1. Buckethead Jim

-- A Peculiar Perspectives Photo Feature --

| Cartoon Kickstart | El Explorador's unprepossessing Window up to Weirdness | The Bucketheads Brigade | The Fairy Mine | Stumpy + Pals | More Odds and Sods | Pretty Boots | Additional Graphics Notes |

Here's how 'oddities.html' began (do double-click to enlarge):

If only because it kickstarted me into doing a photo feature re here:

El Explorador is an impressively maintained garden on a hillside (more like mountainside) overlooking Boquete, Panama, As this or that rollover reveals, it's also a very pretty place with a superb view of the valley below.

However, it has an exceedingly odd, even unique, twist to it. Which of course is why it qualifies for the inaugural feature of the oddities webpage. It's home to a brigade of Bucketheads and related peculiarities, all of whom open up a window with an even larger image when double-clicked.

(With respect to what the signs they sport say, I can't speak Spanish. I can, however, use a dictionary, as per here and here.

Evidently they emerge from a fairy mine, which also contains a scary clown (aren't they all?) and a wonderfully cheerful witch (double-click the bleach bottle clown). Something else that emerged from it was one of the gardeners' son.

Curiously -- what wasn't curious at Explorador? -- he had in hand a bottle, not a bucket, with a minutely punctured lid. Inside it was a live serpent.

Nor were bucketheads, a fairy mine and a boy holding a no doubt deadly poisonous beastie in a bottle the only oddities on view at El Explorador. There was a woodhead who swore he never lied despite having a long nose. His head, being what it was, begged to be knocked for good luck (as in, as also per here, 'knock wooden head', a favourite line of mine).

There was also a raggedy man with a swank, even swish, hat on his coconut head. Then there was Stumpy and pal, who may also have began life as a coconut head. (Not altogether sure what Stumpy has to say, other than 'welcome', but I take a stab at it here.)

Can't forget the trees sprouting bottles that share their space with some nicely dressed fellows wearing party dresses (double-click).

Might the empty bottles upended into the government's trees (as the sign reads) be rather unsubtle social commentary? Wouldn't want to speculate, would I.

Lying, it should be noted, was something of a theme running through the garden. So was a fairly overt Christian sentiment. The grouping below, which I refer to as the lying collective, has a couple of mealy messages.

The easy to read one, in yellow ('No es bueno mentir'), tells us that lying isn't good, or words to that effect. As for the bigger sign above and to one side of it, I missed photographing some of its indubitably pertinent pith so I can't tell you all it says.

For what's worth – take neither endorsement nor encouragment from this – I believe the last three words ('arrondillen ante dios') mean 'kneel before God'.

More quirkily, the 'perfumania' housed little bottles and tiny containers with cutesy smiley faces pasted on them (better seen on the double-click) whereas the outdoor television set had similarly horribly happy-looking paintbrushes that apparently form a polyphonic choir (also a 'yosi pinte' — whatever that means).

The grassy monster has been doctored, sure, but the scary whatever-it-is lurking in the bushes looks natural, a tumorous (as opposed to humorous) tuber perhaps.

The pathway out has been walked before, plenty of times by the looks of the shoes and boots left on the patio of shoes;

But let's not forget what a gloriously green garden El Explorador was and hopefully still is.

And, like the sign to the side of the grinning boombox says, albeit in Spanish (double-click last image), never neglect to tune in your happiness (always assuming that's what 'sintonizate se feliz' means).

Not even, I might add, when you're a coconut head stuck on barbed wire.

You can double-click the banana tail for a goodbye, as in parting, shot of even more bucketheads. Finally, I did an earlier piece on my 2009 stopover in Boquete, Panama. It dwells here.