milton the cat from an alternate dimension
in the summer of 2025/2026, my partner and i went out on a grocery run. it was sweltering hot. on our way
back, we passed through a one-block street near our place, and right outside one of the houses, we spotted a
cat. his nametag read "MILTON" and he was super friendly. we petted him for a while. i saw the house was
functioning as a hotel and took mental note.
a few days -or weeks- after that, we were about to go on a walk and i said "hey, let's go see if milton is
there!". we went back to the one-block street. there was no such cat. there was no such house functioning as a
hotel. it's been six months and we still haven't been able to find the cat, the house or the street.
status: UNSOLVED
monday, tuesday, wednesday
i usually get a song stuck in my head as soon as i get out of bed. this time it was a robotic/vocoder sort of
voice going "monday, tuesday, wednesday" with some sort of brass punctuation (?) in between the words. for
some reason i was sure it was from an aesop rock song but couldn't find it. google was painfully unhelpful as
well, but some time after i was randomly listening to tortoise and there it was, sampled on one of the oganesson remixes! unnervingly, i couln't
find the sample reference for that specific song, BUT, some time after i realized (or heard? can't remember)
that it's from the who sell out! (an album i
apparently really got into in like 2006 and then forgot about entirely) it's right at the beginning!
status: SOLVED
pet game from childhood
when i was in the fourth grade we had to move and i started a new school. they had a small computer lab, and
one day i saw some kids there playing a game where you had a little dog with its house, and you could drag a
ball to it to play, and stuff like that. i never found out the name or anything else. when i got internet at
home a couple of years after i looked for it and found neopets, so that distracted me for
a while. the search continued though, and only in 2025 or so i found out about the petz series of games. i tried it and i'm almost certain it's
the same game, but it's been so long i can't be sure.
status: SOLVED?
secret places
at some point in my adult life i remembered a toy from my childhood that consisted of a cube-shaped room,
from which you could pull out a smaller version of the room. this is extremely relevant to my aesthetic
interests so i tried to find it for many years unsuccessfully, until one fateful day in 2024 or so, when i
just googled something like "cube room toy" and found it: it's the secret places collection by galoob! i was
lucky to find most of the sets on facebook marketplace; now i'm only missing the "pool-in-a-hot tub" (and my
family room-in-a-tv has the tv sticker torn off)
status: SOLVED
dental hygiene for kids video
somewhere between 1994 and 1998 i saw on tv a... movie? commercial? where a girl is at a theme park or
something and gets abducted (well, not really i guess) by an animated rabbit who takes her on a learning
journey all about dental hygiene! in my small child memory this was a super long video, but it was probably five
minutes long, tops. at the end she narrates something like "i don't know if this was real or not, but i sure
learned a lot!". me too, girl... me too.
status: UNSOLVED
hell's bells
around 1998/1999 i had this children's book. it was translated from english (i'm 99% sure), and its spanish
title was "mamá, papá, aquí estoy!" ("mom, dad, here i am!"). it was a series of small stories from the
everyday life of a little girl. i only remember two details: one of the stories was about her getting a navy
blue and pink pe kit, and the other was about going to a birthday party on the wrong day, which caused her to
curse "hell's bells!" (well, in the translation it was "las campanas del infierno", man does the phrase lose
its punch). this is why the blue and pink theme on my music page is called hell's bells.
every time i try to google this book i end up finding completely unrelated stuff.
status: UNSOLVED
gnome child
near the end of 2005 i was dating a guy from school. he had a friend who lived in a room behind his parent's garage, which was awesome because you could go directly to his "place" without having to go through the house. we went there one evening, my boyfriend had keys to the garage so we just went in. the garage was dark and the friend's door was on the opposite end. i saw the door was open and the light was on inside the bedroom, and a small child wearing a pointy gnome-like hat stood right in the doorway. "oh, his little brother is here", i thought, somewhat disappointed. i looked away as we walked through the dark garage, and by the time we got to the door, it was closed. the bedroom was dark, there was no child anywhere. i still don't know what the hell i thought i saw.
status: UNSOLVABLE