ugly finds encountered while thrifting, but it's almost too easy a target and it wouldn't even seem sporting, so I never have.

Occasionally, though, we run across an artifact so singularly disturbing that it must be documented. Beware, though; this is not for the faint of heart; after this break lies madness.

The long and the short of it

So, I found myself down at the site of the new light rail station in the University District just as a couple of big rigs were making delivery of two I-beams that must have been 70 or 80 feet long. The construction site was pretty cluttered, so the hardhats moved a couple of loaders out of the way, but the drivers still had to sort of snake their way through the site. Luckily, their rigs were totally up to the job:

Maybe this is  humdrum for anyone who routinely works with exceptionally long girders, but I thought that an under-carriage back-end steering compartment was pretty boss.

Goin' coconuts

So, I was at the local drugstore with Coco and right there near the pharmacy was this display of healthy-type beverages:

You can see in there with the yerba mate two different brands and several varieties of coconut water. I guess coconut water has been a hipster health craze for a while, not quite into kambucha territory but pretty close. What struck me was that one of these is coconut products is water and the other is juice.

Here's the 99¢ variety, called water:

And here's its ingredient list:

So, it's just plain coconut water; simple. (Interesting side note that the water comes to Seattle from Thailand via Rhode Island.)

So here's the $2.49 brand, and it's confusing, because it's called juice in big letters but says water on the bottom:

And the ingredients are no different from the other:

Although this one specifies the age and not the nationality of the coconuts.

So what makes this juice? The other two canned varieties include coconut pulp and lime juice respectively; that might be an argument for calling those products juice instead of water, but the naming convention extends to to the water-only version as well, so I am at a loss.

Wikipedia is no help. A search for "coconut juice" redirects to "coconut water" - but that page is listed under the category of Fruit Juice! It is a conundrum indeed.

Now, I realize this is just a tiny mystery when set against the vast riddle of life, but I apparently I made a bit of a ruckus in the drugstore as I investigated it, so I had to say that I was going to blog about it to justify the hubbub I created.

And so I have.