Little Flying Robots

Fridge Magnets and Memory: Part 1

some of my personal fridge magnet collection

I was getting a glass of water at a friend-of-a-friend’s party when I noticed their fridge. Or rather, what was on it. Every single magnetized inch of it was covered in souvenir refrigerator magnets. They came from every continent and from many of the planet’s better-known islands, and they had been lovingly selected for maximum heinousness. A neon-green palm tree against an ineptly-painted sunsetted sky (for Florida). Plastic simulations of Taiwanese dim-sum and googly-eyed camels. There was a thermometer with the Dubai skyline printed on it, and a wooden depressive looking lion from Kenya, and an Australian boomerang with a startled kangaroo drawn on it . And more, so much more.

I stood there losing myself in my magnets for a moment, imagining the places that they came from, the particular trips that they represented, and also what sort of human being thought that making magnets shaped like screaming lobsters was a path to success in tourist retail.  

"My wife collects them from everywhere she goes. She likes them more if they’re ugly,” said the friend-of-a-friend in a resigned sort of way, as he noticed me noticing the magnets. The wife in question was away on business at the time of the party and I knew she was a highly successful, sophisticated person. And yet,  she had lovingly curated this refrigerator display of the most disreputable, crapbucket package-drinking-tour souvenirs that I’d ever laid eyes on within a private home. I hadn’t met her, but I felt in that moment as if I understood her a bit. She was the kind of person who travels the world on important business, and returns to her family with the gift of a metallic rainbow alligator magnet that can also open a beer.

Her fridge inspired me, altered my previously untargeted souvenir-buying habits. Today, years after I first saw her kitchen, I too am a Person Who Has Magnets, dozens and dozens of them, taking up every empty patch of metal on my fridge. I buy them whenever I go anywhere beyond my immediate metro area. My magnets hail from dozens of countries and states and cities and tourist attractions, and just like my unseen magnet-hero, I select them for maximum horribleness, luridness, ambition. I have become what Russian magnet-fan Dmitry Balashov called a “memomagnetist” back in 2008,

And yet despite all this passion, I realized recently that I didn’t know anything about fridge magnets. I had no idea where they came from, or who invented them, or why they were ubiquitous in souvenir-junk shops around the entire planet. fridge magnet dates back only to the mid-1960s, yet they are found on every corner of the earth and sold in every souvenir shop and kitchen-goods store on the planet. They are outlandishly successful, and yet I discovered very little has been written on their history or their gigantic popularity.

Here, then, is the origin and current circumstances of that magnetic pink sea turtle you bought in the Bahamas and stuck on your fridge.music magnet，custom music fridge magnet，fridge beats magnet，fridge beats，soufeel fridge magnet，fridge magnet that plays music，mini vase fridge magnet，personalized fridge magnet，fridge magnet maker，magnet maker