Beautiful Magical Fun

Ok, it's time to move on from living tiny things into the world of the inanimate.

Anybody from the Greater Toronto Area who watched TV for, oh, much of the 90's and the early 00's (how unsatisfying is it to write '00' in reference to a decade?  And NOW what do we have to work with?  'Ten's'?  Beh), you might remember a commercial with the jingle 'Cullen Gardens and Miniature Village...Beautiful, Magical Fun!'

I tried to find it on youtube, but found this much less catchy jingle instead:



You get the gist, though, yes?  I always saw their ads and thought, 'Oooo I will visit there someday when I am desperately reaching for something to do.'  And then I forgot about it for, oh...5 years or so.  Until I started this blog and was thinking of tiny things and thought, 'YES! Perfect!'

So what happens when I googled the miniature village?  The m-effer CLOSED in 2005.  Let that be a lesson to you next time you vaguely think about visiting something weird and kitschy sometime in the distant future - much like Hard Rock Park (R.I.P. dream park which I can never visit).  You've got to seize the day when it comes to these weird attractions.  If people like me (ie. people who would willingly waste their time and money appreciating this stuff) don't take action, we will not know what we've got till it's gone.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that while the park is now closed, the miniature village remains...in storage.  And it's FOR SALE.  Yes, for just a nominal fee of $2,000, you could purchase me a teeny tiny building like Uncle Len's Lucky Fried Chicken Shack:

The city of Oshawa apparently bought the whole village back in 2007 for $234,000.  Their original plan was to remount it as a tourist attraction...then they changed their minds.  They tried selling the whole shebang for $250,000, to extremely luke-warm response (hello, eccentric rich people with spoilt children who have everything?  Where are you?  Do you only exist in movies from the 80's and Archie comics?).  The village now sits forlornly in a warehouse, apparently without any sort of packaging to protect it from the ravages of time.  It just SITS THERE, unappreciated by people like me who like tiny things.  This is a sad thing. 

I have been mulling over whether I should call the ReMax office in charge of its sale and arrange a viewing.  I would show up wearing a monocle and a mink stole, trying to feign richness so that the agent did not suspect that really, I just want to skip around giggling at the tiny Santa Claus Parade...

But then I see images like this, and my be-monocled dream is sullied a bit seeing how dusty and shitty it looks, and that that creepy Oshawa councillor might be staring at me while I try to frolic:

Lame.