From my childhood 4: crazy lamps

My grandparents had two crazy lamps in their living room. It is hard to describe them to people. There was a top and a bottom part, connected by little pillars. There was a light on the top which illuminated the bottom portion, which had a greco-roman statue of a partially nude woman. When you turned the lamp on (which they never did), little beads of oil were pumped down little wired strands to give the illusion of rain. I had never seen anything like it since, until the other day.



Click through to embiggen.

This is basically my grandparents lamp exactly. My question is, what the fuck? My grandparent's lamp was sold at the estate sale many years ago. If it was still in our family's possession, it probably would have gone down like this:

Here's my Grandma Fern's rain lamp. If you've never seen one of these before, mineral oil runs down the fishing wire to make it look like the statue is surrounded by rain. My theory is that in 1970, all future grandmothers were issued one of these lamps.

One of the lady's breasts and her buttocks are exposed. Needless to say, I found this very fascinating as a young boy.

Grandma Fern gave it to me while I was in college. Many a wacked-out visitor spent hours staring at the droplets running down the wires. They were usually pretty scared by it, as the lady has no pupils and it gives her eyes an evil-zombie sorta look.