What Is It? game 294

It's once again time for our collaboration with the wonderfully entertaining What Is It? Blog. Do you know what the pictured items are? Can you make up something totally wacky? That's what we're looking for: the funniest and most creative guesses. We will award t-shirts from the NeatoShop to two commenters who post the cleverest, funniest, or most outlandish uses for this thing!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. You have until Saturday this week to come up swith great guesses.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, see? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

See, you don't have to know the answer to win! And remember, there are more mystery items to figure out at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: it will be another day before the official answers are posted at the What Is it? blog, but since we wanted funny-but-wrong answers, we'll go ahead and award the winners. Erin Werra said, "These are the score cards the Russian judges WANTED to use at the Olympics. They're mounted on handy "persuasion tools" to encourage other judges to lower their scores as well." That one deserves a t-shirt! Randall had a great answer, too: "Gopher traps. Among the animal kingdom, gophers are statophiles, they love esoteric information and are fascinated by trivial numbers. When these are placed in a field inhabited by gophers, the little rodents will burrow right up to the number to read it (they are slightly nearsighted) and POW! it kills them with the spring loaded spike." So Randall gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop, too! The answers to this and the other mystery items of the week will be posted at the What Is It? Blog on Sunday, and I'll update the contest post then.

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Back in the time of civil war in America, prostitutes would advertise their "Rates" by holding up these little signs. In some areas, competition was fierce and this led to the prostitutes engaging in "Rate wars" among themselves just to get business. This is where the band "Cheap Trick" got it's name
protect your nuts 3 xl

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Back in old timey times, way before PowerBall, they had these state lotteries on the Capitol steps and some states used these "random" number drawing machines where they'd have some little kid or centenarian war hero come up and push their choice of unmarked buttons and these little springy numbers would pop out to draw the winners. The decimal points? Bah, meaningless -- it was old timey times, they had just discovered decimals and tended to slap 'em on everywhere.

street fight,ash,xl

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I actually saw these in the Smithsonian Postal Museum. They're from the popular History Of Postage Rates exhibit and have long since been replaced with Comic Sans labels on cut-out strips of recycled bond paper. You can tell how old they are by the fact that the largest is .30 (wait, that may not be that old).

street fight,ash,xl

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BAC level indicators for zombies this Halloween

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Most people do not realize how the song " Do you know the way to San Jose ?"was what actually inspired Google to make maps that would get you there without having to stop and ask directions ( I know, a man was behind it) . They didn't have the I phone yet and the internet had not been invented by Al Gore so, they settled on printed maps. Due to the large crayon/pencil/pen shortage of the 1970's That is where these came in - people would have to put them on the map themselves in advance so they knew the distances between turns. This was very profitable to the printers as the maps were damaged from all the holes.
Protect your nuts, 3 xl

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