What's the coolest thing you've ever found?

Let's keep it to three-dimensional objects discarded/left behind/stumbled upon for the purposes of this thread.

An owl pellet with a mouse skeleton inside it.

A couple of really rare comic books.

A 1946 dime. (Since lost.)

I rented a house in Austin in the late 90's with four other people. It was a pass down, the owners were old and still thought the guy who signed the lease in the late 70's was still living there or didn't care who was there so long as rent was paid. Rent was super cheap too, $475 for a four bedroom.

The place had a ton of boxes in the front room, lots of left over furniture in rooms. There was stuff in every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen, stuff in all the left over furniture, lots of books on bookshelves, Beatles records in mono in great condition including The White Album, stamped with extras, box of old silverware, all sorts of beading supplies and beads... I thought all this stuff belonged to the one guy who had been there a decade who was renting rooms to us. Turned out it was there when he moved in and he never had any interest in it so it was all became mine. My roomies were apathetic minimalist, so, mine!

There was a lot of crap I didn't want like a bottle of bleach full of syringes that I found when doing the laundry one afternoon. That find creeped me out but it conjured up all sorts of images and fed my imagination. Still does. The attic was full of syringes and old bongs and had comics, books and more records but I was too creeped out to go through anything there.

wow, i bet there were some solid comics records in the bong and syringe attic, but i hear ya. sounds creepy.

I once found a fragment of a film on the sidewalk, about a foot long. When you held it up to the light the frames showed Harry Dean Stanton in that "I knew these two people" scene from Paris Texas, which I had just watched for the first time maybe a week before.

And I'd just broken up with my girlfriend, even though I was in love with her. Just being a dumb kid.

And we'd watched that movie together, and she cried during that scene.

We're married now. 10 years in February.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YdsVggTe88

Oh wow, that is awesome!

ha, wow

I found a Yamaha keyboard on my way home from the Freud museum last year.
I also once found over $700 in American bills under my couch (strange because it was in Canada), which I gave (back) to my parents, who had no idea how,it got there.

Found a quarter. But it was one of these:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/photos/profile/ellington-quarter.jpg

Only one I've ever seen, and hands-down the coolest thing I've ever found.

$100 bill on the sidewalk, spring 2011

oh wow, so many things
but a memorable one was a box of vintage heels sitting near a dumpster, all in decent condition and my size

Face down on a sidewalk in NYC - an autographed Polaroid of Donald Sutherland.

whoa that is super cool!!

i love him!

me too :)

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9180/e1os.jpg

did anybody post 'a duffel bag full of porno in the woods' in here yet

I was just about to, basically! In one of those attics that isn't really an attic, just a little room crammed full of insulation that you can't actually set foot in, my friends and I found a stash of Penthouses from the mid-80s and a bunch of Atari 2600 games.

wallet with about 1200$ in it. if i remember correctly i was with 4 friends when i found it at a stop we made while en route to our first night on the town in a "big city"; we all had turned 18 a few months before. there was some id cards in there. i was so friends-oriented then it never crossed my mind to take charge of what to do with this so we voted and decided to drop it at the police station. i remember the police at the counter was rude to us. i didn't know the owner of the wallet but he was a new resident in my hometown, months later i heard about the wallet being returned to him with all the cash in there, but here's the twist: he had some sort of mental handicap and a local wine-o conned him out of it all , 20$ bucks at a time, charging him for repairing his tv. he was just unplugging the cable and plugging it back.
there is no moral to this story, of course.

global tetrahedron, here's my life's total pornography encounterances rundown:

• stashed in a plastic grocery bag underneath a yucca tree in a canyon behind my grandparents' house but closer to the al-anon clinic they lived on the other side of a chainlink fence from: three Playboy Magazines, all a-tattered and frayed. my cousin and I assumed they were a hobo's jackoff literature for some reason, as if hobos loved jacking off to Playboys (1989?)

• retrieved by a broom handle with double-sided duct tape stuck to the end of it after I noticed something shiny hiding behind the water heater in my former Milwaukee apartment's little water heater closet: a DVD, sans case, but with the original commerical labeling identifying it as a Black People Porno. carefully cleaned with bleach, and briefly watched, it featured 100% black guys doing it in the buttholes of 100% black ladies. later, while walking the dog, my ex-wife and I dropped it off on top of a fire hydrant near a local high school across the street, where I personally watched some teenage dudes behind us discover it, look around bemusingly, and then pocket that shit and walk off with it like it was a winning lotto ticket (2010 probably)

*walk

Shackleton's fabric mix by shoreditch high street station

100% black guys doing it in the buttholes of 100% black ladies.

picturing a 90% black guy (all black except for a white foot) doing a 50% black lady (sorta greyish all over)

I used to work on rental houses, repairing & restoring after tenants moved out, so I used to find a lot of stuff, but the clear winner there was an old school tube amp multi-speed school library record player w/flippable needle for LP/78, along with a bunch of great random records.

The best story, though, is when our old truck got stolen a few years ago. I had stupidly left it outside off of a busy street with the keys in it, planning to move it later that night. It was gone in the AM. A couple of weeks later my wife's cell rings at 1:30 AM, she doesn't answer. In the morning we discover that it was the cops, who had found the truck. Because we didn't answer, they towed it and charged us. We drive out to the tow yard, all pissed off. The guy says "whatever's in the back that you don't want, just throw it on the ground and I'll take care of it." Since there hadn't been anything in the back of the truck, this seemed weird.

We get out to the truck and the back is FULL of crap - clothes, beer cans, Axe body spray. We start digging and tossing stuff out and begin uncovering a large cache of what we eventually realized were burglary tools. Serious stuff like a bag full of metal saws, lots of files & hammers & such, big-ass bolt cutters, pliers, house jacks, and an entire goddamn oxyacetylene torch setup with both tanks and the carrier. Since there was no way to prove it wasn't in the truck when it was stolen, and there was no way to ID the previous owner if it had been stolen, it was all ours. I gave the oxy torch to a friend who fixed it up, and I kept the rest. It turned out that the cops had busted these guys in the process of stealing another car, they were using the truck as a mobile base of operations.

aaahhhahahaha, that's great.

A beautiful Roman coin while walking with friends in Ostia a few years ago.

I found some weed a couple of times. Gave it away both times as I don't smoke. That's the best thing I can think of.