When I'm feeling down, when I'm feeling a little blue, when I find myself banging my head against a palm tree until small lizards fall, there's only one solution for me! Friday Props! Props. The security blanket for all your creative needs.

The other night, a raucous and crazy Saturday a few weeks back, I flipped through the channels trying to find a movie I would want to watch. No movie. Flipflipflip. Through the religious channel section. Through the Canadian section. Past the motorized sports section. Over the news section until I found a remarkable piece that kept my rapt attention for the better part of an hour, something that very rarely happens to me. The program featured how Frito Lay makes Doritos, Funyuns, and their other snacks. I rarely eat these things, but WOW. WOW. The process is AMAZING. The video below is from a series called "How It's Made" and is full of cliché and terrible music following right along with the genre of industrial videos. 

 I admit. I didn't know where this next section of Props came from. There is still snow on the ground and today I'm actually on a mountain sliding down instead of in the Props laboratory. Compound it with the fact there aren't lizards running all over the place here in Vermont, and it makes me wonder how my brain works. Strange. This is a remarkable little "how-to" on catching lizards "humanely" featuring some fantastic Australian accents. So pretty.

  Finally, Friday Props recognizes the How-To of a man dissecting a piano. He won't be putting this back together at the end, mind you. He does not carefully take each piece, label it, investigate, and reassemble the piano. No. He simply takes it apart. I find the entire process hypnotic and harmonious with the beautiful piano arrangement playing in the background.  This video speaks to both my romantic notions of the beautiful and historic on the one hand while simultaneously causing me to reach for my own impact drill to take things apart and see how they work.