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When I was six or seven years old I played a game of Whack-a-Frog at the Old Orchard Beach fairway. The game consists of placing a rubber frog onto a lever and then whacking the lever with a rubber mallet. Get enough frogs into the rotating floating lilly pads in the middle of a small pool and win a prize!

Although I never won anything quite as weird as an anatomically correct bootleg Hulk doll, I did manage to take home a rather large stuffed frog that appeared to have been assembled in a third world country using street urchins for slave labor. To top things off, halfway home in the car, I started to get a headache and didn’t know why. We got home, the frog went into a box of stuffed animals, and that was that.

Years later the box was found, nostalgia set in and I went through all of my old stuffed animals. I found the frog and pulled it out. Memories flooded my brain and then I smelled kerosene. I held it close to my nose and sniffed…kerosene. Check the box…nothing else smelled. Just the frog. I punched a small hole in the back of the fog and found it stuffed with, you guessed it, dirty rags.

So, beware of fair prizes. They’re difficult to win because the games are fixed and, if you do manage to take something home, toss a match at it and see if it goes up like kindling!