Do you like the pink flamingo?

The pink flamingo is one of those objects that people seem to either love or hate. Considered by some to be a work of art and to others to be visual pollution, this one object stands for everything that is good and bad about our modern society.
Lawn ornaments are nothing new. From marble statues created centuries ago to the Granny Fannies of the late 1980’s, lawn decorations have been around for an eternity. Some compare a lawn without any ornaments to be like a coffee table that is totally empty.
The history of the pink flamingo can be traced back to 1946 when a company called Union Products started manufacturing “Plastics for the Lawn”. Their collection included dogs, ducks, frogs, and even a flamingo. But their products had one problem: They were only two-dimensional.
Hmmm… World peace surely depended on solving this critical problem!
In 1956, the Leominster, Massachusetts company decided to hire a young designer named Don Featherstone. Although Don was a serious sculptor and classical art student, his first project was to redesign their popular duck into the third dimension(One must do what they can to pay the bills). Don used a live duck as his model and after five months of work, the duck was retired to a local park.
His next project would prove to be his most famous. He couldn't get his hands on real flamingos, so he used photographs from a National Geographic in its place. He sculpted the original out of clay, which was then used to make a plaster cast. The plaster cast, in turn, was used to form the molds for the plastic. The original design called for detailed wooden legs, but they proved to be too costly and were replaced by the metal ones still seen today. While the exact date was never recorded, the first pink flamingo was born some time during 1957.
Today, Featherstone is president and part owner of the company that sells an average of 250,000 to 500,000 plastic pink flamingos a year! Should you wish to purchase these decorations, they are readily available. Authentic flamingos always have Don Featherstone’s signature under their tails. Each has a yellow beak with a black tip and they are only sold in pairs.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
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Here are some more odd fears for ya:
Chaetophobia = A fear of hair
Genuphobia = A fear of knees
Scoleciphobia = A fear of worms (sorry Anna!)